Intro
History is full of examples of people who assumed one thing, only to find out that when they examined the evidence something else entirely was true. Everyone assumed the sun revolved around the earth until men like Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler took a closer look and discovered the opposite. It’s true in church history. Men like Saul of Tarsus assumed that people do not rise from the dead, therefore Jesus did not rise from the dead. He believed that until he came face to face with some pretty compelling evidence! It’s true in our personal lives from childhood all the way through. When I was a kid growing up in small town Manitoba, I thought that the 15 foot high man-made pile of dirt in a field close by was a mountain. It was one of the biggest elevation changes around, dwarfed only by Abe’s Hill, another manmade pile of dirt in the nearby Mennonite metropolis of Steinbach. Then, when I was 12, we drove to Banff. I discovered that everything I assumed about mountains was just a little bit off. Until a few months ago, I assumed that sparkling water was one of the dumbest ideas and must taste bad. Then I drank a cherry flavored Bubly, and we are now one of the top contributors to The Bridge Church’s bottle and can return fundraiser!
You know, before I get into what we’re talking about today, I do want to say that this is my hope and prayer for some of you as well in the realm of Christian faith and church. You may have assumed that there is no such thing as God, or that Jesus was just an ordinary, good man, or that churches are inherently corrupt institutions and that Christians are inauthentic and fake, or that religion is dying out, and so on. My prayer is that as you spend time here and as you spend time hearing God’s word, you will discover that something else entirely is true. That Jesus is God, that He is Lord, and that there is life and renewal to be found in becoming part of His body, His people.
However, what we’re specifically talking about today, as we have been for the last few weeks, is spiritual gifts. There are assumptions that many Christians have made about the nature of these gifts and what our role is in them. Some of what we’ve talked about so far in 1 Corinthians might be a challenge to those assumptions. The passage we’re looking at this morning is no different. The question is, are you open to that? Are you open to having your assumptions re-formed or re-shaped by Him?
27 Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it. 28 And God has placed in the church first of all apostles,second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, of helping, of guidance, and of different kinds of tongues.29 Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? 30 Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues?Do all interpret? 31 Now eagerly desire the greater gifts.
1 Corinthians 12:27-31
1. Another gift list (12:28-30)
Verse 27 is the summary of where we were last week. In the previous section, Paul talks about the image of the human body as a vivid metaphor for the church- the church being the people of Jesus. Just like the body is one united whole and yet is made of many different parts each contributing their own role and function, so it is with the body of Christ, the church. There’s unity and there’s diversity. Paul concludes that whole section by saying you are the body of Christ and each one of you is a part of it.
From there, Paul gives some of these many body parts some concrete identities. A couple of weeks ago, we read 1 Corinthians 12:8-10, where we opened up a list of gifts including messages of wisdom and knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, distinguishing between spirits, speaking in tongues, and interpretation of tongues. I said back then that the list Paul gives is not supposed to be a comprehensive list. That list is not some Enneagram test where you figure out which of the 9 types you fit into. It’s a sampling. It’s a selection of some of the ways the Holy Spirit empowers God’s people. More evidence for that is found right here, where Paul repeats some of the same gifts he mentions earlier but not others, and adds yet new ones. Let’s look at this list and try to especially understand the ones that are new to the discussion. For gifts like healing, miracles, and tongues, you can go back to the sermon a couple of weeks ago.
The first three things Paul lists in verse 28 are different, aren’t they? They describe people, not actions. People are identified as apostles, prophets, and teachers, whereas after those three Paul switches to describing the gifts themselves. Why? Maybe it’s because these kinds of people operate in these gifts so regularly and fundamentally that they become almost synonymous with their gift. However, what’s also different about this is that Paul ranks these three gifts. You might assume that gifts are all equal, that there wouldn’t be any kind of ranking, but apparently that’s not quite the case. Commentators suggest that the numbers here are not to do with chronological order, but with importance. He says God has placed in the church first apostles, second prophets, and third teachers, then everything else. Somehow, there’s something very foundational about these three particular identities and gifts for the church, and in this order.
Paul writes about something similar in the book of Ephesians. In Ephesians 2, Paul is talking to Gentiles (non-Jews) who were once far off from God’s people. However, because of what Jesus has done, they are no longer foreigners and strangers, but members of God’s household, “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone” (Ephesians 2:20). If you picture the church as a building- not of steel, but of people- then the foundation of the new people of God are apostles and prophets. Everyone else gets built on top of them. Then, in Ephesians 4, Paul is talking about how Christ has given gifts to the church. “Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up” (Ephesians 4:11-12). It’s a very similar passage to 1 Corinthians 12, with the same basic order: apostles, then prophets, then teachers, with evangelists and pastors thrown into Ephesians 4 to spice things up a bit. Because that’s what pastors do. They spice things up.
A. Apostles
To understand why Paul ranks them in the way he does in Ephesians and 1 Corinthians, we should probably talk a bit more about those gifts or identities. We should talk especially about apostleship, which is listed first. I’ll give you a heads up right here, we’re about to do a bit of a deep dive into the question of who apostles are and what they do, since in Paul’s eyes they’re so central. It’s the one gift or function that even a lot of people who affirm the existence of all the other gifts would question ongoing function. Part of that might come from embarrassing examples of people taking the title for themselves. It feels really pretentious to say “I’m an apostle” in a way that saying “I’m a teacher” or even “I’m an evangelist” doesn’t. There was a major movie in 1997 starring Robert Duvall called The Apostle. Never seen it, but I’ve read the Wikipedia page and know that Duvall’s character, a pastor, murders a guy, runs away, renames himself “Apostle E.F.” and begins a new church before his murderous past catches up to him. If I just ruined the movie for you, it’s 25 years old. You’re good.
However, a big reason a lot of people think that there’s no such thing as apostleship today is not just because of some bad examples of self-proclaimed apostles. Instead, that opinion is formed out of an assumption that apostles had to have been eyewitnesses to the resurrection of Jesus and have received a personal and direct commission from him. That would rule out just about anybody outside of a select number of Jewish disciples in the first century as a potential apostle. That assumption springs from passages like 1 Corinthians 9:1, where Paul asks, “am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? Are you not the result of my work in the Lord?” Paul seems to link his apostleship to seeing the resurrected Jesus. However, he also links his apostleship to his “being free”, meaning, in context, that he preaches the Gospel without taking an income for it. Most people who have an opinion on this wouldn’t say a requirement of apostleship was free labor, since in 1 Corinthians 9:12 Paul himself says he had a right to financial support! No, what’s going on here is that Paul is putting these facts forward as evidence of his authority among the Corinthians. He is not declaring the universal requirements of apostleship. One scholar says these are sufficient conditions for his apostleship, not the necessary conditions. If you lost me, here’s what I’m saying: the most-cited verse for why there can’t be apostles today isn’t actually saying that at all.
Contrary to this idea that an apostle has to have been a witness to the resurrection is the fact that you have a whole bunch of people in the New Testament called apostles, people like Barnabas, Silas, Timothy, Titus, Epaphroditus, maybe even Apollos and Junia. There’s no evidence that those people, who were not Hebraic Jews from Jerusalem, saw the resurrected Jesus. Or take this: in 2 Corinthians 11:13-15, Paul is dealing with the presence of false apostles in Corinth. But he never mentions anything about whether or not they were eyewitnesses of the resurrection, which they almost certainly weren’t. Instead, the evidence that they’re false apostles is their deceitful ways and unrighteous deeds. And then there’s the simple fact that no New Testament passage says that apostleship will cease to be in operation in this life.
So, could there be apostles today? Are people still gifted in that way? I will tell you that for most of my life, maybe until this week, I would have said no, I didn’t think so. As you can tell, I looked at that question more closely. I would now say that after looking at the evidence, I believe my assumption was wrong. Ephesians 4 says that Christ gave the church apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers to equip his people for works of service until we all reach maturity. If maturity is still a need, which it clearly is, then why wouldn’t Christ still be giving the church people who fit all those roles?
But that still doesn’t explain anything about who apostles are or what they do! There’s no neat and tidy definition in the New Testament, but from the range of people in the Bible who are given this title and from what they do, it seems that apostles are gospel pioneers. One scholar, Frank Chan, says that apostles are ground-beakers, visionary and entrepreneurial leaders. They’re people God sends to establish new spheres of ministry by setting up structures necessary for those ministries. Another, Sam Storms, says if it’s in line with the kind of ministry we see Paul doing, apostles would evangelize where the Gospel hasn’t yet extended, plant churches, establish movements, instruct believers, bring wisdom to bear in church situations, and so on. It’s not hard to imagine people like that, because we have plenty of examples in church history, including in the world today. We can think of people who are pioneers and ground-breakers, establishing new Gospel movements with the wisdom and ability to establish structures to sustain those movements. It’s almost like apostleship, rather than just being one gift, is a constellation of a bunch of gifts of the Spirit coming together in one person. One place I think you clearly see this apostleship gift in action is through some of the missionaries of the last few centuries like William Carey or Hudson Taylor who established new church movements in previously unreached areas.
If that’s what is meant by the gift of apostleship, you can understand why Paul lists apostles first in all of those passages. They really are foundational for the church. Without someone with an apostolic gifting, how do new churches get established in an area without a prior presence? You might have evangelists who spread the good news, you might have prophets whose gifts of revelation persuade people of God’s holiness, you might have teachers who can instruct, but where do those believers find a home and get built up? You need apostles who have the gift of evangelism and instruction but can also create structures that sustain all that growth.
That’s why it’s apostles first in 1 Corinthians 12. The ranking in these gifts is not because of the glory they get in the world. It’s not on the basis of esteem. After all, here’s what Paul says about apostles a few chapters earlier in his letter to the Corinthians: “for it seems to me that God has put us apostles on display at the end of the procession, like those condemned to die in the arena…to this very hour we go hungry and thirsty, we are in rags, we are brutally treated, we are homeless…we have become the scum of the earth, the garbage of the world.” (1 Corinthians 4:9-13) You want earthly glory? Apostleship isn’t for you! And when you read the stories of some missionaries that I would categorize as apostolic in their gifting, that’s what you get: plenty of rejection, hardship, opposition. After all, they’re breaking new ground! So the ranking isn’t based on worldly criteria. Paul’s ranking primarily has to do with the ability of these gifts to establish and build up the church. It has to do with overall profitability in the church. For that reason, apostleship is first.
B. Prophets
That was a lot about one word in this passage! Let’s cover the rest of this a lot more quickly. Paul says prophets come second. We’ve touched on prophecy, and we’re going to spend a lot more time with it in chapter 14. Again, though, the basic meaning here is not telling the future. It is the proclamation of a revelation from God, usually in response to or tailored to a specific situation or concern. A couple of weeks ago, I shared a segment of video from Lacey Sturm’s testimony. She’s in church with the plan to kill herself immediately after, and the pastor declares, “there’s a suicidal spirit in the room.” She’s on high alert, because she knows that’s her. Then, on her way out, an elderly man stops her and tells her that God sees it when she cries at night. He tells her that God loves her, and that Jesus died to save her. There are elements of the prophetic in all of that. A prophet would be someone who receives revelation like this on a regular and dependable basis. I have known and been ministered to by one or two people I would describe in this way. It’s a huge blessing and encouragement to have those people around! Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 14:1 that we should “eagerly desire gifts of the Spirit, especially prophecy.” In Paul’s view, prophecy is one of the foremost ways the church is built up and people are drawn nearer to Christ.
C. Teachers
The final identity gift that Paul ranks with a number is teachers. One commentary suggests that the major difference between teachers and prophets is that prophets spoke the message a church needed to hear at a particular moment, while teachers were expected to pass on the same Christian teaching that all believers everywhere needed to know. Teachers instruct believers in what has been established. When it comes to preaching, it may involve the prophetic. There are times when someone is preaching and they are spontaneously given words to say, and those words speak right into the heart of someone or some situation. They walk away saying, “the pastor must have heard my conversation this morning! Did he bug our apartment? That was exactly what we were talking about!” So preaching might involve the prophetic at times, but it absolutely must involve teaching the Scriptures. In Paul’s book, this is a crucial and indispensable element in the life of a church.
D. Helping
Then Paul moves to a list of other gifts. We’ve talked about miracles and healing, and we’ll talk more about tongues and interpretation in chapter 14. But there are two new ones here: helping and guidance. Helping is pretty self-explanatory. In Acts 20, Paul uses essentially the same word when he tells the Ephesian leaders, “in everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: it is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). We are all to help and provide assistance, but what we see in 1 Corinthians is that some are given a supernatural empowerment to help others in an especially skillful way. I’m fairly certain that despite my love for people, this isn’t a gift God has empowered me with. A few weeks ago, one of our kids was sick and threw up a few times in the night. I had no idea what to do. I was frantic, running around, accomplishing nothing, wondering if I should take a crowbar and just rip out the barf-stained carpet right there on the spot. Carolyn does have this gift to some extent, so she was able to immediately assess what was needed, how to help our child best and give her useless husband practical instructions.
E. Guidance
The other new gift here is the gift of guidance. The word here is a word that has to do with piloting or steering a ship. I don’t know much about steering a ship today or in the first century, but I would imagine that the task was a lot more primitive and in some ways more challenging in the first century. If you’re in a wooden ship, without any of the technology we have today, steering a course through raging waters would require a lot of skill. You would have to be able to identify dangers and threats and to point the way through. This is an essential gift for many leaders in the church, especially when it comes to our board and our elders. These are the groups that help set the direction for the church and deal with problems that arise. If the church is like a ship in a turbulent world, you want to have Spirit-empowered pilots working together to steer the ship through.
Again, even putting this list together with the one earlier in the chapter, we haven’t touched on nearly all the gifts the Spirit gives to build up the church and make Jesus known. There are so many others. But for now, I just want to say what a blessing it is that in the body, these various gifts are represented. It’s such an encouragement that where I am lacking in some ability, another person has it in spades. It is such a blessing that there are a variety of empowerments in the body of Christ. It is a gift that we can lean on each other and do this together. That’s what Paul gets at in verse 29. Are all apostles, prophets, teachers, do all work miracles, healings, speaking in tongues? What’s the right answer? No! Not everyone does. But some do each of those. You do one of those, or some other gift. And so together, loving and supporting and encouraging one another as the church, as Christ’s body, we make Him known in the world.
2. Desire the gifts
So Paul lists all these gifts, emphasizes that these gifts are dispersed throughout the body, and then he says this in verse 31: “now eagerly desire the greater gifts.” This, I believe, is where another common assumption is challenged.
A common understanding of the gifts goes something like this: it’s not up to me, in the least, what kinds of gifts I’m given. It’s up to God. He’ll do what He wants. I’m open to whatever, but it’s up to Him. And that sounds pious. It sounds right. It even sounds in line with what we read elsewhere in 1 Corinthians 12, like verse 11: “all these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he distributes them to each one, just as he determines.” Just as he determines. Verse 18: “But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.” Just as he wanted them to be. Verse 28, which we just read: “And God has placed in the church first of all…”. It sure sounds like the gifts that are given are God’s doing and that we are passive recipients. Paul has even made a point of saying that if you’re an ear, don’t say that because you’re not an eye, you’re not really a part of the body. It sounds like you should be content with whatever gift you’ve been given.
And yet here, in verse 31, he says: eagerly desire the greater gifts. In 14:1, just in case you think it was a typo, he says it again: eagerly desire gifts of the Spirit, especially prophecy. He says eagerly desire. Another translation would be zealously. We’re talking about an active, aggressive, relentless pursuit of gifts you don’t presently have. Apparently, even though the gifts are given by God as He wants, we are nevertheless not to sit there passively. How do you reconcile these seemingly different ideas?
First off, throughout the Scriptures, there is always human involvement in God’s work. Prayer is a primary way this happens. God desires to do something but He also involves humans in the work. He wants to give us something but He wants us to want it. He rarely forces something on us without some desire on our part. This is why Jesus tells us to “ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” and that God will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him (Luke 11:9, 13). Does God want to give the Holy Spirit? Does He want to give gifts? Does He intend to do all this? Yes! A thousand times yes! But He wants us to ask for it! In line with all this, Sam Storms writes that “our prayers are often the very means God employs to grant what He desires to give.”
Second, what Paul is warning against earlier in the chapter is not the desire for other gifts but the desire for other gifts for the wrong reason. It is desiring gifts for the profile they provide, for the status they offer. It is desiring gifts because everyone else seems to have this gift and you want it too. What he encourages here is a desire for the greater gifts. And what are the greater gifts? The ones that are most profitable for the church, that are the most effective for building up the church and making Jesus known! And remember, if apostleship is first and foremost here, that might make you the scum and garbage of the earth! So your desire for the gifts is not based on your desire for status or recognition. Instead, it is to arise out of a deep desire to serve God and His people as well and as effectively as possible, for His name’s sake. So it’s not a contradiction. God gives what He will give. We are not to be envious of other people’s gifts, but we are to have a passion for more of the gifts of the Spirit that will enable us to serve Him and make Him known.
Conclusion
In terms of gifts that empower us to serve God, how many of us are sitting content with what God has given us and not striving for even more? How many of us have grown complacent? How many of us have even concluded that whatever gift we might have, that’s it, we’re good to go? Paul speaks to those who have already been given gifts and he says to eagerly desire greater ones! And he says this as a command. This is not an optional, take it or leave it type of deal. He instructs us to desire these gifts. Not to desire, not to ask, not to seek gifts that would enable us to build up the church…in the end, it’s disobedience.
What if God intends to do something through you to make Him known, something beyond anything you’ve yet experienced…and all He’s waiting for you to do is ask for it?
