Gifts For Building Christ’s Church

Grace Fellowship Church

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May 18, 2023

May 14, 2023 | Shayne Poirier on 1 Corinthians 12.

00:00: This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.
00:15: If you haven't already, open your Bibles to 1 Corinthians chapter 12.
00:22: What I want to do today is, as you're turning there, or as you have your finger already in 1
00:28: Corinthians 12, I actually want to start in a different book. You can stay in 1
00:33: Corinthians, but I want to reference something that the Lord Jesus Christ said in the book of Matthew, in the
00:40: Gospel of Matthew, in Matthew chapter 16. It's actually the very first time that we hear the word church in our
00:48: New Testaments. This is the scene. You might remember it from our time in Mark just a few months ago.
00:58: In the Gospel of Matthew, in chapter 16, we read that near the end of Christ's Galilean ministry, our
01:05: Lord Jesus took his disciples some 40 kilometers north of the Sea of Galilee. Does anyone remember the name of that town?
01:12: We're a small enough group, I can ask. It's a city. It's named after Caesar and Herod Philip, Caesarea Philippi.
01:27: The Lord took his disciples to Caesarea Philippi at the foot of Mount Hermon, a mountainous peak that reaches 9 ,200 feet above sea level.
01:39: There we know, from our various times of study, that that place, Caesarea Philippi, at the base of Mount Hermon, was a depraved place.
01:49: In that particular city, you could worship three gods each day on any given day of the week.
01:55: If you lived in the day of the Lord Jesus Christ, you could wake up bright and early in the morning, have your breakfast, and then go into Caesarea Philippi and worship the emperor as part of the
02:08: Roman imperial cult. You could go back home, take some rest. After some lunch, you could make your way down to the
02:15: Grotto of Pan, which was discovered by Alexander the Great and his army and was turned into somewhat of a pagan heritage site.
02:25: You could worship one of the oldest Greek gods, Pan, who was a devilish -looking creature.
02:32: Kids, if you think about cartoon images of the devil with the horns, or maybe the long curly horns, that is loosely based after Pan, who is half man and half goat.
02:47: Then, in the evenings, after dinner, you could go in the dark of night and sacrifice to the ancient enemy of the
02:53: God of Israel, the false god Baal. We know that many who worshipped
02:59: Baal would even sacrifice their own children. It was here, in the setting of this spiritually dark place, that the
03:07: Lord Jesus Christ said those familiar words, words that we've looked at now a few times.
03:13: He said, I will build my church, I will build my church, and the gate of hell shall not prevail against it.
03:24: For millennia now, Christ has been in the glorious business of building his only church, whether it be in the heart of Jerusalem, amid stones and swords, or in Caesarea Philippi, in the shadow of Mount Hermon, in Corinth, which was its own corrupt and vile city, or even here in the city of Edmonton, or in Strathcona County, at Meadow Lodge Bible Camp.
03:53: Christ is in the business of building his church, and in all of the records of Christ's earthly life and ministry, we have many of his words, and yet we find very few promises as emphatic as Christ's words in Matthew 16,
04:10: I will build my church. Now you might be asking, it's an interesting place to start, we're in 1
04:17: Corinthians 12, why start in Matthew chapter 16? This afternoon, we're turning our attention to 1
04:25: Corinthians chapter 12, and here Paul is going to show us one of the primary means that Christ is pleased to use in order to build his church.
04:38: Two years ago, the room was slightly rearranged, I was standing right there where you can see the old platform was, and I said to the group that Christ would build his church.
04:51: By God's grace, Amy and I reminisce about it regularly, how Christ is building his church, and that whether it be the powers of Pan, or Caesar, or Satan, none will thwart
05:03: Christ's building of the church. And what we find in 1 Corinthians 12 is that here, since Christ first commissioned his disciples to go into all the world, it has been our
05:17: Lord's good pleasure to take radical sinners, sinners like you, and sinners like me, sinners like those who are still yet to be reached in the world, and to make them into ordinary saints of God, and to fill them, to fill you with his
05:36: Holy Spirit, and to give you gifts in order that you might employ them in his service to the end that his church would be built.
05:46: And in this chapter, as we study it together, this is what we're going to find. Paul is confronting the error of the
05:53: Corinthians, at least as it pertained to their understanding of the manifestations of the
05:59: Spirit. And we were in 1 Corinthians not that long ago, we know that Corinth was just plagued with errors.
06:09: And in this particular case, he's going to deal with the error as it relates to the Spirit. But what we find is in the midst of all of this, we find positive instruction for how
06:20: Christians are to use the gifts that God gives us to the end that his church would be built, to the end that Christ's promise would be fulfilled, that Christ will build his church.
06:35: And so, and I have to say that my hope is that we would find this all very encouraging today.
06:41: Even as we come together in a small group, even as we come together in a rather sparse crew today, that the
06:49: Lord, if you're a Christian in this room, that he's given you gifts to serve him and to glorify him and to be used of him for his purposes.
06:58: And so we're going to orient ourselves in the text. As I said at the onset, I've prepared a shorter sermon.
07:05: Shorter sermons for me are not always that short, but it is shorter, I assure you that.
07:10: And what we're going to do, this is a big section to bite off. How do
07:15: I preach a short sermon on a whole chapter? Well, what we're going to look at is we're going to look at four statements that we can deduce or to draw from this particular passage to deal with how
07:29: God gives his people to build his church. Four statements that are true of every
07:36: Christian in this room as we seek to faithfully serve and to be used to build
07:41: Christ's church. So let's begin by looking at the first three verses. I'm going to read them and then we'll expound a bit.
07:48: Verse one, Paul says, Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be uninformed.
07:55: You know that when you were pagans, you were led astray to mute idols, however you were led. Therefore, I want you to understand that no one speaking in the spirit of God ever says
08:04: Jesus is accursed. And no one can say Jesus is Lord except in the
08:11: Holy Spirit. The first statement, if you're taking notes, you'll also find these in your bulletin.
08:18: The first statement that I want to put before you is this, to the Christians in this room. You have been redeemed.
08:26: You have been redeemed from a pagan past. Now we see that Paul begins this particular chapter with those words, now concerning.
08:37: And kids, maybe you can remember back if you're a part of this. I think there's probably a few people here that weren't here when we went through 1
08:43: Corinthians. Whenever Paul says those words, now concerning, he uses it four times in the book of 1
08:50: Corinthians. We can look back to 1 Corinthians chapter seven in verse one. And what we see is this. This is a response to something that the
08:56: Corinthians have written to Paul in one of their own letters. And so there has been correspondence going back and forth between Paul and the
09:03: Corinthian church. And in this case, he's now going to deal with something. They have a question about this practice of spiritual gifts.
09:12: And one of the things that I love about reading 1 Corinthians and studying 1 Corinthians is it's a great text to study both hermeneutics and what
09:20: I would like to call reverse hermeneutics. Where we read Paul addressing something in a text and we can go back and look and say, based on what
09:29: Paul is saying, what is the issue that was being encountered in Corinth? And this is what we gather.
09:38: It becomes immediately apparent as we read chapter 12 and then as we make our way into 13 and then into chapter 14, that not only were the
09:47: Corinthians obsessed with the most prominent gifts, they were saying, the heads were saying to the feet,
09:52: I have no need of you. And the eyes saying to the hands, I have no need of you. Not only were they obsessed with the prominent gifts and not only were they especially desirous of the gift of tongues, which we have already looked at at length, but they were ignorant about what it meant to be
10:09: Christians who had the gifts of the spirit and how to use these newfound gifts in a distinctly
10:15: Christian way. And Paul begins in verse 1 by saying that he does not want this church to be uninformed.
10:24: It seems that that is exactly what was happening. The church itself was uninformed about how they were to use these gifts that God had given them.
10:34: And he begins by going into the basics of Christian theology.
10:40: He begins with the truth about the Corinthians, who they were prior to their conversion and who they are now.
10:49: He reminds them of their redemption in Christ. And isn't this true of us also that we were once formerly pagans led astray by mute idols, whether they were idols made of wood or idols made of dreams or jobs or whatever it could be.
11:05: And then he brings them back to the truth about God like a true Pauline epistle, a mini epistle of sorts.
11:12: Paul gives us theology and then he will give us orthodoxy or orthopraxy to practice these things in an upright way.
11:23: And this is the situation at the time. We know the history of Corinth quite well. It was a city of tremendous gross sexual immorality and absolute confusion.
11:36: It was not uncommon in this particular day and age in Corinth not only to worship all kinds of false gods, but to worship all kinds of false gods in all kinds of evil ways.
11:49: And so what we see if we go back into history, if we were to get into our proverbial time machine and go to first century
11:57: Corinth, is that the Corinthians were always after ecstatic experiences, ecstasy, which was the highest form of religious experience in Corinth.
12:10: And as a result of this, it was common in Corinthian culture for people to seek out supernatural experiences.
12:19: And the way they would do this, and you'll recognize this, is that they would get together and they would begin to repeat these frenzied chants, repeating the same words over and over and over again.
12:34: Not something that's too dissimilar from what we might see in some modern charismatic churches. There is a church just a few blocks south of us.
12:45: They will meet and for the first hour they just recite the same few words with some variation, some shift in the music.
12:52: And what this would do is it would numb people's senses and dull their minds and get them into a trans -like state.
13:00: They would get drunk with alcohol. And then once they were in a frenzy and drunk with alcohol, they would participate in repulsive orgies.
13:11: And this is evidenced by the fact that if you were to go to Corinth even today, and you were to stand in the ancient city and look up at the
13:19: Acropolis, which literally means the high city that stands 2 ,000 feet above the city, there you will still find the ruins of the temple to the
13:29: Greek goddess Aphrodite. And in the evenings when the sun would set, the people would come down, the priestesses, some 1 ,000 priestesses from the temple of Aphrodite, and seduce their willing victims in the city below as an act of worship to their
13:47: God. And the situation was becoming so bad,
13:53: I'm trying to think, who was here for our very first sermon in 1 Corinthians? We've got two kids here, we've got one person back there,
14:02: I think there are four people in this room that were here for that first sermon in 1 Corinthians.
14:08: And one of the things that we realized when we studied that particular passage was that the Corinthians were in fact so evil that a new
14:16: Greek word came into creation as a result of their behavior.
14:22: And what it was is the Greek verb korinthiodzo, which means to Corinthianize people.
14:29: And what it meant is that you would trip someone up with debauchery or gross sexual immorality.
14:36: And so Corinth was such a city that not only could you get into Corinth, but if you were there long enough,
14:42: Corinth could get into you. And this no doubt had a significant impact on the church.
14:49: And the perversion of these spiritual gifts in Corinth was leading some to have ecstatic utterances that were not only foolish, but were heretical and blasphemous in nature.
15:02: And we see that in verse 3, when Paul tells the Corinthians, he says, No one speaking the Spirit ever says,
15:08: Jesus is accursed. And we don't know if this was a hypothetical statement, if people were in fact claiming to be filled with the
15:15: Spirit and saying, Jesus is accursed. But what they were saying, at the very least, were blasphemous, unhelpful, and heretical things.
15:24: It reminds me of a story I once heard where a man chose to divorce his wife, and when people asked him why, he said,
15:30: God told him to do it. God will never tell you to do something that is contrary to his word.
15:38: But this is exactly what was happening here. But to the contrary, what Paul says is that one who is filled with the
15:45: Holy Spirit doesn't curse Christ, but the one who is filled with the Holy Spirit confesses
15:52: Christ. And not just confesses Christ, but confesses him as Lord. And Paul says that the only way that a person can make a true
16:01: Christian profession, the kind of profession that we would read about in Romans chapter 10 and verse 9, that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is
16:09: Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, the only way that you can make that confession is by the working of the
16:17: Holy Spirit in that person. That salvation is a gift. It is initiated by and impossible without the powerful, regenerating work of the
16:26: Spirit in that particular individual. And so the first picture we have from these first three verses is
16:33: Corinth as a pagan place. And from all of this,
16:39: I want us to see two things here. Firstly, I want us to see that many of the excesses that were visible in the
16:47: Corinthian Church are again visible today in the modern
16:54: Charismatic Church. I didn't come today to pick on the Charismatic Church. I'm just speaking the truth about some of these particular details.
17:05: The seeking above all else for supernatural encounters, singing the same five words over and over again for 15 minutes or 20 minutes, or like I said down the street, for an hour, yearning to be drunk in the
17:18: Spirit. Sam and I were sharing video clips of Bethel Church and people that were going to the
17:26: School of Supernatural Ministry, and it wasn't enough to get drunk in the Spirit, they had to get high in the Spirit. Because many of these
17:34: Christians have no grasp of the Bible or of historical theology, they don't realize that their pursuit of ecstatic experiences is not only not
17:44: Christian, it's not even Corinthian, it's even worse, it's pagan.
17:51: It's true that there is no such thing as a new heresy under the sun. What we see oftentimes, unfortunately, in these,
17:59: I'm going to pick specifically on the uber -Charismatic Churches, is just a repetition of the
18:06: Corinthian era. Secondly, what I want us to see here is that this is the reason why we are not to engage in these kind of practices.
18:17: The reason is because God has saved us from our pagan, former manner of life.
18:24: I'm not going to read it, but in 1 Corinthians chapter 6, Paul wrote to the Corinthian church then about their former manner of life.
18:33: He speaks about not being idolaters, or adulterers, or to practice homosexuality, or to be thieves, or to be greedy, or drunkards, or violers, or swindlers.
18:45: He says, and such were some of you, but you were washed, and you were sanctified.
18:52: What sweet words. Think about the meaning of those words, if you've tuned out for a second. But you were washed.
18:59: You were sanctified. You were justified in the name of the
19:04: Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of our God. How that ought to move us, dear brothers and sisters, to praise unto
19:15: God and to service in his kingdom. We were, you were,
19:22: I was once led astray by mute idols. Our lives were characterized by every kind of disorder and chaos, and every other vice that sought to ruin our lives.
19:35: But Christ has redeemed us, not with money, not with the blood of a bull or a turtle dove, but with his own precious blood.
19:49: 1 Peter 1, verses 18 and 19 says, you were ransomed from the futile ways, inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things, not with perishable things, such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb, without spot or blemish.
20:12: And how this ought to move us to faithfully serve Christ. That we were once dead,
20:22: I like the way Vody Bokom says it, and you were dead, dramatic pause, dead in your trespasses and sins, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.
20:40: You're following the desires of your mind and every wind that blew about.
20:46: And we were lost, brothers and sisters. God saved us, and he didn't save us at no cost at all, but at the cost of his own son on the cross in our place.
21:02: I feel like I have permission to use this particular illustration because most of you weren't here when
21:07: I shared it the first time. But I think it just captures this perfectly, what it means to be redeemed from our pagan past, to be used in Christ's service.
21:19: I once heard a story about an English nobleman who came to California for the gold rush in the 19th century.
21:28: And during that time, he must have amassed some kind of wealth. But at the end of his stay, he had to go back to England, and he chose to go back through New Orleans.
21:38: And as he was in New Orleans, he was in the city, and there was a slave market that was taking place.
21:44: And he had never seen a slave market before, and so he thought, I'm going to go and watch what happens at the slave market.
21:50: And as he stood amongst the crowd, there was a beautiful young lady who was brought up onto the platform and was put up for sale as a slave.
22:03: As he stood there in the crowd, he listened to two men who were standing next to him, who talked about their intent to purchase her and to do all of the vile things that they had planned to do to her once they had made their purchase.
22:18: And so this man moved, a sincere Christian man moved with tremendous compassion for this young woman.
22:24: He raised his hand and he said, I will pay twice the price of the highest bidder for that young lady.
22:32: The auctioneer said, no one has ever done that before, to pay twice the price of a slave girl.
22:38: And he said, I will take her for twice the price. And so they counted it down and she was sold for twice the price.
22:45: And this Englishman took this young slave girl and he walked her to one of the clerk's offices and had them draft up her manumission papers so that she could be released.
22:59: And when he presented the manumission papers to her, she looked at him in the eyes and spit in his face.
23:08: And he said to her, don't you understand? I'm trying to set you free.
23:14: I'm trying to let you go so you can go free and not be subjected to the evils of slavery and the evils of this world.
23:24: And it was at that moment that the woman broke down and wept. And the woman dumbfounded, looked at him and said, sir, do you mean that you paid twice the price for a slave just to set me free?
23:40: And the man looked at her in the eyes and said, yes, you are free. And she looked at the man and she said, sir,
23:47: I have only one thing to ask. Can I be your slave forever? What kind of man would pay twice the price to see what the world thought was otherwise a worthless slave go free?
24:02: But how much more has God paid that we might go free?
24:08: Not two times what we were worth, not 10 times what we were worth, but 10 billion times what each of us in this room are worth by sending his own begotten son, begotten, not created, in perfect fellowship with God from before the foundation of the world, fulfilling all righteousness, without sin, tempted in all things, and yet without even one iniquity on his record, and that God would send his son to that cross to die for us, that we might be free.
24:42: See him there, the Lord Jesus Christ, the noblest of all men, righteous and above all reproach,
24:51: God of very gods, dying on that cross to save filthy, vile, and helpless wretches like you and me, paying 10 billion times more than what we are worth to satisfy his own justice on our behalf, and reconciling us to himself that he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness to us in Christ Jesus.
25:16: Brothers and sisters, how could we serve any other master in all the world?
25:26: Next we see in verse 4, Paul says, Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same
25:33: Spirit. And there are varieties of service, but the same Lord. And there are varieties of activities, but it is the same
25:41: God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the
25:47: Spirit for the common good. The second statement, statement number two, that we can make from our passage is this.
25:55: Not only have we been redeemed from our pagan past, but number two, we have been empowered by one triune
26:03: God. We don't have to look very far to see, and we heard our brother read it, how it can almost be awkward in the way it's worded, to see that Paul is taking great pains to communicate to the
26:16: Corinthians that though there are many gifts of the Spirit, and yet while there are many manifestations of that Spirit in the church, yet all of this arises from one
26:30: Spirit. From ultimately one triune God. And we see that in verses 4, 5, and 6.
26:38: There are varieties of gifts, but Paul says, but the same Spirit. And there are varieties of gifts, but the same
26:44: Lord. And the same God. And here you see every person in the
26:50: Holy Trinity encapsulated in those three verses. The Father, and the
26:55: Son, and the Holy Spirit. Working in triunity to empower, verse tells us, verse 7 tells us, each and every
27:04: Christian to serve that one God for the common good. And as I mentioned earlier, as Paul often does, he gets, before he gets to the practical, he must address the theological.
27:17: In the last point, he dealt with anthropology, the doctrine of man, and soteriology, the doctrine of salvation.
27:24: And now he's dealing with theology proper, the doctrine of God. And what it would appear is that the
27:31: Corinthians were drifting back to a bit of a polytheistic view, where they would attribute different gifts to different Spirits.
27:43: And so they'd say, oh, that gift comes from that Spirit, and that gift comes from that God, and that is the
27:49: God of this, and that is the God of that. But here Paul again reminds them of the character, the triune character and nature of God.
28:00: And not only does he reference the Trinity, but then he repeats the word one Spirit, or one
28:07: Holy Spirit, ten times in this particular passage. Ten times in this chapter.
28:13: What he's trying to get at is they are serving one God, by the power of one
28:18: God. And looking around, I don't think that there's anyone in this room that would now today attribute different gifts to different gods.
28:28: I don't think that we would say, well, Ty has the gift of a firm handshake. You do, brother.
28:34: And that comes from the God of Thor. I don't think any of us would think in that particular way.
28:42: But I do think that many of us are tempted to engage in a bit of a more subtle variation of that.
28:49: And that is that while we seek to be useful to God, and as we seek to employ the gifts that he has given us, many of us are not content to rely on the solitary power of God alone.
29:04: But we like to go to our own methods, and our own strategies, the tips and tricks of the world, the force of our own personalities, the force of our own charisma.
29:16: Some of us are more naturally gifted public speakers. And so we're tempted, perhaps, not to cry out to God on our faces before we preach.
29:29: That he would bear fruit in the preaching that we're about to do. Some of us are more naturally talented.
29:36: Brother, I think of you and your carpentry skills, Josh. Some of us are more, you're certainly more talented than I am at carpentry.
29:44: Steve knows I once helped a child start a birdhouse business, and I'm pretty sure most of those birdhouses were bought out of pity.
29:54: But even then, where our natural abilities meet our day -to -day, the
30:01: Lord desires that we'd be wholly dependent on him, whether we're making a birdhouse or writing a sermon or fixing a deck at camp, that we would do everything by the power of God for the glory of God.
30:17: We don't rely on the solitary power of God, but on the methods, the strategies, and the crutches that we pick up along the way.
30:25: But like the Corinthians, we must be directed back to solitary reliance upon a sovereign
30:32: God who gives gifts as he wills. The only way that we can be of any good to Christ and his church is to be people who are abiding in Christ, who are seeking him in prayer, who are attached to the lifeblood of the vine.
30:50: And as we labor, it is the very power of God that is working through us. But so many of us, because we live in a world that is not empowered by God, are content to live devoid of the power of God or on the power of God -light.
31:09: If any of the men here who have been in the Institute, if you went through the practice of prayer course, or if you talked to one of these guys that's been in the practice of prayer course, what you'll find is that it is one of the richest courses that we do in the
31:24: Institute for Church Leadership through the Master's Seminary. Even if you're not going to pursue eldership or missionary service or anything like that, you should take that course, the practice of prayer.
31:36: But one of the particular quotes I think that everyone that's gone through that course hears, and it just pummels us, it resonates with us, it encourages us, it challenges us, is a quote from a
31:50: Baptist pastor named A .C. Dixon. He lived in the late 1800s and he said this, he said,
31:56: When we rely on organization, we get what organization can do.
32:05: When we rely on education, we get what education can do. When we rely on eloquence, we get what eloquence can do.
32:15: But when we rely upon God in prayer, we get what
32:20: God can do. So many of our lives, we get what organization can get.
32:28: But how many of us are getting what God can get, what God can do through his power? And let me ask you, are you dependent on God for every aspect of your
32:39: Christian life and ministry? Or are you, if you're really honest with yourself, you're self -sufficient, you're independent, you make your own way, and the power of God, and God's working through you is an afterthought.
32:57: I know that many in this room know this story, but I think it powerfully demonstrates this, that Charles Spurgeon, the man that he was,
33:07: I introduced him to the people at Bethel, they don't hear about Charles Spurgeon near as often, but I said, his exploits are legendary.
33:16: His superhuman ability to accomplish so much, to preach almost every day of the week.
33:22: I love reading, I try to read a lot, there's no way I'm preaching every single day, and then reading six books a day, or six books a week, sorry.
33:30: To be the most published man, one of the most published men in all of human history. To speak without amplification.
33:37: I have amplification on right now. And he would speak without amplification to 20 ,000 people. And we remember that in order for him to do that, he would have to ascend his stairs to the top of his pulpit, 15 steps.
33:52: And I know that many of you know what he would say as he went up each step into that pulpit.
33:58: He would recite to himself, I believe in the Holy Spirit. I believe in the
34:05: Holy Spirit. I believe in the Holy Spirit. Each step, assuring himself that if there was going to be anything accomplished through his ministry in that day and in that pulpit, it was going to be through the power of the
34:20: Holy Spirit. And I love what John Stott says about this. He says in his book,
34:27: Between Two Worlds, an excellent book on preaching, he says, in a bit of a cheeky fashion, we may be sure after 15 repetitions, by the time he entered his pulpit, he did believe in the
34:40: Holy Spirit. And my question is to you, dear friends, maybe in a bit of a cheeky fashion, do you believe in the
34:49: Holy Spirit? Is that evidenced by how you live your life and how dependent you are on the
34:55: Holy Spirit? Or do you live as a secularist in a Christian's body?
35:02: Next, in verses 8 through 11, we read this. For to one is given through the
35:10: Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same
35:16: Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues.
35:30: All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit who apportions to each one individually as he wills.
35:39: The third statement that I want us to take from this text is this, that we have also been given various gifts, given various gifts.
35:50: We've been redeemed from a pagan past, we serve a solitary triune God, and yet he gives us a diversity of gifts by which we are to serve him.
36:00: Now in this particular passage that I just read, we looked at nine particular gifts. Now some might say, are those the only gifts that God gives us the church?
36:09: I'm grateful there are far more than that. If we look down to verses 27 and specifically 28, we see that Paul lists another eight, and there there's a little bit of overlap.
36:20: If you wanted to go back this week and maybe do a bit of a spiritual inventory, what are the gifts of the
36:26: Spirit, at least as they are revealed in Scripture, and what gifts might I have? You can look here in 1
36:33: Corinthians 12, but I'd also direct you to Romans 12, Romans 12 verses 6 to 8.
36:40: You can look at Ephesians chapter 4 and verse 11. Steve, do you know what's in Ephesians 4 .11?
36:52: Apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, teachers. Sorry for putting you on the spot like that.
37:00: And in 1 Peter chapter 4 and verse 11. Time simply isn't going to allow for us to go through each of these gifts today, but what we will recognize is that there is a distinction in these gifts, and we've looked at this before, but there's a twofold distinction between those that are speaking gifts, those are gifts that are prominent in the church, and those that are serving gifts.
37:27: And I think that's a very biblical distinction to make because we see Peter make that distinction in 1
37:32: Peter 4 .11. This distinction between those who speak and those who serve. And in verses 8 through 11,
37:41: Paul relays that some have been given the gift, for instance, of the utterance of wisdom and knowledge.
37:49: Others have been given the gift of prophecy or tongues. In verse 28, he lists the apostles, the prophets, and the teachers.
37:57: These are the most prominent gifts in the church because they are the speaking gifts. They're the head, and they're the mouth, and they're the eyes of the body.
38:07: But Paul also lists gifts like faith and distinguishing between spirits, what we might call discernment, the gift of healings, or maybe the far less glamorous gifts of administration and helping.
38:21: There are some people that the Lord gifts, and their purpose is to help. And let me tell you, for someone who leads and organizes and coordinates in the church, those who are gifted with the gift of helping are one of the greatest blessings to the church.
38:38: Those who are prepared to serve, and to work, and to labor, and to never be seen, and to never be remembered when people give thanks or send out the cards, who are content to labor in obscurity in order that God would be glorified, and that Christ's church would be built.
38:59: But regardless of the nature of the gift, Paul again reinforces in verse 11 that these are empowered by one and the same spirit, he says, who apportions to each one as he wills.
39:11: Now, whenever you read 1 Corinthians chapter 12, inevitably the question will come up, well
39:17: Shane, what about the gift of tongues? What about the gift of prophecy? What about these miraculous, these supernatural gifts?
39:25: Jason is going to ask in the back, Shane, what about the gift of miracles? And maybe in this particular place, there's evidence of those.
39:35: And to that question, it's interesting, I preached the same sermon at Bethel this morning, and I said, and if you want to know the answer to that question, go talk to the elders of the church, they'll have exactly the right answer.
39:48: But now I'm in this church, and so I have to stand up and take responsibility. And I did take responsibility there too, but I had a little bit of fun with it before I did.
39:59: But what I would suggest is that these supernatural gifts are not given to the church today, at least in the same way.
40:08: And I want to make a very brief case for that. In the
40:14: Bible, for instance, we see the office of apostle. I know that there are churches in the city today who have apostles, at least they claim to have apostles.
40:25: I've even seen super apostles, and I think that Paul was being sarcastic when he used that expression, and yet there are super apostles.
40:34: But what we see in Scripture, if we begin to dig in to what it was to be an apostle, in order to be an apostle, one had to be appointed by Christ.
40:46: The word apostle literally means a sent one. And so they had to be appointed by and sent by the
40:53: Lord Jesus Christ. And then we see from examples in Acts chapter 1, as the apostles got together, that they had to be witnesses of Christ's resurrection.
41:02: And Paul talks about that, that though he was one who was untimely born, the resurrected
41:09: Christ did appear to him on the road. And for that reason, he qualified as an apostle.
41:17: As for the supernatural gifts, it's interesting that when Paul greets the churches, for instance, when he writes to the church in Philippi, in Philippi chapter 1, and he says to the saints who are in Philippi, along with the elders and the deacons, if there were still apostles today, or if there were still prophets today, or if there were still miracle workers today, in the same way that we might see in the
41:43: New Testament, would he not also say in that later letter to these churches, to the elders and to the deacons and to the prophets, or to the faith healers?
41:56: But he doesn't do that. And when he gives the qualifications for the leaders of the church in 1
42:01: Timothy chapter 3, again, he doesn't give qualifications for prophets or miracle workers, but specifically to elders and deacons.
42:12: I think that many Christians lose sight of this today. Certainly it's the case in the charismatic movement, because there's so much ignorance concerning the
42:22: Old Testament prior to Christ. But if you were to look back at the Old Testament people, it was very infrequent, rather rare in fact, to see a great miracle, to see a great healing, to see personal prophecy.
42:37: And even in the New Testament, as the canon itself drew to a close, what we find is even by Paul's letter to Timothy, in AD 62 approximately, his first letter in 1
42:50: Timothy chapter 5, he speaks to Timothy's frequent ailments and his stomach issues.
42:57: And it's interesting that Paul could have said to Timothy, well, what you need to do is the next time that they have the word faith convention, the word faith revival, you need to go to the faith healer and let him hit you with his suit coat and you will be healed.
43:15: That happens. But he didn't say that, to go to a faith healer, to go to a miracle worker.
43:20: What did he say? He said, no longer drink only water, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments.
43:30: Many of the supernatural gifts, such as tongues and miracles and prophecy, I would suggest served as a temporary display to validate the gospel message and to aid in the preaching of the gospel to the surrounding nations immediately following Christ's life.
43:51: It lended credibility to the nations as they brought the gospel message.
43:57: And we see this in places like Hebrews chapter 2. The author is talking about such a great salvation.
44:05: And he says, was first declared by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard, while God also bore witnesses, witnessed by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the
44:20: Holy Spirit distributed according to his will. That it was the gospel message that was attested to by these miracles.
44:29: Now, at this point some might say, well Shane, why are you even talking if there are no gifts?
44:36: I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is some of these most supernatural gifts, I think there was a time and a place for them.
44:44: But nonetheless, there are countless other gifts that the Lord gives. As he gives in verse 11, each one individually.
44:52: And it's not man who chooses the gifts, but it's God who distributes these gifts. And so for some of you in this room,
45:00: God has given you a prominent gift. Maybe it's the gift of teaching. You're to do that for the glory of God without despising those who have a less prominent gift.
45:11: And for some of you, God has given you, like we would see in verse 28, the gift of administration.
45:18: And some people might say, well, what am I going to do with the gift of administration? Well, I think it's really interesting.
45:24: In verse 28, Paul, that term for administration is a Greek word. It literally means steering the ship.
45:33: It's not a prominent gift. But we need somebody to steer the ship.
45:39: We need somebody to serve in a way that sustains the ministry of the church. But in both cases, they're to serve
45:48: God with the gift that he has sovereignly purposed for you.
45:58: Who knows how many churches or missions organizations or Bible camps are held up by the faithful ministry of men and women who silently steer the ship, who sacrificially serve outside of the sight of others for the glory of God.
46:21: And lastly, in verses 12 and 13, For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is for Christ.
46:34: For in one spirit we were all baptized into one body. Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, in all were made to drink of the same spirit.
46:44: So we see that we have been redeemed from our pagan past. We've been empowered by one triune God. We've been given gifts, various gifts.
46:55: And then the fourth point I want to make is this, that God has done this. Number four, all for the good of Christ's church.
47:03: The rest of this chapter, I'm not going to expound upon it today, is permeated by the vital role that every member plays in the health and strength and up -building of the church.
47:19: In verse 7, Paul talks about how all these gifts are used for the common good.
47:25: And then in verses 12 through 31, what we see is this Greek word body.
47:30: Certainly Sam, as he read the passage, noticed how many times he was having to say body, body, body.
47:38: The Greek word for body, soma, appears 18 times. And for the remainder of the chapter, it's permeated by this theme, the welfare and the up -building and the unity of the church.
47:54: If you're a believer in this church, God has given you gifts for his glory and for the building of his church.
48:04: I don't want to disappoint you, but God doesn't need you to serve him and to establish his kingdom in the world.
48:14: But what I would suggest is that he has made things such that the church needs you and that this church needs you.
48:26: And if you're a believer in this church, in what ways are you serving?
48:32: In what ways are you using your gifts? Or as one person has said, are you short -circuiting the blessings and the benefits of your brothers and sisters by not using your gifts?
48:48: Many of us might say, well, I don't know how the Lord has gifted me. I don't know how I am to serve him in this life and in this church.
48:58: And the first thing I will always say to someone who comes to me and says, I want to serve, but I don't know how, is, well, let's get you serving somewhere that really excites you.
49:09: Let's get you serving in an area that makes you happy, that brings you joy. It's often the case that the ways that the
49:16: Lord has gifted us are the ways that we are most happy, when our sails are most full, when our souls are most singing.
49:24: There are people in Christ's church who love to crunch numbers. Steve isn't here, but he knows
49:31: I love to make spreadsheets. It's very possible the Lord has gifted me in that way, because looking around,
49:37: I don't think many of you like making spreadsheets, but I love making spreadsheets and writing policy.
49:45: You need to look for ways that the Lord makes you happy as you serve him.
49:51: And some of you might say, but I don't feel like I have almost anything to offer. And I love what
49:58: D .L. Moody once said. He said, we may easily be too big for God to use, but never too small for God to use.
50:07: We can be too big, but never too small. So, dear saints, Christ is building his church.
50:15: He will build his church. I trust the Lord will build this church.
50:21: And the question I ask you today is, how are you being used? As Christ means, to that end.
50:31: I'll finish with 1 Peter 4, verse 10. He says this. As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God's varied grace.
50:42: Whoever speaks is one who speaks the oracles of God. Whoever serves is one who serves by the strength that God supplies, in order that in everything
50:52: God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him be along glory and dominion forever and ever.