The first and most important thing in the metaphor of the church as the body is to recognize Christ as the head. Colossians 1:18 makes this pretty clear and pulls on the same illustration as we see in our weekly text, showing just how prevalent this idea was, even in the foundational period of the church. Leaning even more heavily into this idea, the one thing we should recognize is that every action taken by the body is meant to be dictated by the head. In a literal, physical sense, when a portion of the body—say the hands—move without a mental prompting, or do not move when queued by a mental prompting, that is considered an illness. The body is to take its direction, identity, and life from Jesus alone.
