Hello brothers and sisters.
I need to tell you something a little embarrassing.
The first time I heard Casting Crowns’ “If We Are the Body,” I almost laughed.
It came on while I was driving, streaming the Christian Rock station on Amazon Music. I was barely into my walk with Jesus at the time.
Okay, that’s actually overstating it. I wasn’t even a believer yet, to be honest. I was still in the exploration phase, still trying to figure out whether any of this was actually true. I had started listening to Christian music as part of that process, letting it wash over me while I drove, seeing if anything resonated. Looking for anything that could help me feel something.
And then the chorus hit. The song asks, in essence: if the church is the body of Christ, then why aren’t we reaching out, healing, teaching, going where we’re needed? Why isn’t Christ’s love showing through us?
And I felt smug. Almost vindicated.
See? I thought. Even devout Christians admit it. The church is full of hypocrites. None of these people actually live the way Christ admonished his followers to.
Now, I need to give you some context for why that was my gut reaction. I was raised in the LDS (Mormon) church in Utah, where the religion isn’t just something you do on Sunday; it’s the fabric of the community. I walked away from it at the tender age of eight because even then, something felt deeply off to me. Too much of what I was being taught didn’t add up, and too much of what I saw in the people around me (especially the church leadership) just didn’t match what they preached.
In the Mormon church where I grew up, the expectation was that you dressed up in dresses and suits for service. Showing up in jeans and a t-shirt would have been scandalous. And while the church’s official position (at least as we were told at the time) was that believers shouldn’t drink alcohol or even caffeine, the story circulating back then was that the church owned about half of the Coca-Cola company.
I’ve since learned there was little truth to that, but as a kid, it was one more brick in the wall of hypocrisy I was building. I grew up watching people preach about faithfulness and non-judgement and not working on the Sabbath (which the LDS church observes on Sunday, teaching the youth that Sunday is the Sabbath, even though biblically it’s not difficult to figure out that it’s actually Saturday) while their actual lives told a different story.
That background colored everything. I spent more than thirty years as an agnostic, convinced that organized religion was, at its core, a performance. People playing dress-up and pretending to be holy while being just as broken and selfish and greedy as everyone else (if not more so).
So when I heard a Christian band singing a song that seemed to confirm exactly that, my reaction wasn’t anger. It was a dark sort of satisfaction. It struck me as a blatant admission that even the seemingly devout knew what I knew.
I kind of avoided the song after that. Not consciously, but it didn’t pull me in the way some other music was starting to. Even though I recognized, from my own childhood experience, that the song was addressing a genuine problem in the church, I couldn’t see past my own cynicism long enough to hear what it was actually saying.
It would be months before I understood.
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How I Got Here
I should back up and tell you how I ended up listening to Christian music in the first place, because it wasn’t anything resembling a straight line.
A close friend (who has been a devout believer since she was a child) first showed me a version of a Christian believer that I had never known before. Kind. Generous. Thoughtful. Doesn’t Judge. Debates to understand, not to win.
In a word, Christ-like.
I’d known her for a few months when she introduced me to a book called The Veil by Blake K. Healy, which explores one man’s experiences seeing into the spiritual realm. I read it because I thought it would help me understand her perspective better.
I didn’t expect it to shake me the way it did.
I read it twice.
That led to a conversation that changed the trajectory of my life. I wasn’t ready to read Scripture. I was self-aware enough to realize that my heart and my mind were still too closed to approach it without cynicism. So she suggested some other books to start with. I read Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ and J. Warner Wallace’s Cold-Case Christianity, both of which I highly recommend if you’ve never read them. After that I listened to an audio course on the New Testament by Dr. Bart Ehrman (I didn’t realize until later that he isn’t a believer, but don’t let that dissuade you. Although you have to separate out some of his nonsense, there’s quite a bit of fascinating detail in it), followed by a debate between Dr. Ehrman and Dr. Michael F. Bird about when the early church began considering Jesus God. It’s honestly a fascinating debate and I highly recommend it. But after that I read Paul and Jesus by James D. Tabor, followed by several other apologetic works that I honestly can’t remember the titles of now.
I’m sure you’re getting the point here that I was not easily convinced. I tend to be very analytical and logic-driven, so I needed to read about a lot of evidence before I could “turn off” the cynicism. Which probably makes sense when you remember that I spent a lifetime being preached at by almost everyone in my life.
Anyhow, I eventually felt ready to give actual Scripture a real chance. And true to my usual way, I didn’t dip my toe. I didn’t dabble. I dived in head-first! Over the course of about two or three months, I read the Bible cover to cover.
Twice.
First in the KJV and then the NRSVUE. I started occasionally watching the Life.Church service online and listened to Christian rock more than other types of music. I was pretty regularly praying to God, asking Him to show himself to me. To prove He was real. It sounds absurdly prideful to me now, but it’s what I was doing. Based on advice from believing friends.
In fairness, I was leaning toward believing it was true.
But true faith?
I didn’t have it. It just hadn’t clicked. I hadn’t encountered God. I had never seen anything I couldn’t explain away.
And then one morning, just another morning seemingly like any other, I was driving to work. I don’t know how to describe it other than the sunrise just looked... different. I don’t have a better word for it.
The sky was clearer. The colors were more vivid. More beautiful. It was almost as though the whole world was saturated with color. My eyes watered.
I glanced to my right and saw the sun cresting the horizon, tinged with red, and I was overcome. A presence settled over me like a physical weight. Peace suffused my entire being. Everything in the world just felt… right… for the first time in my life.
It was the Holy Spirit. I’m as convinced of that now as I was in that moment. I literally felt Him settling over me, as though He were saying, It’s okay, son. You can stop struggling now. I’ve got you.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, everything changed.
Scripture started making sense in ways it hadn’t before. My cynicism evaporated. My resistance to going to church vanished. I started discovering Bible commentators who resonated with me and I found a church to attend. I dove deeper and deeper into God’s Word, and I haven’t come up for air since.
It was somewhere around four to six months after that experience that I heard “If We Are the Body” again. And this time, I heard something completely different.
The Penny Drops
Mark Hall, the lead singer and songwriter of Casting Crowns, wrote the song as a teaching tool for his youth group. He was walking them through James 2, the passage about showing partiality in the church, giving the best seat to the rich man while telling the poor man to sit on the floor. The song paints two scenes: a girl who slips into a crowded worship service only to be met with teasing laughter, and a traveler far from home who sinks into the back row only to feel the crushing weight of judgmental stares that tell him he’d be better off back on the road.
The song isn’t an indictment of Christ. It never was. It’s an indictment of us. The church. The body.
If we are the body, and Scripture says we are, then why aren’t we doing what the body is supposed to do?
When I finally understood that, I didn’t just hear a song. I heard a conviction. Because the question the song asks isn’t whether Jesus’ arms are reaching. His arms have always been reaching to envelop us. The question is whether our arms are reaching, because we are now His hands and feet in this world.
And this time, it hit me from the opposite direction. The first time I heard the song, I heard confirmation that the church was full of hypocrites and Christ was imaginary. Now I heard something far more uncomfortable: a call to do better. Not a smug observation from the outside, but a loving rebuke from the inside. And I was on the inside now.
The cynical outsider who had spent thirty years pointing at the church’s failures was now part of the church. The mirror wasn’t aimed at someone else anymore. It was aimed at me.
At all of us.
Jesus Himself had the harshest words not for sinners, tax collectors, or prostitutes. His sharpest rebukes were aimed at the religious establishment, the Pharisees and Sadducees, the teachers of the law who knew Scripture backward and forward but had forgotten the heart of it. Who had abandoned the spirit of the law in favor of the letter. The ones who tithed their spices down to the last mint leaf but neglected justice, mercy, and faithfulness (Matthew 23:23).
Casting Crowns wasn’t doing anything Jesus hadn’t already done. They were holding up a mirror to the body and asking, Are you reflecting Him?
That realization changed how I read Scripture. And as I dug deeper, I discovered that God has been saying the same thing to His people for thousands of years.
God Has Always Told Us How to Treat People
One of the things that surprised me most when I started reading through the Old Testament with fresh eyes was how much space God devotes to how His people should treat outsiders, the poor, the vulnerable, and the stranger. This wasn’t an afterthought or a footnote. It was woven into the very fabric of the Law.
One might even say it was the point all along.
The Stranger in the Land
In Leviticus 19:33-34, God commands Israel:
“When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” (NRSV)
Now, here’s where it gets interesting from a textual standpoint. The Hebrew word for “stranger” here is גֵּר (ger), which refers to a foreign-born resident, a sojourner, someone who has come to live among the Israelites but isn’t one of them by birth. This word appears over ninety times in the Hebrew Scriptures. The command to welcome and protect the ger is one of the most frequently repeated commands in the entire Old Testament.
But when the Septuagint translators rendered this passage into Greek, they chose the word προσήλυτος (prosēlytos), which literally means “one who has come near” or “one who has approached.” It’s derived from the verb προσέρχομαι (proserchomai), meaning “to come toward, to draw near.”
Think about what that means for a moment.
The Hebrew emphasizes the stranger’s status. They are a sojourner, someone without inherited rights, someone vulnerable. The Greek emphasizes the stranger’s action. They are someone who has drawn near, someone who has come to you. They’ve made the effort to approach.
And the command is the same in both languages: love them as you love yourself.
The verb the Septuagint uses for “love” here is ἀγαπήσεις (agapēseis), from ἀγαπάω (agapaō). This is the same word that the New Testament uses for the highest form of love, the love that God has for humanity, the love that Jesus commands His followers to show one another. This isn’t casual affection or politeness. This is the love of deliberate, sacrificial commitment.
God didn’t tell Israel to tolerate the stranger. He didn’t say to be civil. He said to love them with the same word that would later be used to describe His own love for the world.
The Prophets Sound the Alarm
And when Israel failed to do this? God sent prophets to call them out.
Ezekiel 22:29 describes the sins that led to God’s judgment on Jerusalem:
“The people of the land have practiced extortion and committed robbery; they have oppressed the poor and needy, and have extorted from the sojourner without justice” (NRSV).
Look at the list. Extortion. Robbery. Oppression of the poor. And right there alongside those sins is mistreating the stranger. In God’s eyes, refusing to show justice to the outsider was just as serious as theft and oppression.
Malachi takes it even further. In Malachi 3:5, God says:
“Then I will draw near to you for judgment; I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, against the adulterers, against those who swear falsely, against those who oppress the hired workers in their wages, the widow and the orphan, against those who thrust aside the sojourner, and do not fear me, says the Lord of hosts” (NRSV).
Notice the company that mistreating the stranger keeps. Sorcery. Adultery. Lying under oath. Cheating workers. Exploiting widows and orphans. And thrusting aside the sojourner. God lists them all together because in His economy, they are all expressions of the same fundamental failure: the refusal to fear Him by refusing to love the people He told you to love.
This is exactly what Casting Crowns was singing about. The girl who slips into worship and gets laughed at. The traveler who sinks into the back row and gets judged. They are the ger. They are the prosēlytos. They are the ones who have drawn near, and the body of Christ is supposed to welcome them with the same ἀγάπη that God shows to us.
Jesus Takes It Personal
And then Jesus came and removed any remaining ambiguity about how seriously God takes this.
In Matthew 25:35-40, Jesus paints a picture of the final judgment. And the criteria He uses to separate the “sheep” from the “goats” isn’t theological knowledge. It isn’t doctrinal precision. It isn’t church attendance or how many worship songs you know by heart.
It’s this:
“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” (NRSV)
And when the righteous ask, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger?” Jesus answers with what might be the most staggering words in all of Scripture:
“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40, NRSV)
Jesus doesn’t just command us to love the outsider. He identifies with the outsider. Every hungry person you feed, every stranger you welcome, every sick person you visit, you are serving Christ Himself. And every person you turn away, ignore, or judge? Same thing, but in reverse.
This is the weight of what Casting Crowns was asking. When a stranger walks into your church and feels the weight of judgmental stares, they aren’t just being turned away from a building. They’re being turned away from the very One whose name is on the sign out front.
Love Your Enemies. Yes, Really.
Jesus didn’t stop at strangers, either. He went further than any rabbi before or since:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:43-45, NRSV)
There it is again, ἀγαπάω (agapaō). The same word. The same love. Not just for your neighbor, not just for the stranger, but for your enemy. The person who is actively working against you.
This is the standard. This is the bar.
And when you measure the modern church against that bar? Well. Let’s just say the song starts making even more sense.
Paul’s Marching Orders
Paul, who understood this better than almost anyone, spent his letters hammering this point home to the early churches.
To the Ephesians, he wrote:
“Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear” (Ephesians 4:29, NRSV).
The Greek word Paul uses for “building up” here is οἰκοδομή (oikodomē), which literally means “the building of a house.” Our words are supposed to be like bricks laid with care, constructing something that shelters and protects. Not tearing down. Not excluding. Building up.
To the Colossians:
“Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone” (Colossians 4:6, NRSV).
Everyone. Not just the people who look like you, talk like you, vote like you, or believe exactly what you believe. Everyone.
To the Romans: “If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Romans 12:18, NRSV). Not just with fellow believers. With all.
And then the capstone, in Romans 12:20-21:
“No, if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink... Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (NRSV).
There’s an echo of Matthew 25 here that I find remarkable. Feed the hungry. Give drink to the thirsty. Paul isn’t just repeating Jesus’ words about judgment, he’s applying them to how we treat even those who oppose us.
The Thread That Runs Through It All
Do you see the thread?
Leviticus says love the stranger as yourself.
Ezekiel says God will judge those who oppress the stranger.
Malachi says God will be a swift witness against those who thrust aside the sojourner.
Jesus says when you welcome the stranger, you welcome Him.
Paul says build people up with your words, speak with grace to everyone, live at peace with all, and feed even your enemies.
James says that showing partiality, giving the best treatment to the wealthy and the well-dressed while marginalizing the poor and the outsider, is sin (James 2:9).
This is the through-line of Scripture from the Torah to the Epistles. God’s people are called to love without conditions, welcome without prerequisites, and serve without asking whether the person “deserves” it.
Because none of us deserved it when God loved us.
A Both/And Reading
Now, as a student of the Septuagint, I can’t let this go without pointing out something that enriches our understanding even further.
When the Septuagint translators chose προσήλυτος (prosēlytos) to render the Hebrew ger, they made a theological decision that would echo through the centuries. By the time of the New Testament, prosēlytos had taken on a more specific meaning: it referred to a Gentile who had converted to Judaism. Someone who had “drawn near” to God and His people from the outside.
This is the same word used in Acts 2:11, when Luke lists the diverse crowd present at Pentecost and includes “proselytes” among them. It’s the same word in Acts 6:5, when Nicolas of Antioch, one of the first seven deacons of the church, is described as a “proselyte,” signifying a former outsider who became a leader.
Here’s the beauty of that: the Septuagint’s translation of Leviticus 19:34 laid the linguistic groundwork for the New Testament’s vision of the church as a community that welcomes those who “draw near.” The outsider who approaches God’s people is to be loved as family. Not tolerated. Not accommodated.
Loved.
And the Hebrew text, with its emphasis on the ger‘s vulnerable status, landless, without inherited rights, dependent on the goodwill of the community, reminds us that this love must be practical, not merely sentimental. The ger needed food, legal protection, and economic opportunity. Love that doesn’t translate into tangible care isn’t the love that Scripture commands.
Both texts. Both emphases. Both true. The Greek gives us the theology of welcome. The Hebrew gives us the ethics of justice. Together, they paint a picture of what the body of Christ is supposed to look like.
If you’ve found this work insightful or helpful, please share it with a friend who loves Scripture as much as you do.
So What Does This Mean for Us?
I want to be really careful here, because I’m not writing this to beat up on the church. I love the church. I found my way to Jesus through believers who welcomed me when I had no idea what I was doing, who answered my questions without condescension, and who didn’t judge me for being a forty-something agnostic who couldn’t find Philippians in a table of contents.
But I also know that the church hasn’t always been that for everyone. And the song that once confirmed my cynicism is now a reminder that we have real work to do.
If we are the body, then we need to be the body that Jesus described. The one that feeds the hungry, welcomes the stranger, clothes the naked, and visits the sick and imprisoned. The one that speaks words that build up rather than tear down. The one that loves not just our friends and fellow believers, but even our enemies.
Jesus didn’t wait for people to clean up their act before He loved them. He ate with tax collectors. He talked with Samaritan women. He touched lepers. He forgave the thief on the cross. He didn’t set up barriers or entry requirements. He simply loved, and His love drew people in.
That’s what the body is supposed to do.
Not stand in a circle with our arms folded, sizing up anyone who tries to step inside. Not whispering behind the back of the girl who walked in wearing the wrong thing. Not giving judgmental stares to the stranger who doesn’t know when to stand or sit during the service.
Meeting people where they are. Loving them as they are. Trusting that the Holy Spirit will do the transforming work that only He can do.
Because here’s what I’ve learned since that morning drive when the Holy Spirit settled over me and everything changed: Jesus meets us where we are. He met me in my cynicism, in my smugness, in my thirty years of writing off the faith as a performance. He didn’t wait until I had my heart sorted out to reach me. He reached me first, and the heart change came after.
And if He can do that for me, then He can do it for anyone.
So since He does that for us, shouldn’t we do the same for others?
A Final Word
I still listen to “If We Are the Body.” But now when I hear it, I don’t hear confirmation that the church is broken beyond repair. I hear Christ’s own question echoing through His church:
You are My hands. Are you reaching? You are My feet. Are you going? You are My voice. Are you teaching? You are My heart. Are you loving?
And I hear the prophets behind it. Ezekiel warning that God will judge those who oppress the stranger. Malachi declaring that God will be a swift witness against those who thrust aside the sojourner. James insisting that faith without works is dead.
And I hear Paul, writing to a church that he loved with everything in him: “Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up.”
Scripture doesn’t whisper about this. It shouts. From Leviticus to Malachi, from the Sermon on the Mount to Paul’s prison letters, from the Hebrew of the Masoretic Text to the Greek of the Septuagint, the message is the same:
Love the stranger. Welcome the outsider. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Speak with grace. Build up, don’t tear down. And never, ever let someone walk into the body of Christ and feel like they’d be better off back out on the road.
Because Jesus paid much too high a price for us to pick and choose who should come.
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I believe that Daniel and the others were indeed casterated. Think about it, he tells his army to take noblemen and royal lineage to serve him. What better way in his mind to stop the multiplying of the royal families and thus reduce them from taking back their kingdoms.
I enjoyed reading about your personal journey. It's always interesting looking back at times when we were closed off or cynical towards truth.
You're spot on with the overall message of the Bible being about loving the sojourner. As someone who has been living in the Middle East for the past 10 years, this message is very meaningful to me.
Sojourners face many challenges. They have questions, needs, and are often lonely. As God' people, we have a responsibility to also "draw near," break the ice, and help the sojourner where we can.