A Variety of Gifts from One Spirit

Our text this morning is in 1 Corinthians chapter 12, verses 4 through 13.

Now, there are different gifts, but the same Spirit. There are different ministries, but the same

Lord. And there are different activities, but the same God produces each gift in each person.

A manifestation of the Spirit is given to each person for the common good. No one is given a message of wisdom through the

Spirit. A manifestation of the

Spirit is given to each person for the common good. To one is given a message of wisdom through the

Spirit. To another, a message of knowledge by the same Spirit. To another, faith by the same

Spirit. To another, gifts of healing by the one Spirit. To another, the performing of miracles.

To another, prophecy. To another, distinguishing between Spirits. To another, different kinds of tongues.

To another, interpretation of tongues. One and the same Spirit is active in all these, distributing to each person as He wills.

For just as the body is one and has many parts, and all the parts of that body, though many, are one body, so also is

Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and we were all given one

Spirit to drink. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for another

Lord's Day that we can come and worship with fellow believers. God, that we can hear the proclamation of your word, that we can sing hymns and spiritual songs to you.

Lord, we pray that our worship would be a pleasing incense to you. Lord, as Pastor Josh unpacks the word for us,

Lord, I pray that your Spirit would be active in all of us as one. Lord, that we would hear and understand your word, that we would be conformed to the image of your

Son by the power of your Spirit through your word. God, give us blessings, give us understanding.

Lord, let each man and woman understand the gift that Spirit has given. Lord, knowing that it's not under our own power that we have these gifts, but by the power of your one

Holy Spirit. Lord, just bless the teaching of your word. It's in your name we pray, amen. Not much intro today.

We need the power of the Holy Spirit in the church. We accomplish absolutely nothing without him.

Each one of you, each one of you has not only been given the Holy Spirit when you were regenerated and became an inheritor of the grace of God and became his child, but you are also given measures and different giftings through the

Holy Spirit for the profitability of the church. Too often we take credit for it.

Too often we think that these gifts are natural. Too often we deny the Spirit's work in changing our very desires to take credit for pensions of our own personality.

It's time to stop. It's time to stop doing that. As a Christian, your desires have been shaped by the

Holy Spirit. You love scripture because God has changed your heart to make you love scripture.

You love to hear the preaching of the word because of the Spirit's work in your heart. You love to sing the hymns, to meditate on the

Psalms, to pray to God, to love your brother. All of that is the work of the

Holy Spirit in your life. You are not seeking that. It is not your natural bent. It is not the way you are.

It's not the way you were born. That's what God has changed you into through marvelous salvation.

And too often, like the Galatians, what we do is we try to complete in the flesh what was begun in the

Spirit. That's going to be a key theme today. Your sanctification is completely in the hands of the

Holy Spirit, working through you. Likewise, your ministry as a Christian, your part in the great commission of making disciples and teaching them all that Christ has taught them, all that he commands, your part in that is ordained by the

Holy Spirit, empowered by the Holy Spirit, foreknown by the Holy Spirit, and laid out in front of you so that you would walk that way in the

Holy Spirit. I think our teaching on the Holy Spirit has been lacking.

He is a mystery, but God is a mystery. And I think what we try to do in our conservative branch of Christianity, which has much, much, much right, much more right than the leftist branch of so -called

Christianity, what we have done, though, is we have lifted up knowledge and academia, and we have taken credit for things.

How many times have you heard, well, that guy is just an excellent preacher. He's charismatic. What a charismatic preacher he is.

What a way he has of crafting sermons. And what we do is we rob the glory of the gift of preaching that is given by the

Holy Spirit. Over and over again, we do this, and I repeat, it's time to stop. So we're going to look at the first four verses here.

This is the very gifts and ministries of the body. This is the bride of Christ, and the bride of Christ has a job to do.

The bride of Christ, see, you as the bride of your husband, you are a shadow of the real bride.

The substance of the real bride is the church of the living God. And this church is made up of many members, each of which has been carefully crafted and put together to further the purposes of God in the area where they are placed.

It's an amazing thing. There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are varieties of ministries and the same

Lord. And there are varieties of workings, but the same God who works everything in everyone.

But to each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit for what is profitable. First, understand this.

If you are a child of God, the Holy Spirit is in you, living inside of you, indwelling you, changing everything about you from one degree to another for the rest of your life.

He will not give up. He will complete what he started. What an amazing thought that is.

Christian, have you thought about that lately? You are being changed daily, and it's not your doing.

It's not based on your effort. It's not how many times that you can get in the prayer closet. It's not how many times you can post on social media pithy verses.

It's not dependent on any of that. It is dependent on what God's purposes and his work is in you.

And that is an encouraging thought indeed. Your sanctification is in the hands of God.

Your work is in the hands of God. And what the Christian life is about doing is it's about letting go of the reins of command and so -called control in your life and following after the

Spirit with a slack leash. We don't want him pulling us along with us gagging like my dog does.

We don't want that. He will do it. He will pull you to where he has you going.

But the ideal way would be to be walking along behind with the slack in the leash.

This sanctification, as we start to see in 1 Corinthians 12 here, is that it's not merely talking about mortifying sin.

And that's what we instantly jump to, isn't it? Sanctification. We think sanctification. We have to put sin to death.

We are being made holy. We have been consecrated. We have been set apart. And all of that is true. But we have also been set apart for a purpose.

And that purpose is to do good works. And the works that we are called onto are works of the

Holy Spirit. Don't take credit for it. Don't take credit for it. Another thing we learn from this four verses is that when you become a member of the church, when you become a

Christian, both the church universal and the church local, we are not flattened into an amorphous mass.

We do not become the Borg, if you're a Star Trek person. Remember, there's this big cube floating around in space, and the

Borg would take you over, and you became part of their hive mind, where you had no individuality whatsoever.

You all think the same thing, do the same thing, floating around as a menace in space. That's not what the church is.

The church has distinctive members who all have different giftings, different ideas, and they will work in unity under the word that you should have been seeing over and over, right?

One Lord. One Lord. One God. He gives these gifts. So we are not flattened, and that is the ideology of our age is that everything is flattened.

We are egalitarian. Everybody is the same. Men can be women, vice versa. There's no difference.

You do you, whatever. That has no accord with Scripture because God has hierarchies, but also

God has differentiations and distinctions. We are not all the same person. We work together with all of our various giftings and skills to serve the body.

It's really important. Now, what we have to understand is that there is a manifestation of the

Spirit. You know what that means, right? A manifestation, it's a fancy word. It gets used when people say they're going to manifest an idea, which

I don't know. I think that sounds a little bit more new agey than realistic. Manifestation is something come to life.

It is the embodiment where you see something personified. In fact, Jesus was the manifestation of light, of the

Word of God. He is the manifestation of God where men saw him and they believed.

So what you will have is you will have spiritual gifts that are given to you, and they are manifested. They come into being, and you can see them.

And we have no difficulty with this as far as understanding them in the areas where they seem to be personality -driven.

I got a couple of examples for you. Number one, when Sarah began the ministry, not

Sarah in the Bible, this Sarah, when Sarah began...yeah, I'm talking to you. When Sarah began a ministry of baking for Sunday mornings, she did that herself.

It probably did not seem to us in the church that she was working out a supernatural spiritual gift, but she absolutely was and is.

That is something that the Spirit leads to do. Now, is it supernatural? No, it's not.

But the desires have been shaped for the profit of the church, for the building up of the body, for the common good.

And this is really bad in our camp, the second example. My preaching, you're going to know this right away, you'll laugh.

My preaching does not come from intellectual superiority, but instead, it is a spiritual gift that would rob me of all boasting and point all praise to the one who empowers the gift.

See, what we do is we wrongly divide and take credit for certain gifts that seem understandable.

That guy is just a really nice guy. He just encourages all the time. What a nice guy that is, and you see how we miss it.

See, encouragement is a gift of the Holy Spirit. And when a brother encourages the brothers, when someone has faith that seems astounding, where they're not shaken by the hard times and what's going on in this world, that is a gift of the

Spirit. It's not that guy's toughness. It's a gift of the Holy Spirit, and we should acknowledge it as such.

Why do we take credit? Are we so confused? Are we so ignorant?

Have we forgotten? Do we not have at the bleeding edge of our minds what we were when we were called?

He who knew no sin became sin so that we would have the righteousness of God. We had nothing to offer him, and he saved us.

And when we take credits for gifts, it's ridiculous. See, because what happened, as we learned a couple of weeks ago in Ephesians 4, is that Christ won us in his victory.

He went to war against the authorities and the principalities of all of the heavens.

He went to war against them. He destroyed them, and his victory is a slow -developing victory.

He prophesied it in Daniel, did he not? That it would be like a small stone not cut from human hands that would smash the empires of the world and would grow into a huge mountain.

It says, 11 goes through the lump. And he gave gifts out of these spoils when he subjected the authorities and principalities to open shame, because he descended below and he led out the captives.

Right in front of Satan and all of his enemies, he led a parade in front of everyone who would hate him, opening them up to shame and laughing.

And in doing that, he also gave gifts of the spoils of that war.

And that is the spiritual gifts that we see. And so the gifts that you have that are manifest in your life are gifts of the

Holy Spirit that are the victory spoils of Christ that he gave you out of his victory so that he would be glorified.

They should never result in boasting, never. But instead, they should result in assurance, in gratitude, in humility, and above all, above all, an exhilarating awe of God, that the giftings that go through you and go through your brother and your sister that you see manifest, that they give glory to the one who gave the gifts.

And understand this, these are not piddly gifts. These are not, you know, party favors, okay?

These are huge gifts, earth -moving gifts that constantly make war against the powers of darkness, and they are all the tools of righteousness given to us through the

Holy Spirit. And the size of the gift is very critical because what happens is when the gift is very large, it is the giver who gains all the glory, much more glory than the receiver.

See, when we despise the spiritual gifts, when we take credit for them, when we deny their existence, when we think that they don't happen, what we do is we diminish the gifts, and that diminishes the glory of the giver.

Understand, here's an illustration. If I was to come up to somebody after church today, I would pick somebody, but I don't want to embarrass you.

Let's say I come up to you and I say, hey, look, I sign over a deed to a house, I just give it to you. I give you a house, okay?

Now, whose glory would that deed lead to? Would it be the person who received the house, or would it glorify me, the one who gave the house?

Because it would be whispered, wouldn't it? And then it would be trumpeted. Hey, that guy gave me a house. How did that happen?

But what happens is, often what we do is we are given all of the riches of Christ, and all of the inheritance, we have been brought into the holiest of houses with all the riches that he lavishes on his people,

Ephesians 1. And what we do is we say something like, well, yeah, it's obvious that he should have given me this house, because I've worked really hard.

And actually, I would have gotten this house anyway, because I've always been such a hard worker. And it's really,

I got the house because I'm really smart and you can see the talents I have and all the abilities. Do you see how stupid that is?

And that's what we do when we despise spiritual gifts and when we diminish the glory of them. This church and no church can do anything without spiritual gifts.

It is the power of the church to make disciples. And we learn from this verse, which really is the thesis, is verse seven.

Look at it real quick. To each one is given the manifestation of the spirit for what is profitable.

This is going to hinge the whole chapter, because the gifts are given to the church for the profitability of the church, not for any other reason.

See, the Corinthians had messed this up. The Corinthians were using manifestations of these gifts for their own glory, for their own power.

They were getting people to point fingers at them going, look at that guy. Look at the prophecy. Look at the tongues.

Look at the miracles. Can you believe what that guy's doing? He must be godlier than all of us. Let's lift him up.

Remember, they had divided into factions. I'm of Apollos. I'm of Paul. And what's going on is because of their divided nature, because they are trying to be glory hogs, they are missing the whole point of the spiritual gifts.

They are given for the profitability of the church. Why? Because the Lord, in his wisdom, has decided that to progress the

Great Commission, he is going to use local churches to do that. Is that how

I would have done it? No, I don't think so. But that's what God did to bring maximum glory to himself, is that he would use you.

And I think to myself, Lord, have you seen me? Do you understand what you're doing? Do you understand the thoughts that I have?

Do you understand the weakness? Lord, it's hard for me to even control my temper in one day.

And you want me to do this? And that's the right posture, because what that leads to is understanding you can't.

You can't do it. You ever put yourself personally invested in an evangelical mission where you're trying to share with someone the gospel, and they're just not understanding, and you keep going on?

And what can happen is you can think, if I had just crafted it right, if I had just said it the right way, they would have understood it.

But you start to learn over time that the gospel is received by the Spirit. He opens the eyes, and it doesn't matter what you say.

Does that mean that we shouldn't strive to get better at making our argument and our appeal?

No, we should obviously strive to get better. But at the same time, no one's salvation is dependent on you. You can't do it.

You cannot regenerate hearts. All for the common good.

We are not the benefactors. We are not giving to others spiritual gifts. We are the beneficiaries.

The Lord is the benefactor. He is giving the spiritual gifts from on high to us.

And now we move to our next section, which is verses 8 through 11. This is the variety of gifts. You guys have been waiting for this.

Here we go. Here we go. For to one is given the word of wisdom through the Spirit, and to another, the word of knowledge according to the same

Spirit. To someone else, faith by the same Spirit, and to another, gifts of healing by the one Spirit.

And to another, the workings of miracles. And to another, prophecy. And to another, distinguishing of spirits.

To someone else, various kinds of tongues. And to another, the translation of tongues. But one and the same

Spirit works all these things, distributing to each one individually, just as He wills.

The first thing you have to understand is this listing of gifts is not comprehensive.

It differs a little bit from the list in chapter 13. It differs from the list in Romans 12, 6 through 8, and Ephesians 4, 11 through 12.

But prophecy occurs in every one of these lists. Now, I will do a little canard here. I don't want to steal

Corey's thunder. He's got a sermon on prophecy coming up in a few weeks. But I will tell you, why prophecy?

Why is it on the list? And I will answer. It's very simple. I'm a simple man. Why is prophecy on the list?

Because if we want to be empowered by the Spirit, we need to know what God says. And prophecy, at its very basic level, is knowing what

God says so that you can say it. That's what it always was. God spoke to the prophets, and they spoke what

He said. Prophecy is on every list because every Christian needs to desire to know what

God says. Simple as that. See, the church at Corinth, they would have understood the definition of these gifts.

So what Paul is not doing here is he is not giving us a list and then trying to define what they all are.

In fact, it's kind of frustrating, isn't it? That he just lays them there. There they are. Word of wisdom, right?

We look here and we're like, I don't know what that is. What is that? So we're going to delve into that.

That is not Paul's point in the text, but because of where we are and because of where we sit with gifts and all of the misunderstanding, confusion, and bounds,

I do have to spend a significant portion of this sermon, I think, trying to define these gifts. So here we go.

We're going to work through them. The church at Corinth knew exactly what he was talking about. You have to understand that first.

And so that context gives us a little bit of a window. That's called exegesis, right? We look into the surrounding context, and that helps us to learn and discern what he's saying.

Word of wisdom first. Understand that there is an opposite, there is an opposite ordering of these words that are given in chapter one, verse 17, where Paul says that his message is not wisdom of word, which would empty the cross of power.

So Paul is doing a play on words here that would be the opposite of the sophistry that's going on in Corinth, where there would be a lot of rhetoric, right?

A lot of smooth sounding arguments that would try to persuade people into different ideas.

And Paul says, I'm not going to come to you with that. I'm going to teach you the cross, the wisdom and foolishness of the cross, because these other wisdom of words, they would empty the cross of its power because we're depending on tickling the intellect to get to supernatural power, which is what the

Greeks were all about. So word of wisdom, we know right off the bat, is not clever human words that derive from human wisdom, but instead it's the exact opposite.

These are spiritual words coming from genuine divine wisdom. And we know this, what is wisdom?

Wisdom is the correct application of the law of God in difficult circumstances. So what is a word of wisdom?

Let's put it together. It is given by the Holy Spirit. It is something where you are being able to come into a difficult situation.

And when you start studying the law a lot and you start running into the interaction between law and conscience, there is a lot of gray between law and conscience, right?

The law, the law is cold, right? In the sense that the law has its statutes.

They are objective. And then we have freedom in Christ in conscience, and then the interaction between those two becomes difficult in counsel.

And so a lot of questions that we get and a lot of the discernment we have to do is discerning people's conscience. And so what can happen is a word of wisdom is when the

Spirit gives you the manifestation, right? You're going to speak it. The Spirit gives you discernment to take what the law of God says and to apply it wisely to difficult situations.

These are not situations like, hey, I got mad on the road the other day. Should I go to that guy's house and burn it down?

No, that's not a difficult situation. The law says, no, you should not do that, okay? But there are difficult situations where people are wracked and they don't understand what way they should go.

And so a word of wisdom is God giving this to you. Now, how do you get a word of wisdom? We know from Scripture, right?

James says that if any of you lacks wisdom, you should pray for it and he will give it to you.

If you're not a double -minded man who prays with doubt, God has always given wisdom when it's been asked for.

He delights in giving wisdom. So if you desire wisdom, ask for it and then give credit to who gave it to you.

Word of wisdom, do we need this in the church? Can we really function?

Can we function in sanctification without wisdom? The answer is definitively no.

You have to have wisdom. And our time today is defined by a distinct lack of wisdom.

We do not apply the law properly. In fact, within many branches of the church, we've said that the law doesn't even matter anymore.

That's foolish. The eternal moral law of God is in effect today as much as ever it was.

But for you, Christian, what it does is it doesn't only reveal your need for a savior, but it teaches you the way to live while it also restrains the evil of the world.

The law of God is a good thing. That's why the Psalms tell us over and over to meditate on it. Do we meditate today over something that's gone?

No, we meditate on God's law because he has given us his character through the law. We need to seek it.

Word of knowledge is the next one. Now, Paul does this thing throughout Corinthians where he talks about how knowledge puffs up, right?

Knowledge puffs up. So once again, he's given us an opposite to go off of. Knowledge puffs up.

If you start to think that you are very intellectual, that you know a lot of facts, that you are the smartest guy in the room, that knowledge is going to puff you up.

But on the opposite end of this, there is knowledge given by the Holy Spirit that brings glory to Christ and that it humbles you because you start to understand it's not your knowledge.

So knowledge is not a bad thing. Knowledge is good when it edifies and it profits.

It's bad when it puffs up. It's futile when it puffs up. And you and I, we have seen both kinds on display in our life, have we not?

Unfortunately, unfortunately for much of my life, I displayed the puffed up kind where I would try to make people feel stupid around me.

It's to my shame. There's a lot of people that if I saw them, I would have to apologize for the way I treated them when

I was in my teenage years. I think about that often. But knowledge is a good thing because when it does edify, the

Spirit draws all the attention back to Himself because the Spirit gives knowledge in order to educate, in order to navigate

Scripture. And when knowledge is combined with wisdom, we get a deep and abiding application of the law rooted in understanding of the law.

See, knowledge gives us understanding. Knowledge gives us comprehension. Knowledge gives us recall to where we can remember what we read, to where we can remember all of the pieces, the elementary pieces, to start to put them together.

And see, we love knowledge in this world. We lift up knowledge and that's why we have to be careful that it doesn't puff up.

But the knowledge that we should be seeking in this place is the knowledge that is given by the Holy Spirit for the common good, not to boast and not to build up our own intellect.

Who cares how smart you are? Who cares? Seriously. This is the shame of my young life, much of it.

The shame of my young life is that I thought I was very smart. And just look at my definition. I preach my shame so that you would learn from it.

Just look at the definition. I forgot who I was. Did I not? In lifting up my own intelligence,

I forgot not only who gave me the intelligence, but I forgot how intelligent he is.

Who am I compared to that? Who are you compared to that?

See, we lose sight of who we are. It's an identity question. We are God's people.

He is our God. We're reminded over and over. Hezekiah needed to be reminded. That's why we read that in the call to worship that he prayed to God, remembering that he is the one true

God. We need knowledge in this place and we need it with humility. We need faith.

There is a gift of faith. Demonstrably, this is not saving faith because Paul is talking about how these gifts are given to different people, right?

One spirit, this person has faith. This person has knowledge, right?

This sort of thing. That obviously is not talking about saving faith because we don't have different measures of saving faith, right?

You are given the Holy Spirit by grace through faith, right? The grace of God has given you faith in God and that is salvific.

However, there is a different kind of faith that is not possessed in equal measure by all of the elect and that is this.

It is a gift of faith in hard times and exceptional circumstances. Do we need members?

Do we need members of the church who have exceptional faith when things get bleak, when things get really difficult, that they are not gonna be rattled, that they are gonna put steel in the spines of other members and build up in those troubled times because they know that God is in control of this and that if God is for us, who can be against us?

That is a spiritual gift of faith, to not be rattled by the circumstances of this world and when things are difficult and when things are hard, that the man with faith, the woman with faith is holding fast to God.

It's an amazing thing to see, as with all of the gifts. That's the picture I'm trying to paint.

It's amazing to see a man of faith. We saw with Abraham, did he not, that he was in a foreign land with a pagan dad and God calls him and says, go out and be a pilgrim in this land with a bunch of people who are your enemies and Abraham believed

God and he left. And Abraham is an old man. It said, you will have descendants that number like the sands of the seashore and Abraham believed

God and it was counted as righteousness and by faith, this one son, this one and only son who was going to be the father of all the generations of God's promises,

God tells him, go up on a mountain and kill your one son, the son who you love and Abraham believes and he takes

Isaac up to that mountaintop. Why, because Abraham, Hebrews 11 tells us that Abraham had faith that God would rise up the dead.

See, God's been writing this story the whole time. There's a reason to have faith because God never changes and he has written all of this into his scripture.

So we should look for the gift of faith. We should pray for the gift of faith and we should build up the body with the manifestation of the gift of faith.

Here's where we make the turn. Now look, hopefully I've demonstrated to you, you can understand and this is the problem.

This is the difficulty with these gifts in the list. Notice they're not separated, he just rattles them off. Why should we separate?

But look, here's the thing, you will think to yourself, if somebody gives you wise counsel about the law, if somebody gives you knowledge about scripture, if somebody has strong faith in the face of adversity, what we do is we don't get shaken up, but instead we go, oh yeah, that's a really faithful guy.

Wow, that guy's really smart. Wow, what an amazing wisdom that guy had.

But this is where it gets weird, right? Gifts of healing, now I'm done, it's over.

Here's the thing, the gifts of healing are in the plural in this text because of the wide range of circumstances and manifestations of this gift.

There's a lot of different ways that this happens. And with most of these gifts, you'll see that there's kind of more like ordinary means and then there's more extraordinary means.

So in the gift of preaching, the ordinary means is that I study every week and I write a sermon and I'm thinking, but what's also going on in that is that the

Lord through insight is giving me something that needs to be delivered to you, it's yours. And then the very extraordinary expression of this gift is that conviction of the

Holy Spirit comes from this guy talking. Because it has nothing to do with me, I can't convict any of you guys of anything.

I'm a total nobody. I teach every day to kids and they don't listen to me, they gleefully don't listen to me.

And yet in here, people listen, why? Because it's a gift of the Holy Spirit. Why would

I take credit for that? I have no ability to do that. Same with gifts of healing. James 5, we know this text.

Is anyone among you sick? Then he must call for the elders of the church and they are to pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the

Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will save the one who is sick. And the

Lord will raise him up, and if he has committed sins, they will be forgiven him. I want you to see a linkage here.

There's a linkage between these gifts and faith over and over again. The gift of healing flows out of faith.

What we try to do in our modern era is we try to look at this and go, well, this is talking about spiritually sick.

Why would you say that? Could it be talking about spiritually sick?

Of course. I think that it's just talking about the sick. Spiritual sickness, physical sickness.

If you are sick, call the elders so that they would pray over you and hopefully your elders would have faith.

And this verse pierces me because I'm gonna tell you guys very explicitly, I have never in my life had the gift of healing.

I have prayed for many sick people and they hadn't healed.

Some of them heal over time with natural means, and I give credit to God for that. God holds our health in his hand.

Not with me, gift of healing. You've seen a lot of charlatans and facsimiles, right? Karate chopping people on the stage, making people's legs longer, like that sort of thing.

Magic tricks. That's not what we're talking about. We are in good company to believe that the

Lord still heals through people today. Let me go back to somebody that Baptists revere. In 1892, there was a biography of Spurgeon published.

Here's what it says, and I quote, "'No man probably in England or in America in this century "'has ever healed so many people as did

Mr. Spurgeon. "'Although he was not himself a physician "'and never wrote prescriptions, "'he felt that there was an unexplainable mystery "'about the whole matter.

"'Yet he asserted that there was some power "'connected with prayer, which ought to be used "'when persons were in pain and could be relieved by it.'"

The letter goes on, and Spurgeon is quoted. "'Now that might sound baffling to you, "'but it sounds liberating to me.

"'I don't have to know how the gift works. "'I clearly don't even have to believe "'that

I possess the gift. "'I merely have to trust that God hears my prayers "'and that he is able to liberate the oppressed, "'heal the sick, give back sight to the blind, "'and restore hearing to the deaf.

"'I don't have to muster psychological certainty "'of the outcome of my prayer, "'nor do I have to have faith in my faith.

"'I only need to trust that my Jesus "'is moved to compassion for his people.'"

I leave that argument there. Healing is operative. We pray.

We pray in faith to God that he would heal, and we trust him. It's not dependent on the faith in our own faith.

It is dependent on the power of God through the Holy Spirit. He is the sustainer of life. We move to another one, workings of miracles.

Workings of miracles. This is also in the plural, if you'll notice, meaning that there are different types of these sorts of things.

The word that's translated miracles is translated such because it's used a lot of times in the gospels to explain

Jesus's miraculous ministry, but the word is the word that we get the word dynamite from. It literally means power, okay?

Workings of power. And what we would get here from Corinthians is that Paul is not likely talking exclusively of what we infer from miracles.

When you think of a miracle, what do you think of? That's probably not exactly what Paul's talking about.

That's in realm, but in this context, he is talking about what's going on in the church in Corinth.

First Corinthians 1 .18, "'For the word of the cross is foolishness "'to those who are perishing, "'but to us who are being saved, "'it is the same word, power of God.'"

Power of God. The dynamite of God. Verse 24 of chapter one, "'But to those who are called both

Jews and Greeks, "'Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God.'" Chapter two, four and five, "'And my word and my preaching "'were not in persuasive words of wisdom, "'but in demonstration of the

Spirit and of power, "'so that your faith would not be in the wisdom of men, "'but in the power of God.'"

Four, 19 through 20, "'But I will come to you soon if the Lord wills, "'and I shall know not with words "'of those who are puffed up, "'but their power, "'for the kingdom of God does not consist in words, "'but power.'"

Galatians 3, five says, "'So then, does he who provides you "'with the

Spirit and works miracles among you, "'do it by works of the law, "'or by hearing with faith?'

He would say, "'He provides you with the Spirit "'and works power among you.'"

How does he do it? Is it by works of the law or is it by faith? Faith is tied in. And churches do not exist without the power of God.

The power of the Spirit to save, the power of the Spirit to draw people to him, the power of the

Spirit to authenticate himself. And yes, miracles. And I will tell you right now,

I don't want to get too far in, but a lot of you know this story. The existence of this church is a miracle where hearts were moved.

Hearts were moved. Hearts acted irrationally. And God delivered super straight licks with crooked sticks.

And what happened is people acted against their own self -interest to birth this place. And this place was birthed with the

DNA it has, and it had to come from the opposition that God anointed on this place.

This church, as CBC, was born out of the power of God. Has nothing to do with me.

It has nothing to do with you. It's the power of God. God moves men to this day.

They can't act otherwise. Even when it's for their own chastisement or discipline, he moves people to accomplish his purposes.

We want to be following him with the least slack. The church does not exist without works of power.

We have to have it. We hear stories all the time. We hear stories in the mission field about the power of miracles that go on to edify the local body.

And friends, we are in a dark, dark place here in America. And I'm just going to tell you, if we're going to see reformation and the revival that we desire in this land, there will be works of power because God will not share credit.

He saves. He alone draws men to himself.

And he uses weak means. That's us. We get to prophecy.

I spoke a lot of it Wednesday, so I'll leave it a little bit there. I commend to you that teaching.

If I have the gift of prophecy and know all mysteries and of all knowledge, that's what he says in chapter 13, verse two.

So we understand here that there is a mystery and knowledge that's given through prophecy. God speaks the mysteries that are beyond your grasp and he gives it to you.

Prophecy is, I believe in many ways, the most dangerous of all these gifts. And that is because of this. With prophecy, you are purporting to speak for God.

Okay? Now, there is a measure of prophecy in the preaching of the word. And for a long time, we in the reform camp have said, well, that just is prophecy.

Friends, it's not. We know because preaching and teaching is differentiated from prophecy.

So prophecy is not the gift of preaching and teaching. However, there is a prophetic voice in the preaching of the word because I do stand behind this holy desk every week and I do tell you, this is what the

Lord says. And there is power in that. There has to be power in it. But he knows that we need to prophesy.

First Thessalonians five, there is consistency. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing. In everything, give thanks, for this is

God's will for you in Jesus Christ. Do not quench the spirit. Oh, man, these words.

Listen to this. Do not quench the spirit. Do not despise prophecies, but examine all things.

Hold fast to that which is good. Abstain from every form of evil. We know that the canonical prophecies are obviously done.

There's no more adding to the scripture. It's closed. There will be no more scripture given.

But we also know that the Lord speaks. And here's what we are given. We have to examine the fruits and we have to abstain from evil and the crooked ways of wicked men and we have to hold to what's good.

And what's good and evil is defined by the law. The law that tells you what's good and what's evil.

We need a lot more prophecy in the church. We need a lot more speaking about what is going to happen if we continue on this path.

And the way that we get it is the same way that all of these other gifts. Do you notice the common thread? It's faith. And how do you get faith?

By prayer. Are you praying that you would have a manifestation of your spiritual gifting?

That you would give glory to God from it? We have the distinguishing of spirits. I don't think it's a mistake that prophecy and distinguishing of spirits and then tongues are put all together with distinguishing of spirits in the middle.

Because if you're going to have prophecy and you're going to have tongues, you had better have distinguishing of the spirits.

Because if you don't, you're going to listen to a lot of false counterfeit miracles of the enemy.

He always wants to piggyback. He always wants to cause confusion. He wants to cause division.

There are many spirits, but God gives us a gift to tell good from evil, truth from deception, encouragement from despair.

There are always going to be counterfeit apostles and signs. There are many today. There are many on the airwaves today.

If you look on YouTube, you're going to find a lot of them. It's not hard to find them. But we have to trust the

Holy Spirit in this place that there will be people in this body who are gifted by varying measures with the distinguishing of spirits that would safeguard the body from crooked men who would lead to our destruction.

We always have to ask, who does this profit? What is being built up? Who is being built up?

What is the fruit? Now, I'm going to frustrate you a little bit. I'm not going to talk about tongues and translation of tongues today.

We have a lot more time on that later. I will tell you this, tongues is for unbelievers in the sense that there is a

Pentecost use of tongues where people understand the gospel and the proclamation and teaching of God in their own language.

There are many testimonies of this from the mission field. There will continue to be many testimonies of this because God will be heard.

And our language is not a barrier to God. He will continue to speak and he has continued to speak, but it goes with distinguishing of spirits.

You'll get enough of tongues later on. I want to do this and I want to end this way. You saw it in verse 13.

By one spirit, we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and we were all made to drink of one spirit.

Friends, we have to have this. We have to drink. If you don't drink, you die.

There is living water through the Holy Spirit. And there is this idea that he has bought you all with a purpose.

He has brought you in to this covenant. He has baptized you and immersed you and you went into the waters of death and wrath and judgment and you emerged out of the waters, a new creation, cleansed, wearing the white robes of righteousness of Jesus Christ.

And he has smashed the things that would divide us in the body. That doesn't mean there's not

Jews and Gentiles. What that meant was there is no distinction between Jews and Gentiles in the body of Christ because we are all saved equally.

We are all given gifts in different measures so that we would build one another up. We would not bring in the old tribal hatreds that divide us in the past in this place.

We should not divide. Just as in marriage, let no man tear apart what God has put together. So it should be in the church that no man should divide what

God has knitted together in the church. More on that next week. But friends, understand this.

You always had to drink of the living water to be saved. That never changed.

And when you drink of this water, you're going to keep drinking it not because you're thirsty but because it's life itself and it tastes sweet.

And you know this, don't you, brothers and sisters? You know there is nothing sweeter, nothing sweeter than to be walking closely with the

Spirit, clean conscience, bold, fearless, out ready to do adventure, and men out ready to make war on the enemy.

And we need men in the battle. The fields are white today. And friends, we're not going to do it from our own ingenuity.

We need the gifts of the Spirit. So church, I commend you this week to pray for them.

Pray that you would have gifts of the Spirit to build up the church and that you would give all glory to God for that.

Let's pray. Father, we're thankful this thing that you have put together,

Lord, let us be rightly afraid of going against your law by tearing it apart. Lord, help us as we pray for your power in this place,

Lord, that our goals would be completely honorable, that our goals in praying for power would be that men, women, boys, and girls would come into your kingdom, that they would bow the knee to you, our

King. Lord, we need you. We have prayed often, we have said from the very beginning, we are merely holding up cloths in the wind, we cannot make the wind blow.

But Lord, you promised in John 3 that the Spirit blows like the wind and he goes wherever he will.

And so Lord, we hold up the sheets and we pray. We pray that you would give us faith, we pray that you would give us wisdom, we pray that you would give us knowledge, we pray that you would heal those who are sick and hurting among us.

We pray that you would give us distinguishment and discerning of the spirits. Lord, we pray that there would be prophecy that we would understand, that we would be edified and uplifted by it.

And Lord, we pray that you would use tongues in the right way, Lord, not to bring confusion, disorder, hatefulness, division, but instead,

Lord, to build your kingdom for the unbelievers, that they would hear and that they would understand. Lord, we love you and we trust in your provision for us knowing we cannot do it.