Intro
We’re beginning a new series today on 1 Corinthians 12-14, which is all about the gifts of the Holy Spirit. I recognize that for some of you, this is all going to be brand, brand new. You’ve never heard of spiritual gifts. You might not even be sure what or who the Holy Spirit is. Others of you come from backgrounds where spiritual gifts were talked about and practiced all the time. Your mom greeted the mailman in tongues! Some of you come from backgrounds where you heard about spiritual gifts, but you were warned about excesses. You were told the more “extraordinary” gifts ceased in the first century and any manifestation of them now may be of the devil. For me personally, I grew up in a Mennonite church context that just didn’t talk about the Spirit and His gifts. They weren’t on the radar. The more extraordinary spiritual gifts weren’t practiced and they weren’t preached against. They just didn’t factor in at all. But over the last decade plus, as I left that church background and was exposed to the wider church and the history of spiritual renewal in the church, I have become thirsty to know more about the Spirit and the gifts He gives. I have become thirsty to experience everything God would have for me in walking with Him. That’s my prayer for you as well today. That no matter where you’re coming from, no matter what your previous knowledge or experience, that you would come to the Word of God with an open mind and a soft heart to hear what God has to say. Not even to what I have to say. What God has to say. That’s what I’m committed to whenever I preach, including in this series: teaching the Bible. Let’s listen to what God inspired the apostle Paul to write 2000 years ago, words that have incredible relevance and urgency for our day as well.
1. The Context
Again, the section of Scripture we’re going to be in is 1 Corinthians 12-14, the single most extensive teaching in the Bible about the gifts of the Spirit. This is a letter that Paul, the early missionary, church planter, and author of about half the books in the New Testament, wrote to followers of Jesus in the Greek city of Corinth. Corinth was a provincial capital, a significant city in terms of its size and importance. Like the city of Antioch, which we looked at a couple of weeks ago, Corinth was a diverse city and quite religiously pluralistic. Like Antioch, it was known for sexual promiscuity, which factors into the letter as a whole. One Greek writer had even created a word from the city name, the verb “korinthiazo”, which means to fornicate. Can you imagine? A city becoming so known for an action that you invoke the city name to describe the action? Actually, you don’t need to imagine, because that’s happened with Vancouver. Urban Dictionary says that to vancouver someone is to make plans with them and then bail at the last minute. Seriously! If a friend does that to you, you got vancouvered. Don’t be vancouverers and don’t be corinthiers!
Back to Corinth. The main thing you need to know about the church in Corinth, and Paul’s overarching concern in writing the letter, is that Greek ways of thinking had thoroughly permeated the church. For example, the Greek view of spirituality was decidedly anti-body. You could do anything you wanted with your body because what counted was what was unseen, what was of the mind. That comes out quite a bit with issues Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians. You might recognize that same kind of thinking in our day, too, especially in conversations about sex and gender. This is a very relevant letter for our culture! Another aspect of that Greek thinking was the obsession with status and self-promotion. Corinth often received visits from impressive public speakers who may not have had much to say content wise but would wow people with their rhetorical abilities. Aspects of the Corinthian correspondence show that the believers there were embarrassed that Paul didn’t fit the mold.
Put that all together, and you have massive potential for misconstruing and misusing gifts of the Holy Spirit. From the evidence in 1 Corinthians, it seems that the believers in Corinth had received a wide range of gifts, including what is known as speaking in tongues. We’ll talk about this more later in the series, but tongues is Spirit-empowered, incomprehensible speech that a believer may speak in praise and prayer to God. The Corinthians, obsessed with otherworldly spirituality and with rhetoric, grabbed on to this as the most desirable gift of the Spirit. This was the prize. Then, informed by their Greek values of status and promotion, they elevated this gift above all the others as the definitive mark of spiritual superiority. You were truly spiritual if you spoke in tongues. They exalted those who had that gift. What we have in 1 Corinthians 12-14 is Paul’s response to this state of affairs in the church. And I’ll tell you this right off the bat: Paul’s solution is not to put a stop to the exercise of spiritual gifts, not even tongues. He doesn’t do that. Instead, he reframes the issue for them, he gives them a whole different perspective from which to view spiritual gifts. Again, regardless of where we’re coming from, that’s what we need as well. Are you excited? Let’s go! Just to give you a heads up, we won’t talk too much about what the gifts are this week- that’s next week. This week is all about setting the tone, getting the fundamental understanding right.
2. 1 Corinthians 12:1-3- Content, not form
Now about the gifts of the Spirit, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed. 2 You know that when you were pagans, somehow or other you were influenced and led astray to mute idols. 3 Therefore I want you to know that no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says, “Jesus be cursed,” and no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit.
1 Corinthians 12:1-3
Paul begins by introducing his topic, which is probably an issue the Corinthian believers themselves had raised in a letter to him. In the Greek, it’s literally “now about the spiritual things”, but given the context, our English versions appropriately translate it as spiritual gifts. Paul doesn’t want them to be uninformed. He doesn’t want them to base their view of these gifts on what comes most natural to them, on what is merely familiar. He wants them to have a right understanding of these gifts.
Because here’s the thing: some of these gifts, even the extraordinary ones, weren’t totally unfamiliar. They had some experience with something like the gift of tongues. Paul talks about how, before they knew Christ, they had been influenced and led astray to mute idols. But then in verse 3, he writes about the different kinds of utterances people might make under spiritual influence. Paul knew that other so-called gods and idols were false. They couldn’t speak because they weren’t real. However, people believed they could. People believed a Greek god like Apollo, whose temple was prominent in Corinth, was real and could speak through people. You may have heard of the Oracle of Delphi. Delphi was another Greek city not too far away from Corinth, and there was a temple to Apollo there as well. At the temple, according to some ancient accounts, there would be a priestess who would sit on a tripod, possibly above a crevice in the ground emitting various gasses. In response to inquiries, she would utter unintelligible prophecies in an ecstatic prophetic trance. The idea was that these “oracles” were given by Apollo himself.
Some people speculate that some of the gasses might have been the real source of so-called prophecies, but it shouldn’t surprise readers of the Bible if there was a more sinister spiritual reality to this as well. Apparently, the demonic can mimic supernatural forms and appearances. In Exodus, God sends Moses and his brother Aaron to confront the Pharaoh of Egypt so that he will release the Israelites from slavery. He gives Moses a number of signs to perform and plagues to proclaim over Egypt. At first, in Exodus 7 and 8, Pharaoh calls on his own magicians. They’re able to replicate those signs by their “secret arts”. They can turn sticks into snakes, water into blood, and cause frogs to emerge. However, they run out of steam on the third plague, the proliferation of gnats. Frogs? Easy. Gnats? Way above their pay grade. But the point is that these “secret arts” can match the form of some miraculous signs.
We see the same thing at the end of the Bible, in Revelation. We read about a beast out of the earth who “performed great signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven to the earth in full view of the people. Because of the signs it was given power to perform on behalf of the first beast, it deceived the inhabitants of the earth.” (Revelation 13:13-14)
See, some people have witnessed supernatural evil, and they rule out any and all dramatic spiritual manifestations as demonic because of it. They recognize, rightly, that the demonic can present itself in this way. In light of that, they say, “we don’t do weird, that’s of the devil, get behind me Satan!” Other people accept any dramatic spiritual manifestation as from God because they recognize, rightly, that the Holy Spirit does work in signs and wonders and other humanly unexplainable ways. It’s something supernatural, it must be wonderful, let’s celebrate without giving another moment’s thought! But in 1 Corinthians, Paul gives us wisdom that avoids both these extremes. He helps us discern what is of God and what isn’t, and in these verses he shows that when discerning, it’s not about form, it’s about content.
In verse 3, Paul says that nobody speaking by the Holy Spirit can speak defamatory and cursing words about Jesus. We’ve seen videos of protests in the US lately where people have been so consumed with rage. I’m talking incredible, almost unexplainable levels of anger and vitriol against the church, yelling out curse words at Jesus because of a Supreme Court decision. There might be something supernatural going on there, but I guarantee you it’s not the work of the Holy Spirit if Jesus is spoken of in that way. Conversely, Paul says that the only way someone says that Jesus is Lord is by the Holy Spirit. This goes back to stuff Paul writes earlier in the letter about how the Gospel is so counter-intuitive, so counter-cultural, that it is only by the Holy Spirit that we see and believe that a crucified and resurrected man from Judah is Lord of heaven and earth and eternal savior of all who trust in him (eg. 1 Corinthians 2:6-10). That doesn’t come naturally. People don’t hear that and go, “well, obviously!” That understanding comes when the Spirit is at work in someone.
In other words, it’s not the form that indicates the source, it’s the content. It’s not power and ability that is the real evidence of the presence of the Holy Spirit, it is whether those powers and abilities are directed towards exalting Jesus. It is not inspired utterances that are the goal, but words that display Jesus as Lord.
Appearances can be deceiving when it comes to spiritual gifts. I heard a story related to this. Full disclaimer, I’m pretty sure it’s not real. A man was desperate for a job, applied at the zoo, and the zoo keeper offered him an unusual position. The gorilla had died, the zoo didn’t have the money to replace him, but this man could wear a monkey suit and impersonate the gorilla for pay. After a few days, he’s really getting into it, swinging from vine to vine. Until, that is, tragedy strikes. He accidentally swings himself right over the fence into the neighbouring habitat: the lion’s den. He feels the enormous lion’s hot breath on him, he is terrified because he knows he’s a goner, and reflexively screams for help. Suddenly he hears the lion urgently whisper, “quiet down, you idiot, or we’ll both be out of a job!”
Don’t be deceived by appearances when it comes to spiritual gifts. Test their authenticity by their content. Because the gifts are about content, not form. Spiritual gifts are all about Jesus.
3. 1 Corinthians 12:4-6- God working, not you
Here’s where Paul goes next.
4 There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. 5 There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord.6 There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work.
1 Corinthians 12:4-6
Here you have Paul attributing the process of giving and utilizing spiritual gifts to God, who he refers to in three ways: the Spirit who distributes the gifts, the Lord (one of the most common descriptors in the New Testament for Jesus) who receives the service performed by spiritual gifts, and God, who works in all of them and in everyone. This is one of those passages where we see a clear reference to the Trinity, though that word is not used anywhere in the Bible. On the basis of this passage and many others like it, Christians believe that God is somehow three-in-one. He is one God in three persons. It’s something we can’t quite explain, but we also don’t know how to explain what we find in the Scriptures without it. Jesus is fully God, and yet is somehow distinct from God the Father, and the Holy Spirit is fully God and yet somehow distinct from the Father and the Son.
You might wish we could say more, but if theologizing about the Trinity was Paul’s main concern, he’d spend a lot more time with it. His point, instead, is that the primary agent at work in spiritual gifts is not the individual human being, but instead Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
I’ve made the point before that if you are a follower of Jesus, you are not the main character in the story of your life. That sounds really, really strange, right? But it’s true. In Christ, you have been crucified to a life lived for your own glory and status. At the same time, you have been raised to a new life, filled by the Holy Spirit, with the purpose of glorifying Jesus and making him known. It’s the same deal with spiritual gifts. The main character here is not you, it’s God. The power at work here is not yours, it’s God’s.
Imagine a kid attempting to lift a heavy weight. He’s straining and struggling with all his might. His Dad comes up behind him and gives him assistance, gets the weight above his son’s head. Imagine the kid walking away boasting to everyone about how incredibly strong he is. Look at what I was able to lift! Look at my huge muscles!
Cute, right? But how many grown-up believers are like that with the Spirit? God works through them in some way, and they’re like, look how amazing I am! Everyone stand in awe of my spendor and might and wisdom! They’ve forgotten who is behind them doing the heavy lifting. One of the greatest basketball players in the world, Giannis Antetonkounpo, has impressed me in this way. He is a freak of nature athlete. 6-11, 240 pounds of muscle, doing things very few humans have ever been able to do. He’s also a follower of Jesus. During the recent NBA Playoffs, he made headlines for an incredibly athletic self-alley oop off the backboard. Here was his comment after the game when asked about the play: “I’m lucky enough that God blessed me with the ability to jump.” I love that. God is the main character in whatever abilities I possess, not me.
I don’t mean, and Paul didn’t mean, that we are completely passive participants in the process. Giannis Antetonkounpo takes care of his body and trains hard. He is disciplined and prepared in the game. Likewise, believers submit to the Holy Spirit, step out in faith, and choose to walk in obedience. However, when it comes to the gifts of the Holy Spirit, we need to recognize that when we use them, it is the presence of God working through us. Verse 7, which we’ll come to in a moment, makes this really clear. Paul says that to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given. “The manifestation of the Spirit.” When we utilize our gifts of preaching, having mercy, giving words of knowledge, healing, giving, leading, and so on, it is God Himself working through us. That is why the author Sam Storms says that we should speak of such gifts as God’s presence rather than his presents. A gift is the presence of the Holy, Almighty God within us and working through us!
There are a couple of implications of this. One is that to use the gifts given by the Spirit as we are meant to requires our dependence on and trust in him. The more we rely on our own strength, the more we impede the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, since God is the one at work. I am confronted with this on an almost weekly basis as I prepare to preach. The ability to preach, to publicly teach the Scriptures, is the primary gift the Spirit has given me as far as I can tell. I say this partly because it’s not something that I always had. I’ve recently referred to my first sermon, which was more an exposition of Rocky 3 than biblical teaching. But it wasn’t just that, it wasn’t that I needed to learn what kind of content to include. It’s that even as a young adult in college, I was terrified of public speaking. I stammered and said “um” every other word. My knees shook. My stomach would tie itself up in knots hours in advance if I knew I needed to speak to a group of people. If I did speak, I wrote it all down and kept my notes close beside me. I told people as a young adult that I thought I might like to be a pastor to help people grow in the Lord, but the one aspect I could never see myself being good at was public speaking.
I don’t know exactly when or how it changed, but I know one of the big moments was when I was invited, as a recent college grad, to be the speaker for a small Bible camp in rural Manitoba. Apparently they’d take anyone! They asked me to do 10 messages. Completely terrifying. But I said yes. I stepped out in faith. I prepared those messages. And somehow, God used me. I still felt ridiculously nervous, but God gave me words and the ability to be present. I even enjoyed it. I experienced life in serving God in this way, and heard from others that God had spoken to them through me. I was experiencing a manifestation of the Spirit.
Fast forward 16 years. I’ve preached hundreds of times, and to much larger crowds of people. I don’t feel nervous anymore. I’m confident in the gift I have received. But sometimes I get really confident. I think, I’ve got this. I know exactly what I want to say. It’s going to be a phenomenal sermon. It’s going to go viral. Christianity Today will want to do a cover story on me because of this sermon. I should probably go get a haircut for the photo shoot. And then, as I’m preparing, I’ll hit a major block. Like, nothing’s coming. Something isn’t right. And I’ll get on my knees. I’ll repent of the pride. I’ll call out in desperation, I become aware of my dependence on God. And through that humility and dependence, the words come, and God chooses to once again use me with the gift He’s given. See, I have a role to play in preparation and discipline, but the biggest role is to trust and depend on His power.
The other implication of this is one we’ll explore more in a couple of weeks. Briefly, if it’s God working through us and not us doing the work, then any sense of superiority over another person’s gift is so uncalled for. After all, it’s the same God at work through both of us! That’s Paul’s other main point here: we have different gifts but it’s the same Spirit who gives them, the same Lord who is served, the same God at work. You and I don’t get to demean or belittle another person’s gifting. That’s because when we do that, we are demeaning and belittling God, on whom we ourselves are totally dependent. The spiritual gifts are about God working, not you. Again, spiritual gifts are all about Jesus.
4. 1 Corinthians 12:7- Given, not earned
And that leads to this final point, which comes out in verse 7: “now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.” This verse functions as the theme verse for the entire section of chapters 12-14. You could break it down word by word. And we’re going to touch on every aspect of it at some point in this series. But for right now, I want to focus on one particular word: given.
Spiritual gifts are given. I think the language of rights and privileges has been overplayed and misused over the last couple of years, but spiritual gifts are not a right everyone has access to. They are not “natural”. Spiritual gifts are not just personality traits you’ve always had. They are not just inborn abilities. They are supernatural empowerments for service, like the gift of preaching I was given later on in my young adult years. Gifts are imparted to us by someone else.
We can think about that on a few levels. One is that as a gift, spiritual gifts are an act of grace by God. Gifts, by their very nature, are not earned or deserved. It’s not that God goes, “wow, Craig has helped a lot of elderly women cross the street this week, that’s worth the gift of prophecy!” They are not a wage given in return for service. Gifts are acts of grace given through the undeserved mercy and kindness of God.
In this way, we see the deep connection between spiritual gifts and the Gospel. Salvation in Christ is not something you earn or deserve. I find this is something that new believers, as well as old ones, continually struggle to comprehend. The goal is not being a “good person”, whatever that means. You cannot work your way to heaven or into relationship with God. On our own, we stand condemned in our sin, mired in a pit with no ability to get ourselves out. But in Christ, God has reached down and pulled us out. He has done what we could not, and what we could not deserve. As Paul writes in Ephesians 2:8-9, we are saved by grace, not by works, so that nobody can boast. It is all by the gift of God. We get upset at the injustice and evil in the world. That’s appropriate at one level, but we need to remember that “there but for the grace of God go I”. His forgiveness of our sins, His reconciling us to Himself, His giving of the Holy Spirit and gifts through the Holy Spirit, is all grace, through and through.
This means, second, that if spiritual gifts are given, we honor the giver by accepting the gifts. Some of us feel nervous about the Holy Spirit and would rather not talk about gifts, like the Mennonite churches of my upbringing. Which is like if I offered my kids new bikes and new helmets to keep them safe, but they ran away screaming with fear. God loves us dearly, has poured out His grace on His life, and wants to give us gifts. If we say to Him, “um, thanks but no thanks, God”, what does that say to Him? Accept the gift! Be grateful for it!
And that points, third of all, to our responsibility once we’ve received His gifts. Yes, it is all by grace that He gives us the manifestation of the Spirit. But He gives us this manifestation for a purpose. It’s the same deal as with salvation generally. We are forgiven and reconciled to God not just for our own sake but so that we will be ambassadors of reconciliation. It’s so that we will share the good news of God’s love in Christ with others. As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:18, “all this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.” Likewise, the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. It is given to build others up and bear witness about Jesus.
My mom lives in Oklahoma and so she will often send Carolyn and I money for the kid’s birthdays, Christmases, and so on. That’s a gift. It’s given to Carolyn and I. But there is definitely an expectation involved. If next time we video call she asks what we got the kids and we say, “oh, actually, I used that money to buy myself a brand new suit”, how’s that going to go over? (Granted, that’s about the most unrealistic scenario you could imagine in my particular case!) That gift was given with a purpose, to benefit and bless our kids. I dishonor the giver by using the gift in ways contrary to the purpose of the gift.
Spiritual gifts are not earned, and not to be used however we want. They are given by grace and for a purpose. Because, once again, spiritual gifts are always all about Jesus.
Conclusion
That’s what this all comes down to. That’s what you need to understand as we begin this journey in exploring the manifestation of the Spirit that is given to every follower of Jesus. This is not about you. It is not about you or about me. This is not about our status. It is not about where our gifts rank in the eyes of others. This is not about putting on a show for others or seeing amazing, unexplainable things just for the sake of being wowed. This is about Jesus. Through and through, it is about Jesus. He is the savior, the King, our deliverer, our first and our last, our Lord and the Lord over all, the crucified and resurrected one, the one the world needs to know. He has saved us and forgiven us and given us the Holy Spirit so that we can make Him known. So die to the pride and status and fear and anxiety when it comes to the gifts of the Spirit and set your eyes on Him. Receive what He has given you, depend on Him fully, and may He be exalted in you and through you.
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