The Christian community is a healing community. The love that we are called to exhibit to one another allows us to empathize with the suffering and associate with the lowly. Our lives are to be so intertwined that we rejoice and weep with another.

To be a Christian is to be called to a radical new life. Paul teaches us how this new life together is marked by genuine love, patient in hardship, and caring for the needs of one another. This new life allows us to enter into the suffering of others and to resist evil and avenging wrongdoing.

In Romans 12, Paul tells the church to present itself as a living sacrifice to God. That wasn’t just an individual call, but a call to the entire church, to offer itself in service unto God as a unified, corporate body. This lies at the heart of the community of faith: being renewed in our minds and laying aside the ways of the world together.