Gifts For Building Christ’s Church

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.

Christ Will Build His Church in Matthew 16

If you haven't already, open your Bibles to 1 Corinthians chapter 12. What I want to do today is, as you're turning there or as you have your finger already in 1 Corinthians 12, I actually want to start in a different book.

You can stay in 1 Corinthians, but I want to reference something that the Lord Jesus Christ said in the book of Matthew, in the Gospel of Matthew, in Matthew chapter 16. It's actually the very first time that we hear the word church in our New Testaments.

This is the scene. You might remember it from our time in Mark just a few months ago. In the Gospel of Matthew, in chapter 16, we read that near the end of Christ's Galilean ministry, our Lord Jesus took his disciples some 40 kilometers north of the Sea of Galilee.

Does anyone remember the name of that town? We're a small enough group I can ask. It's a city. It's named after Caesar and Herod Philip, Caesarea Philippi. 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.

There we know from our various times of study that that place, Caesarea Philippi, at the base of Mount Hermon, was a depraved place. In that particular city, you could worship three gods each day on any given day of the.

Week.

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 Roman imperial cult.

You could go back home, take some rest. After some lunch, you could make your way down to the Grotto of Pan, which was discovered by Alexander the Great and his army, and was turned into somewhat of a pagan heritage site.

You could worship one of the oldest Greek gods, Pan, who was a devilish-looking creature. 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.

And then in the evenings, after dinner, you could go in the dark of night and sacrifice to the ancient enemy of the God of Israel, the false god Baal. And we know that many who worshipped Baal would even sacrifice their own children.

So it was here in the setting of this spiritually dark place that the Lord Jesus Christ said those familiar words, words that we've looked at now a few times. He said, I will build my church. I will build my church, and the gate of hell shall not prevail against it.

And 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.

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, I will build my church.

Now you might be asking, it's an interesting place to start, we're in 1 Corinthians 12, why start in Matthew chapter 16? This afternoon we're turning our attention to 1 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.

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. 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 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 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 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.

In this chapter, as we study it together, this is what we're going to find. Paul is confronting the error of the Corinthians, at least as it pertains to their understanding of the manifestations of the Spirit.

We were in 1 Corinthians not that long ago. We know that Corinth was just plagued with errors, 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 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.

I have to say that my hope is that we would find this all very encouraging today, even as we come together in a small group, even as we come together in a rather sparse crew today, that the 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.

We're going to orient ourselves in the text. As I said at the onset, I've prepared a shorter sermon. Now, shorter sermons for me are not always that short, but it is shorter, I assure you that. What we're going to do, this is a big section to bite off.

How do I preach a short sermon on a whole chapter? 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 that deal with how God gives his people to build his church.

Four statements that are true of every Christian in this room as we seek to faithfully serve and to be used to build Christ's church. Let's begin by looking at the first three verses. I'm going to read them and then we'll expound a bit.

Verse 1, Paul says, Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be uninformed. 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, Jesus is accursed, and no one can say, Jesus is Lord except in the Holy Spirit.

Redeemed from a Pagan Past

The first statement, if you're taking notes, you'll also find these in your bulletin. The first statement that I want to put before you is this, to the Christians in this room, you have been redeemed.

You have been redeemed from a pagan past. Now we see that Paul begins this particular chapter with those words, now concerning. Kids, maybe you can remember back if you're part of this. I think there's probably a few people here that weren't here when we went through 1 Corinthians.

Whenever Paul says those words, now concerning, he uses it four times in the book of 1 Corinthians. We can look back to 1 Corinthians chapter 7 and verse 1. What we see is this is a response to something that the Corinthians have written to Paul in one of their own letters.

There has been correspondence going back and forth between Paul and the Corinthian church. In this case, he's now going to deal with something. They have a question about this practice of spiritual gifts.

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 I would like to call reverse hermeneutics. We read Paul addressing something in a text and we can go back and look and say, based on what Paul is saying, what is the issue that was being encountered in Corinth?

This is what we gather. 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 Corinthians obsessed with the most prominent gifts.

The heads were saying to the feet, I have no need of you. 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 Christians who had the gifts of the Spirit and how to use these newfound gifts in a distinctly Christian way.

Paul begins in verse 1 by saying that he does not want this church to be uninformed. 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.

He begins by going into the basics of Christian theology. He begins with the truth about the Corinthians. Who they were prior to their conversion and who they are now. He reminds them of their redemption in Christ.

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. Then he brings them back to the truth about God like a true Pauline epistle, a mini epistle of sorts.

Paul gives us theology and then he will give us orthodoxy or orthopraxy to practice these things in an upright way. This is the situation of the time. We know the history of Corinth quite well. It was a city of tremendous gross sexual immorality and absolute confusion.

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. What we see if we go back into history, if we were to get into our proverbial time machine and go to first century Corinth, is that the Corinthians were always after ecstatic experiences, ecstasy, which was the highest form of religious experience in Corinth.

As a result of this, it was common in Corinthian culture for people to seek out supernatural experiences. 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.

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. They will meet and for the first hour they just recite the same few words with some variation, some shift in the music.

What this would do is it would numb people's senses and dull their minds and get them into a trans-like state. They would get drunk with alcohol and then once they were in a frenzy and drunk with alcohol, they would participate in repulsive orgies.

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 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 Greek goddess Aphrodite.

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 God.

The situation was becoming so bad, 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. I think there are four people in this room that were here for that first sermon in 1 Corinthians.

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 Greek word came into creation as a result of their behavior. What it was is the Greek verb karynthiazo, which means to Corinthianize people.

What it meant is that you would trip someone up with debauchery or gross sexual immorality. Corinth was such a city that not only could you get into Corinth, but if you were there long enough, Corinth could get into you.

This no doubt had a significant impact on the church. 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.

We see that in verse 3 when Paul tells the Corinthians, he says, no one speaking the Spirit ever says, Jesus is accursed. We don't know if this was a hypothetical statement, if people were in fact claiming to be filled with the Spirit and saying, Jesus is accursed.

What they were saying, at the very least, were blasphemous, unhelpful, and heretical things. It reminds me of a story I once heard where a man chose to divorce his wife. When people asked him why, he said, God told him to do it.

God will never tell you to do something that is contrary to his word. This is exactly what was happening here. But to the contrary, what Paul says is that one who is filled with the Holy Spirit doesn't curse Christ, but the one who is filled with the Holy Spirit confesses Christ.

Not just confesses Christ, but confesses him as Lord. Paul says that the only way that a person can make a true Christian profession, the kind of profession that we would read about in Romans 10 .9, that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is 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 Holy Spirit in that person.

Salvation is a gift. It is initiated by and impossible without the powerful, regenerating work of the Spirit in that particular individual. The first picture we have from these first three verses is Corinth as a pagan place.

From all of this, I want us to see two things here. Firstly, I want us to see that many of the excesses that were visible in the Corinthian church are again visible today in the modern 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. The seeking above all else for supernatural encounters. Seeing 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 Spirit. Sam and I were sharing video clips of Bethel church and people that were going to the 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 Christians have no grasp of the Bible or of the historical theology, they don't realize that their pursuit of ecstatic experiences is not only not Christian, it's not even Corinthian.

It's even worse, it's pagan. It's true that there is no such thing as a new heresy under the sun. What we see often times unfortunately in these, I'm going to pick specifically on the uber charismatic churches, is just a repetition of the Corinthian error.

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. The reason is because God has saved us from our pagan former manner of life. 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.

He speaks about not being idolaters or adulterers or to practice homosexuality or to be thieves or to be greedy or drunkards or vilers or swindlers. He says, and such were some of you, but you were washed and you were sanctified.

What sweet words, think about the meaning of those words if you've tuned out for a second. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of our God.

How that ought to move us, dear brothers and sisters, to praise unto God and to service in his kingdom. We were, you were, 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.

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. 1 Peter chapter 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.

And how this ought to move us to faithfully serve Christ. That we were once dead, I like the way Votie Bauckham 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.

You were following the desires of your mind and every wind that blew about. 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.

I feel like I have permission to use this particular illustration because most of you weren't here when 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.

I once heard a story about an English nobleman who came to California for the gold rush in the 19th century. 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.

And as he was in New Orleans, he was in the city and there was a slave market that was taking place. 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.

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. And 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.

And so this man moved, a sincere Christian man, moved with tremendous compassion for this young woman. He raised his hand and he said, I will pay twice the price of the highest bidder for that young lady.

And the auctioneer said, no one has ever done that before, to pay twice the price of a slave girl. 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.

And then 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. And when he presented the manumission papers to her, she looked at him in the eyes and spit in his face.

And he said to her, don't you understand? I'm trying to set you free. I'm trying to let you go so you can, you can go free and not be subjected to the evils of slavery and the evils of this world. 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? 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, 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? But how much more has God paid that we might go free? Not, 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, 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. See him there, the Lord Jesus Christ, the noblest of all men, righteous and above all reproach, 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.

Brothers and sisters, how could we serve any other master in all the world? Next we see in verse 4, Paul says, now there are varieties of gifts, but the same spirit. And there are varieties of service, but the same Lord.

And there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the spirit for the common good. The second statement, statement number two that we can make from our passage is this, not only have we been redeemed from our pagan past, but number two, we have been empowered by one triune 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 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 spirit, from ultimately one triune God.

And we see that in verses 4, 5, and 6. There are varieties of gifts, but the same spirit. And there are varieties of gifts, but the same Lord. And the same God. And here you see every person in the Holy Trinity encapsulated in those three verses.

The Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit working in triunity to empower, verse 7 tells us, each and every Christian to serve that one God for the common good. And as I mentioned earlier, as Paul often does, before he gets to the practical, he must address the theological.

In the last point, he dealt with anthropology, the doctrine of man, and soteriology, the doctrine of salvation. And now he's dealing with theology proper, the doctrine of God. And what it would appear is that the Corinthians were drifting back to a bit of a polytheistic view where they would attribute different gifts to different spirits.

And so they'd say, oh that gift comes from that spirit, and that gift comes from that God, and that is the 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.

And not only does he reference the Trinity, but then he repeats the word one spirit, or one Holy Spirit, ten times in this particular passage, ten times in this chapter. What he's trying to get at is they are serving one God, by the power of one 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. I don't think that we would say, well Ty has the gift of a firm handshake, you do brother, and that comes from the God of Thor.

I don't think any of us would think in that particular way. But I do think that many of us are tempted to engage in a bit of a more subtle variation of that. 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.

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. 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, that he would bear fruit in the preaching that we're about to do. Some of us are more naturally talented, 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. 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.

But even then, where our desires that would be holy depended 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.

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. But like the Corinthians, we must be directed back to solitary reliance upon a sovereign 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. 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. 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 will find is that it is one of the richest courses that we do in the Institute for Church Leadership through the Master Seminary.

And 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. 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 Baptist pastor named A .C. Dixon.

He lived in the late 1800s and he said this, he said, when we rely on organization, we get what organization can get, or what organization can do. When we rely on education, we get what education can do.

When we rely on eloquence, we get what eloquence can do. But when we rely upon God in prayer, we get what God can do. So many of our lives, we rely upon God in prayer. We get what organization can get.

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 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 in the power of God, and God's working through you is an afterthought?

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, 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, right?

His superhuman ability to accomplish so much, to preach almost every day of the week. 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.

To be the most published man, one of the most published men in all of human history. To speak without amplification. 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. And I know that many of you know what he would say as he went up each step into that pulpit.

He would recite to himself, I believe in the Holy Spirit. I believe in the 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 Holy Spirit.

And I love what John Stott says about this. He says in his book, 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 Holy Spirit.

And my question is to you, dear friends, maybe in a bit of a cheeky fashion, do you believe in the Holy Spirit? Is that evidenced by how you live your life and how dependent you are on the Holy Spirit?

Or do you live as a secularist in a Christian's body? Next, in verses 8 through 11, we read this,. For to one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same 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.

All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit who apportions to each one individually as he wills. 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.

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. In this particular passage that I just read, we looked at nine particular gifts.

Some might say, are those the only gifts that God gives us in the church? 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.

If you wanted to go back this week and maybe do a bit of a spiritual inventory, what are the gifts of the Spirit, at least as they are revealed in Scripture, and what gifts might I have? You can look here in 1 Corinthians 12, but I'd also direct you to Romans 12, Romans 12 verses 6 -8.

You can look at Ephesians 4, in verse 11. Steve, do you know what's in Ephesians 4, verse 11? Apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, teachers. Sorry for putting you on the spot like that. In 1 Peter 4, 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. We've looked at this before, but there's a two-fold distinction between those that are speaking gifts, those are gifts that are prominent in the church, and those that are serving gifts.

I think that's a very biblical distinction to make because we see Peter make that distinction in 1 Peter 4, verse 11. This distinction between those who speak and those who serve. In verses 8 -11, Paul relays that some have been given the gift, for instance, of the utterance of wisdom and knowledge.

Others have been given the gift of prophecy or tongues. In verse 28, he lists the apostles, the prophets, and the teachers. These are the most prominent gifts in the church because they are the speaking gifts.

They are the head, the mouth, and the eyes of the body. 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.

There are some people that the Lord gifts, and their purpose is to help. 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.

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.

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. Now, whenever you read 1 Corinthians chapter 12, inevitably the question will come up, well Shane, what about the gift of tongues?

What about the gift of prophecy? What about these miraculous, these supernatural gifts? 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.

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.

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. But what I would suggest is that these supernatural gifts are not given to the church today, at least in the same way.

And I want to make a very brief case for that. In the Bible, for instance, we see that the office of apostle. I know that there are churches in the city today who have apostles, at least they claim to have apostles.

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. 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.