Strong Gifts

Oh, Father, thank you, Lord, for the testimonies that we have heard, because these are not testimonies of human ability. They're not testimonies of men and women who got their lives together. Rather, these are the stories of rescue.

The story of a God who is greater than all of our sin, who comes into our mess and rescues us from our sin. And without that, we are hopeless. Thank you, Lord God, for these testimonies. And we pray now, Lord, that you would stir up in us spiritual gifts in order that we would go and minister this gospel of reconciliation, that sinners can be reconciled to a holy God, that the great divide has been crossed by Jesus when he descended and came into this world, was born of a virgin, died on a cross, ascended to the Father, and gave gifts to men.

Father, give us your gifts, Lord, not for us and not for our glory, but for you and for your glory, for the building up of your church. We need more of you, Lord Jesus. We need you, God. Speak to us today in your scriptures.

In Jesus' name we pray, amen. So the main idea of this series has been construction-related, and we've looked at what are those things, those stones, that make for a strong church. We began with Luke 20, 17, and we say that the church is, first of all, founded upon the gospel.

We need to be preaching Christ. The cornerstone is him. Some people trip on that cornerstone, and they're crushed by it, according to Luke 20, 17, and 18, but those who stand upon Christ are saved. He is the rock of our salvation, so the gospel needs to be the first and foremost piece of our preaching.

We preach Christ and him crucified. That's the first thing. Next, we look to the rest of the foundation, which we found in Ephesians 2, 20. Christ is the cornerstone, but the foundation built around that cornerstone is the apostles and the prophets.

That speaks to the New Testament-inspired writers, the Old Testament, the writing of the scripture becomes the foundation. Notice, we don't have Peter here this morning, do we? We don't have James and John.

We don't have the apostles in person today, but we have written for us the words of the apostles. We have their letters that have been preserved by God, and it becomes the foundation of our church, Ephesians 2, 20.

Third, what was the next foundation piece beyond that? Well, we looked to Acts chapter 4. Acts chapter 4 speaks of Christ as the cornerstone, but it's in the context of the boldness that the disciples have in preaching Christ and the theology that they hold, that what man meant for evil, God intended for good.

And we talked last week about the importance of theology. Theology is not just for pastors. It's not just for seminarians. It's for all of us who believe in God, to keep God at the center, to study God.

That's what theology is. So we talked about that some last week, and today we move into the fourth, and that will be found, if you'll turn with me, in Psalm 95. We're actually going to the old to look at the new.

Psalm 95, and I'm just going to read it. I've also given you, if you'll notice in your notes, many scriptures that relate to spiritual gifts. We won't be able to go through all of them, but does everybody have the notes?

Take these home with you and study from there. We'll spend a little bit of time in Psalm 95 and grab some teachings out of those other texts, but it's going to be on you to go home and read those things and look at the notes I've given you and see if these things are so.

Psalm 95. Main idea here is that spiritual gifts are prominent in the book of Acts. We're not going to read through those things, but if you read the book of Acts, you'll see that the church is built not by the power of men in their craftiness, in their excellence of speech.

No, the church is built on the power of God, and to build the church we need God's power active in our lives, in our ministries, stirring us up to minister and serve others and to speak by the power of the Spirit of God.

We need spiritual gifts operating in the fellowship. It's part of what the church is. We go out in the power of the Spirit to do His work. We need these things today, but we live in a day and age where there are abuses of the spiritual gifts and things that look like spiritual gifts or are called that by some people are actually counterfeits.

We need to be careful that what we do in the spiritual world is in fact scriptural. So we're going to begin with a broader context, not here speaking directly about spiritual gifts, but speaking of a larger Christian submission to God.

In Psalm 95, we see what worship really is, and spiritual gifts, however they operate in the church, should look a lot like this. So follow along with me, please. Everybody, this is life and death stuff, if you're dozing off.

This is the Word of God. We need this. Psalm 95, O come, let us sing to the Lord. Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation. Let us come into His presence with thanksgiving. Let us make a joyful noise to Him with songs of praise.

For the Lord is a great God and a great King above all gods. In His hand are the depths of the earth. The heights of the mountains are His also. The sea is His, for He made it. And His hands form the dry land.

O come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord, our maker. For He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand. The passage continues with a warning that needs to be heeded, but let's focus on the first seven verses.

Three things I want us to see. Here we have praise offered to God, and God here is called, verse one, the rock of our salvation. We have been given a gift. Those of us who have gathered here in the name of Jesus, believing in Christ, we have been given the gift of salvation.

He has taken sinners like us and saved us from our sin, spared us from the wrath of God. Christ bore our sin on the cross. This is the gift of God to us. How then shall we approach Him? Psalm 95 shows us that.

We come, first of all, with worship. Spiritual gifts will be the topic today, but notice, as we come before God, whatever we do, it needs to be doxological. We need to come in a spirit of worship. A doxology is a short word of praise.

It's something spoken or sung to the glory of God. Notice, if nothing else, this psalm is doxological. Let us sing to the Lord. Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation. When we gather on Sunday morning, this should not be a quiet room.

Now, when I'm preaching, I understand quietness because we need to hear what's being taught, but when we sing, that noise should be joyful. It should come from the depths of our heart, because we are singing to the rock of our salvation, the one who died to take away our sin.

It should affect how we sing. There should be an exclamation point at the end of our worship times. Verse three, why? For the Lord is a great God. Doxological. A great King above all gods. In His hand are the depths of the earth, and the psalmist goes on, doxology, giving glory to God.

That's the first thing. The second thing, though, is that we gather dependent on one another. Worship needs to be dependent. Some people say, hey, I'm a Christian, I'm spiritual, but I don't need church.

I can just go sit under a tree, or go out by a river, and that's where I have church, me and the Trinity, but that's not what we learn from this psalm. Look at verse one, oh come let us sing. Second part of verse one, let us make a joyful noise to the rock.

Verse two, let us come into His presence. Let us make a joyful noise. There is something important about the assembly of the Christians, especially on Sunday morning. Revelation 1 10, John says he was in the spirit of the Lord on the Lord's day.

The curia hamera, the day of the Lord, the day that belongs to Jesus. Sunday morning is His time, and we gather together, not scattered, but assembled. Let us come and worship Him. We're dependent on one another.

And third, the final thing to notice from this psalm, not only are the spiritual gifts doxological, meaning therefore the glorification of Jesus, not only are they dependent, meaning we do this in community as an assembly, but third, spiritual gifts are delimited by scripture.

Let me get into what I mean by that. Scripture sets the boundaries of how we use and operate in the spiritual gifts. I came from a high school basketball team that produced eight ministers that I can count, maybe more, just within the that late 1990s.

We were all playing basketball together, and many of us have gone on to become ministers. It's an interesting thing, and many other church men too that didn't go into the full-time ministry, but it was, it's an astonishing thing, and it wasn't the coach who led us into that, because he was, he got saved when we graduated.

But there was something about that class in the 1990s. One of them, who's a good friend of mine, his name is Michael Koulianos. He is a Pentecostal minister. He actually married Benny Hinn's daughter.

Benny Hinn's a famous TV guy. Now listen, I want to say that some of what you see on TV, including the ministries of Benny Hinn, which Michael might not agree with everything Benny does, some of what you see is not appropriate scripturally.

I don't find any place in the scripture where there's the waving of the coat and the slaying in the spirit, where people fall down unconscious. I don't see uninterpreted tongues spoken in the congregation as legitimate.

I don't see over ecumenism, where all roads seem to come together, even Roman Catholicism, as if there's no differences. A minimizing of doctrinal differences is a problem. And there's other areas that I would disagree with, but I'll tell you what, I would love to go down to Florida, to Orlando in September, and worship with Michael Koulianos.

Yes, there's problems, and the scriptures are delimiting that we should not abuse, and I'm not minimizing what those problems are, but I'll tell you what, when Michael and his friends worship, you see people on their knees, and you see tears coming down their face, and you see hands raised, and they are worshiping Jesus Christ.

Not a different Jesus, the true Jesus of the Bible. And yes, there's errors, and there's problems, especially on TBN, I get that, but there's also a thousand millennials that will gather. And as the church takes sniping shots at Pentecostals, there's a group of worshipers.

And I just want to ask you this one thing about this, look back in the scripture, is it appropriate to kneel? Is it appropriate to raise hands? Is it appropriate to show emotion in worship? Psalm 95 verse 6, oh come let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our maker, for he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.

See, the devil loves to take something that's good, and push it out of bounds, and distort it into something that's not good. But we, brothers and sisters, are prone to error too. We are prone to sit on our hands, and it's better to be passionately on fire for the Lord Jesus, and working out your salvation, than to be frozen chosen, as the saying used to go.

We can have both, we can have sound doctrine, we talked about it last week, but that should not keep us from passionate, fiery, warm hearts, and emotion is okay. It needs to be appropriately displayed.

So we're going to talk about spiritual gifts, and I know we only have five or ten minutes, so you're going to go home and study some of these things, but flip with me to a couple of the passages. There are four major lists of spiritual gifts in the New Testament.

I remember them by 4 -4 -12 -12. 1 Peter 4, Ephesians 4, Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, and that 1 Corinthians passage goes on for three chapters. I want us to turn to the first one, 1 Peter 4, and I'll make just a quick point.

1 Peter chapter 4, verses 9 to 11. In keeping with Psalm 95, wherever you see spiritual gifts spoken about, you see these three concerns raised. Spiritual gifts are meant to be doxological. That is, they direct praise and glory, not to the person with a gift, but to the giver.

They direct praise and worship to the giver, the rock of our salvation. Doxological, dependent, they are for the edification of the body, for the church in assembly, for the building up the body in unity and in love, and third, they are delimited.

There are things that are out of bounds, and you'll find those mostly in the latter part of 1 Corinthians 12 -14, where the abuses of spiritual gifts are rebuked in that section. You're going to need to study that on your own, but 1 Peter 4, you're with me now, verses 9 through 11, notice the main concerns.

Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God's varied grace. Whoever speaks as one who speaks oracles of God, whoever serves as one who serves by the strength that God supplies.

In order that, that's the hena clause, the purpose clause, in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, and here's an actual doxology, to him belong glory and dominion forever and ever.

Amen. See the connection? There are two kinds of spiritual gifts talked about here. They're really categories, speaking gifts and serving gifts, the result of which is doxology. When we live and operate in the spiritual gifts that are given to us, God receives glory.

He is glorified. To him be the glory, dominion forever and ever. Amen. But the second thing is that there's a dependence. There's a building up of the body together. Each one has received a gift, but the body together operates in the spiritual gifts.

So we're to welcome one another and use these gifts together. In this church, we are not one of the churches that has 20 of the people doing 90 of the work. Look around. Notice, in our church, we have people who serve.

Somebody mowed the lawn this this week, and that happens every week. IHN comes every quarter. Everybody jumps on board. How many kids own teachers? How many people decorating and planning for this building?

The different and varied gifts are operating in this church. That category of service is strong. It needs to get stronger with all the strength that we have. But the second category of speaking is something that I would like to see us do more.

Speaking on Sunday morning happens from the pulpit, and we'll learn if we had time in Ephesians 4, we'd see that God gives gifts. There's the same context there, and the gifts there are offices or people.

He says the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastor teachers. Now from Ephesians 4, follow with me for a minute. From Ephesians 4 11, apostles and prophets refer to the foundational gift of the apostling leaders of the church who then prophetically give us the scriptures.

They're foundational in that context. You following? That comes from Ephesians 2 20 and Ephesians 3 5. It follows right into Ephesians 4 11. They're foundational. Then the third list there is evangelists, who are those of us who go out preaching the gospel all around, into Camden, onto the streets, into Mount Laurel.

But the final there is pastors and teachers. In that case, in Ephesians 4, there's no distinction between the two. There's no article. So it's saying that the pastor and the teacher is the same person.

According to Ephesians 4, God gives pastors and teachers, and for 2 ,000 years there has been pulpits in churches where a person who's given that gift preaches the word of God. That needs to happen, and where it doesn't, the church will always die.

There needs to be the true preaching of God's word. Calvin and Luther said that's a mark of a true church, where the word of God is rightly delivered, along with the really ordinances, baptism and communion.

That needs to be there. But now we're back to 1 Peter. Thank you for going with me in Ephesians for a minute. We're done with that. Back to 1 Peter, all of your speaking and serving. There's a whole category of speaking gifts, many of which go beyond this pulpit.

When we gather on a Sunday morning, everyone who believes in Christ is a minister of the gospel, and you have speaking gifts. This is what I want to say to us this morning, don't miss this. You need to walk up to someone in the hall and say, how's your walk with Christ?

And brothers and sisters, be honest with one another, share how your walk with Christ is, and then begin to speak life into that person. Speak encouragement, exhortation, 1 Corinthians 14 2, prophesying in the sense of proclaiming, foretelling, not prophesying in the foretelling sense, but speaking into their life, asking that the spirit will make you a minister, a priest to that person.

And then standing in the hall, put your hand on their shoulder and pray over that person. Do this all week long, make phone calls, recognize that you have speaking gifts. If we were to go through 1 Corinthians 12 to 14, we'll see that many of those are speaking gifts.

Someone has a word of knowledge, that's differentiated from a word of wisdom. I think a word of knowledge, because it's differentiated from a word of wisdom, refers to a gift of knowledge of the scriptures.

There are people who can memorize chapters and books of the Bible and can correlate that data into systematic theology and teach, that's a gift of knowledge. Some have a gift of wisdom, where you can come alongside someone and counsel them how to work through this problem at work and to apply the scriptures to their lives.

Maybe you have a gift of wisdom, maybe you have a gift of prophecy, where you can teach and profess the word of God. My point is this, you have gifts, use them. On Sunday morning and all week long, we need the spiritual gifts operating in this church.

So I'm going to kind of wrap this up in a way with the main ideas of what I'm trying to say. One, the spiritual gifts need to be for the glory of God, not for the glory of any minister, any anointed man of God, any crusade leader or any such thing.

Praise and glory is directed upward, not vertically, that's first. Second, we depend on the operating of the gifts. This church has been growing and is getting stronger because many people are throwing their hand into the work.

We depend on one another to keep going and the more we step out in faith, the more work there will be to do. When you're not gifted by the spirit, when you're operating from a deficit, you run from ministry.

You want nothing of it on your table, but when the spirit is filling you, when you're filled with the spirit of the living God, you run into that battle. That's what sends a person to Camden. That's what makes you go and minister rather than dealing with your own stuff.

You need the filling of the spirit. We depend on one another. And third, it's delimited, so be careful. Study what the scriptures say because there are abuses that are done in the name of spiritual gifts that are not the genuine.

They're counterfeit. They're done in the flesh. We need more spiritual gifts. We had a prayer meeting, Ryan and I. We pray every Wednesday. For over a year, we've been praying and this last time was particularly powerful.

We were praying in the church office and we were praying through Acts 4 at the time. You can read the end of Acts chapter 4 about how the Lord answered, but we were praying for gifting in the body, for spiritual gifts to come forth and people to begin to use them.

And Ryan actually said some things that I think were prophetic in the sense of insightful that God gave them for what we should do. One of the things was that as the service ends this week, we're going to ask people to just leave unless you want to come and pray.

And this will be an open area up here. If you want someone to pray for you, to pray over you, take some time. And we knew that this came from the Lord. How do we know it? Because within a few minutes of when we said amen, a lightning bolt struck so loud it rocked the church building.

It knocked the internet out, destroyed our modem, fried the power strip. It hit our church within minutes of when this prayer was over. And we said, weren't we just praying Acts chapter 4? And after they had prayed and asked for these things, the place where they were meeting was shaken and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit.

Listen, the point was we were praying. Spiritual gifts are grace gifts. They come from the grace of God. You can't demand them. They're the mercy of God. But we are to earnestly desire them, to ask God for a filling of the Spirit.

So we're going to open this up at the end here. After the song, I just ask if you would just depart quietly once the last song is over. I won't even do the goodbye time, okay? Once the song is over, Michael will give you the cue and just slip out.

But please come and let someone pray over you that God would use you as a minister of the gospel. Amen? Let's pray. Michael, come on up.