The House That God Builds—Beyond the Toolboxes of Tradition

The Body and Its Miracle of Composition

Paul’s depiction of the church as a body is both fascinating and startling—perhaps even unheard by modern ears dulled by overfamiliarity. We take the metaphor for granted, forgetting how radical it was when Paul first told individual Christians that they were not themselves a body, but merely members—disconnected, decaying, and meaningless until joined together in that living composition of interdependence that alone gives birth to life.

In Romans 12 he writes,
“As there are many members in one body, and all the members do not have the same function, even so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and individually we belong to one another.”

Two aspects stand out. First, not all members have the same function. Second—and more arresting—is his assertion that we belong to one another. The human being says of its hand, my hand, or its ear, my ear—a declaration of possession in which the part has no purpose, ambition, or identity apart from the whole. The ear has meaning only within the body to which it belongs.

The Gift and the Character

From that foundation, Paul exposes one of the church’s great stumbling blocks: our confusion between gifting and character. Each of us is endowed with unique spiritual and practical capacities, yet we often look through the lens of our own gift and mistake what is simply different for what is deficient.

To stay within Paul’s analogy and follow his personification of body parts, imagine that the ears complain that the eyes can’t perceive vibrations as well as they do, while the eyes protest that the ears never seem to grasp the vision. Then the nose interjects that the whole affair “stinks”—and none realize that they are perceiving through distinct senses of the same body.

In our self-appraisal and in our judgments of others, we lose awareness of the uniqueness of each gift, each calling. We begin to imagine that everyone should function as we do, and when they don’t, we grow exasperated. But even within the body, there are rarely more than two versions of the same member: two eyes, two ears, two hands, two feet—and even those work in complement, never identically. There is one nose but two nostrils—each with its own perspective on the same breath.

The lesson is clear: diversity of function is intrinsic to the miracle of unity.

From Body to House: A New Analogy

Let us depart from the body metaphor and take up another Biblical image: the house, for the body of Christ is also called the temple of God. As Jesus’ physical body was the temple where God dwelt, so the church is described as “a spiritual house built of living stones.” The writer of Hebrews affirms, “Whose house you are, if you hold fast your confession firm to the end.”

Imagine a contest—a gathering of every trade required to build a home. Each craftsman is challenged to construct the most complete house possible, but with one restriction: he may use only the tools and materials of his own trade.

The plumber builds his “house” entirely of PVC and copper pipe—joints, valves, and adhesive—a gleaming maze of conduit that faintly resembles the rough outline of a dwelling.

The framer begins with vigor, stacking timber and driving nails, but he must bore pipes from wood and carve wooden wires for power, straining to make lumber do what only metal and copper can.

The painter stretches canvas and drop-cloths over scaffolds, coating them with thick pigment to mimic the walls of a home.

The electrician weaves a lattice of wire, stringing circuits as if voltage could shelter from the rain.

The roofer piles shingles into an awkward pyramid that, at least to an eight-year-old, might pass for a house.

When the contest ends, every house bears one thing truly excellent—the single element for which that trade was specifically designed. The plumber’s house flows; the framer’s stands tall; the painter’s glows; the electrician’s hums. Yet none of them work.

Spectators admire the effort, even tip their hats to the ingenuity, the “thinking outside the box.” Yet the winner would not be the one who built a livable home, but the one who best faked completeness—who most skillfully concealed the need for inter-dependence and counterfeited self-sufficiency.

And this, tragically, is how the church so often builds: every movement mastering its specialty, perfecting its single trade, while the true house of God still waits to be built together.

The Fractured House of God

Since the days when Jan Hus was burned in the Bohemian Reformation, when Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the Wittenberg door, when the Swiss Brethren were re-baptized in Zürich, and when Roger Williams separated from the State church, history has witnessed sincere men stepping out of structures they could no longer call the temple of the living God. They longed for a house “whose builder and maker is God”—a church founded upon the rock that Christ promised the gates of hell could not prevail against.

Yet through the centuries, God has refined and perfected profound, essential elements within every Christian tradition. Each one holds something indispensable to the whole:

• The Catholics preserved the ancient Christus Victor vision of atonement and the sense of the church’s essentiality, though confused about its nature.
• The Lutherans gave us the seeds of justification by faith.
• The Presbyterians bequeathed covenantal salvation—the insight that Christ is in covenant with Israel, into whose promises the church must be grafted.
• The Anabaptists restored believers’ baptism, the principle of separation from the world, and two-kingdom theology.
• The Baptists reinforced baptism by immersion and the congregational, believer-centered church governed by the inerrant Word.
• The Methodist's emphasized repentance, holiness, and the early seeds of accountability and discipleship.
• The Pentecostals revived the experience of God—the baptism of the Spirit, the power of Pentecost, the immediacy of the divine.

Yet each, like a tradesman building alone, centered the edifice on one primary revelation and then covered the gaps with human ingenuity. God handed them a divine piece, and rather than stop there, they finished the rest in the flesh—plastering human reasoning over what revelation had begun.

Toward a New Kind of Master Building

The need of our age is for wise master builders—craftsmen who will no longer glorify their personal or inherited disciplines but labor toward the completion of the entire house. Our emphasis must shift from our tradition—whatever it may be—to the end goal: a fully restored church patterned only after the New Testament.

The revivalists of past centuries shook the world. We honor them not for perfection but for their courage—to press as far as they could with the limited tools they possessed. Yet all worked from toolboxes defined by a particular tradition. The plumbers came with pipes, the carpenters with saws, the electricians with wire cutters. Each perfected his own craft but seldom built upon what others had already laid. They rationalized why their discipline alone sufficed, rather than seeing it as just one essential element of the whole reconstruction.

A Journey beyond the Toolboxes

I have often reflected on my own father’s journey of faith. He was utterly unschooled in organized religion—an atheist and a student of philosophy and English literature, voraciously reading every thinker he could find in his search for meaning through the 1960s.

Then, one day, God broke through.

On impulse, he pulled a paperbound Bible from his shelf—a book he owned only to reference in philosophy essays. It fell open by chance to the page containing the only prayer he had ever spoken. After seven years of searching through religions and philosophies, he began to mouth the words:

“Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come . . .”.

As he prayed, an invisible but undeniable Presence filled the room. His hands rose heavenward, tears streamed down his face, and he yielded to a reality he had never encountered before. He thought “Pentecostals” were a Native American tribe in New Mexico; he had no idea what was happening in that moment. Yet the living Christ broke through the noise of the world and revealed Himself as Lord and Savior.

Within a week, my father found himself in a church, being led through repentance, baptism, and surrender. There, within that Pentecostal milieu, he learned of the house promised in Scripture—also called a kingdom, a temple, a body: a place of harmony, wholeness, and restoration.

He believed it with unshakable conviction, because the same God who had met him in the pages of Scripture also spoke through those pages, saying:

• “. . . that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times He might gather together in one all things in Christ . . .” (Eph. 1:10).
• “. . . heaven must receive [Jesus] until the times of restoration of all things . . .” (Acts 3:21).
• “. . . you also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house . . .” (1 Pet. 2:5).
• “. . . in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord . . . joined and knit together by what every joint supplies . . . ” (Eph. 2:21; 4:16).
• “ . . . He Himself gave gifts to men . . . for the equipping of the saints, for the edifying of the body of Christ . . . till we all come . . . to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:8–13).

My father believed it—and he refused to be confined within the narrow discipline of any single tradition. His commitment, and that of many who walked with him, was not to a denomination but to the restoration of the church.

It was as though God said to that generation: Stop pretending the whole house can be built from one toolbox. Bring them all. Line up the toolboxes of Methodists and Baptists, Pentecostals and Anabaptists, Presbyterians and Moravians, Catholics and Reformers alike. Throw open the lids and use whatever is good and of God to build the house—because the goal is not the discipline, but the dwelling.

The Restoration Vision

That is the journey we remain upon, and it is far from over. We have not arrived. We are not the answer—only a people striving to be part of an answer: one step in the right direction, one movement that sparks others, one catalyst of hope and faith.

But we must stop locking ourselves within the silos of a single discipline. The call of God now is broader, deeper, and more urgent—a call that will not let us rest while His house lies in ruin:

“For Zion’s sake I will not hold My peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until her righteousness goes forth as brightness, and her salvation as a lamp that burns” (Isa. 62:1).

And again, the psalmist warns:
“If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill! If I do not remember you, let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth—if I do not exalt Jerusalem above my chief joy” (Ps. 137:5–6).

Jerusalem is the church. Zion is the restored bride—“the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem . . . the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are registered in heaven” (Heb. 12:22–23).

God seeks those who will prioritize her restoration above every other allegiance—above the pride of individuality and above the “stability” of tradition.

Wholeness as the Goal

Whether you’re tempted to judge a brother because his gift differs from yours, or to cling to a tradition because it has done much good, remember: God is seeking those who will fix their eyes on the restoration of Zion.

We must recover a vision of wholeness—of a complete, intergenerational culture of flourishing families, restored worship, and redeemed work. This vision encompasses every essential sphere of life: economy, education, relationships, identity, entertainment, and separation from the culture of death.

Most of all, we must reverse the test of fruit. We must no longer judge the work by how well it echoes tradition; rather, we judge tradition by the fruit it bears.

The measure is life. We do not want a structure that merely approximates the Biblical pattern, a crayon sketch of God’s architecture. We want a house with foundations that do not move, walls that do not collapse under cultural pressure, a roof that shields from the fiery darts of the age, power coursing through its frame like light in darkness, water rushing on tap—living water—and a family within it overflowing with joy and thanksgiving.

That is the house Christ promised. That is the life abundant for which we labor.

The Unfinished Work

Until the fullness of that promise stands visible on the earth, woe to any who would halt the work of restoration. Woe to those who say, “This far and no further.” Our spiritual ancestors did not want their fragments of restoration memorialized by shrines; they longed for completion.

The writer of Hebrews tells us that “they without us cannot be made perfect.” Our forebears lean over the grandstands of heaven, cheering us on to finish the project—to include their essential pieces, bringing them into the great temple now rising from the earth.

We mock them when we idolize their fragments. We honor them when we weave their truths into the wholeness God is building.

The House of the Living God

So let us put away judgment—the habit of viewing our brother’s weakness through the lens of our own strength. Let us not mistake difference of gifting for defect of character, nor pride ourselves on character when God has merely wired us differently.

And let us not despise one tradition because its house remains incomplete. Instead, may the Lord place in the hands of faithful shepherds and builders every tool restored through the ages, until Scripture is our standard, and life abundant our measure, and the temple of God stands again upon the earth—His living, breathing demonstration of wisdom to principalities and powers.

Then the world will know: God has a people. They are united. His kingdom is coming, because His will is being done on earth as it is in heaven.