“Spiritual Gifts”

In all honesty I don’t really know what I should preach to you because I have a really good message prepared on the spiritual gifts, but I'm not certain I have time to explain all that is there.  Tonight we are having a seminar and the following Sunday night on spiritual gifts.  It is for you.  It is for you to come and sit down in a very practical fashion, look at the scriptures and say, "Okay, if I am a member of the Body of Christ, if Christ has gifted me, where am I best gifted?  Where has He trained me and shaped me so that I can go to work?  So, if you'd like a deeper understanding of this, then join us tonight at 5:30 and we will begin over in the Fellowship Hall.  We will walk through some things, our teachers and instructors will be staff members.  I get to sit and listen, of which I am very grateful.  It is fun.  You know, when you are a younger preacher, you like to do the preaching all the time.  But, sometimes when you have done it as long as I have, you get frankly tired of hearing yourself talk and you like to listen and be taught sometimes, so I am looking forward to that.

But, I think what I would like for us to do, is to simply deal with the results in the church of the fact that the Spirit gifts us.  Now I don’t have time to explain individual gifts.  I may make some comments along the way, but what I want to do is to call your attention and my attention to the fact, maybe in a bit of a strange way, that God is among us. 

The time changed this morning, didn't it?  Do you like that?  I don’t!  Every time we mess with nature we mess up.  In Florida, back in the 30s they spent all kinds of money damming up the Kissimmee River so they could do a lot more traversing of the river, it would be a lot more convenient.  In recent years, you know what they have spent all kinds of money doing? Sending the Kissimmee River back to its natural flow because it was destroying all the wetlands.  In South Florida they introduced a tree from the Latin American countries called the melaleuca tree.  Because it was a water tree that sucked up gallons of water out of the wetlands; they needed to dry them up.  Do you know what the plague in South Florida is now?  Melaleuca trees.  So, I think Daylight Savings Time is of the Devil!  [Laughter]

No, what I really thought about Daylight Savings Time was this. It reminded me how small and insignificant the church is in the world.  Why do they do it on Saturday night?  Why don't they do it on Sunday night?  Why….it would disrupt the work world!  It would cause everything to come to a stop.  We wouldn't know how to listen to Tony Cruise because he wouldn't be on yet!  [Laughter]  I saw him over there shaking his head, so I thought that would be appropriate!.

We are pretty insignificant…..but are we?  And the trouble is we let that come into our lives and we begin to think that we are insignificant as a Christian, and that the Church, herself, is insignificant because we have no sway in the world anymore… it seems.  Oh…and we live in such a strange world that needs a saviour so badly.  We have political candidates on the left and the right that cannot be trusted with their morality.  We are going to be electing a new President next year.  Who in the world can a Christian vote for with a clear conscience.  Vote, you should, my friend, we have a privilege and vote the best you can.   But sometimes it's hard.  Our society has done a to-do over the woman of ill repute who died and they are still trying to decide how she died and it has covered the news.  An article yesterday in the Saturday paper worried about Brittany Spears' sanity.  You know, somebody took a survey not too long ago of known names in the United States of America, and they listed the biggest names in Christianity, that you and I would probably recognize, and they listed them alongside people like: Oprah, Bill Gates, and, do you know, the biggest names in the church were virtually unrecognizable by the American public.  Nobody knew who they were.  We don't even compete….so how important is the church to you?  What does She mean to you? 

In my lifetime I've watched Her slip down the pole of priorities, lower and lower She gets.  I do understand that some of her changes are very much cultural and that we should be willing to adapt to.  We should never give Biblical precedence to things that are just cultural.  But, issues such as commitment, value, finding the very life of God in the church and finding church a necessity is for some hardly even thought of.  It was years ago that the most regular attenders in church, believe it or not in our mobile society, missed 15 Sundays a year.  Sometimes we just travel that much.  Sometimes we don't care.

What has come to life for me, in looking at the spiritual gifts are these things.  This is an overview, not a detailed view.  A review for our mind is the design of spiritual gifts; their purpose in the life of the church.  For one thing, because there are many gifts with various operations, take your Bibles please and look at 1 Corinthians 12:

I didn't have you turn there first because I really didn't know where we were going to look in the scriptures this morning, but we are going to stick with this text and I want you to look at 1 Corinthians 12:4 and see that God has planned for a diverse church.

"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. "

There are some who take that and divide that into three nice, neat categories to tell us what types of gifts are what.  But I don’t think it says that at all.  All the Spirit of God is telling us is that all the gifts are from God and are empowered by God.  And, in their expresses the varieties are many.  Varieties of gifts, lots of gifts and with those gifts there are varieties of services.  One teacher might teach adults, one teacher might teach preschoolers.  One teacher might be more studied and direct in his approach; the other might be far more charismatic in the common sense of the word, not the Biblical sense of the word, in how demonstrative (s)he communicates as a teacher.  And there are varieties of activities; different things going on in the church.  The church is full of diversity  but the gifts are designed and purposed for unity.  Look at Verse 7:

"To each [that is each member] is given the manifestation  of the Spirit for the common good."  Every gift has the same purpose within the Body and that is the common good of the Body for her, for her growth, for her strengthening, for Her honoring.  Strengthening the weak, honoring those who have succeeded and every gift if to take the individual and the Body to maturity and it is a manifestation  of the Spirit of God.  That is where we begin to grasp what we are talking about.

Does God ever seem distant to you?  Do you ever wonder if He is really there?  Do you wonder where His power is?  Where the sense of His presence is?  Do you know that sometimes it is nothing more than our blindness to Him every day of our lives.  That is why the Bible tells us, 'The Heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork."  Every creature, every creation ought to be the line that is traced directly to God.  Your creativity, your ability to think and imagine ought to be this line back to God, but, because we live in a world that has shrunk God and shrunk the Church, we don't think that way anymore.  So this has alerted me to think that way, so when I look at you and see you serve, whether it is opening a door or taking an umbrella, or teaching a class, or setting up for the Lord's Supper, I am watching a manifestation  of the Spirit of God at work. 

Why are you here this morning?  Because it is culturally fun to be here?  No, some of you can’t wait until bracket Sundays so you can get home and see what the place in the tournament is for the NCAA.  Scott's going to be flashing that up during the Spiritual Gifts seminar, so you can come and watch it. [Laughter] Sorry, no he's not.  But all of us that have any interest in that are highly interested in it.  I watched a good bit of athletics yesterday on television; I was flipping through the channels and found the SEC Track and Field Championships at University of Kentucky (UK).  I watched the men run the Mile; right at 4 minutes.  I can't drive my car that fast!  [laughter]  Can you imagine what it takes to get a human body capable of running 5,280 feet in 4 minutes?  Can you imagine that?  Why?  What is it that possessed this man, these young men, to literally take their bodies and put them to torture so they can cross a finish line in 4 minutes, and hopefully be first?  I'm wondering what it would look like in the Church of God if we realized we have been gifted of the Holy Spirit of God and what we do is the manifestation  of the Spirit to express His beautiful diversity  and to build the wonderful unity in the Body and I have been given a particular gift for that; if we might go through the strain, if we might gain the value  of serving God?

What are some of these gifts?  Let's just look at them briefly and I will make a few comments.  I think there maybe some questions in the back of your minds as to what some of these gifts are.

Verse 8:  "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 of these are empowered by one and the same Spirit who apportions to each one individually as he wills."

I'll make a couple of statements.  That is an extremely difficult passage of scripture to understand all the details of and apply in our day, and I have watched commentator after commentator, who are good and Godly men write and study these words in detail and all of them come to a bit of a different conclusion.  Part of it is as a result of safety.  We don't understand it because culturally and expressively there are some things that we have not experienced in our lives so the best thing to do is to squeeze them down into a mold so that we are safe.  Well, there is one thing I know about God, he is NOT safe!  Do you think it was safe the day Jesus went into the Temple and was incensed with holy rage and made a whip of his own mind and his own hands and drove out the moneychangers and the animals and turned over their tables?  I don't think that was a safe day.  We don't serve a safe God.  Safe gods don't save people; they are unable to.  Our God is not safe.

And then you have the flip side of this to where people throw their brains out the window and say, "Well, yes these things are wonderful expressions of the Spirit of God, if I could just lose my mind and get out of myself and get into some kind of ecstatic state then I'll know that I have God because I've had this experience."

Neither of those are anywhere close to the truth.  Let's just walk this through very quickly:
To one is given the first gift [listed in verse 8] the utterance of wisdom; the second is listed the utterance of knowledge.

From a study of scripture there is virtually no difference between those two gifts.  And the real issue here is not knowledge and wisdom, the real issue is utterance.  These are the ability to convey messages of wisdom and knowledge to God's people by the Spirit of God.   The word, message, is Logos.  The word, it seems to me, would have to do with understanding the mystery of the Gospel of Christ.

The third one listed there is, according to the same Spirit, to another Faith by the same Spirit.  This is not saving faith.  Saving faith rests in the objective Gospel of Christ's death on the cross.  This faith, however, is also a faith with an object.  There is no faith in the Bible that doesn’t have an object.  You don't create things by faith.  That's not the gift of faith.  This would be like the faith of George Mueller, the man who founded the orphanages in England a couple of centuries back by faith that God would feed those orphans and provide his needs if he would just ask him in prayer.  He had an object; he was given a special gift of faith to believe in something great.  Some people have that gift.  It is not weird.  It is always in line with the scriptures but they don’t have a specific scripture promise that all believers are to believe; it may be something specific to them and they have the ability to believe it.

To another, gifts of healing by the One Spirit.  Sometimes I go way back to older commentaries because it removes us from the day….I love what John Calvin said about that.  You know what his explanation was?  "Everybody knows what that it."  You have one of the most brilliant men who has ever lived and his explanation of the gift of healing is, 'well, we understand that.' 

You understand that from the gospels, it is the gift of healing.  It is the God-given ability to heal sickness, but if you look at how it's written, it is in the pleural: Gifts of healing.  Most sensible commentators talk about this probably being individuals in the church only enabled by the Spirit of God to heal probably certain kinds of illnesses.  One person may be able to heal leprosy; the other one might be able to heal epilepsy.  We don't know the details of that, but that is the appearances of that; a healing that is miraculous similar to the healings of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Then he goes on and he lists not only healings but he says, "To another the working of miracles."  Now, why we translate that miracles even in good translations I'm really not sure, because it really says, the working of powers.  It seems to be more in the spiritual realm of confronting the demonic and the ability to do that, and, again it is in the pleural.  He goes on and write on another gift, not only does he talk about the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits; to another various kinds of tongues; to another interpretation of tongues.

Let me say just a few things very quickly because we will run out of time.  There are some well known teachers who I agree with in many, many areas and I think they have some weight to stand on, but I am not convinced of their arguments based on a verse in Chapter 13.  Would you look with me please in Chapter 13, Verse 8.  This is the great "Love Chapter." We'll look, Lord willing, at it next week.

Verse 8:

"Love never ends.  But as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.  When I was a child I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man I gave up childish ways.  For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.  Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. So now faith, hope and love abide, but the greatest of these is love."

For some of you, I am going to apologize ahead of time, this is going to go right over your head.  Others of you are going to sit on the edge of your seat because you've wondered what my position on this issue is.  The position of prophecy and tongues, are they gifts that are available to the body today?  Quickly said, "Yes, I believe they are." And this is why I think that.  It is in Verse 8 where is says, "As for prophecies they will cease, as for tongues they will cease, that some good and godly people believe that with the fulfillment of the New Testament these "sign gifts" passed away.  But the context just will not support that because if it does, then knowledge is passed away, too.  The expression of knowledge.  It is not gone, we still have it.  And on top of that, what is this perfect thing, for we know in part and we prophesy in part, and that is true and it is still true.  But when the perfect comes; what's the perfect?  I find that it would be impossible for the Corinthians to have understood "the perfect" would be when the New Testament would be complete, especially when this was one of the first books written.  What is the completeness?  The completeness is nothing more, I think, than when Jesus comes back.  But, when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.  When I was a child I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man I gave up childish ways. 

He's maturing, and even in this maturity,  for now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.

So what do you do with the gift of tongues? It is so rarely understood. 

A couple of things:

1.       The Bible tells us that God has distributed in the Body every member as he wills.  He has given the gifts as he wants to.  Nobody and no teaching in the Bible ever tells us that all gifts have to be operative  in every church in every age.  God is sovereign over them.  We have to give Him the freedom to do those things.  In the Bible the word, glossa, glossolalia is the word used for tongues.  You can research that and research that and research that until the end of the age and you will find that the word glossa which is used for tongues always means cognitive information, has nothing to do with ecstatic utterances where somebody loses themselves  and they don’t know what they are saying.  They may not understand it, but if the gift of tongues is to be present, there is always to be an interpreter who understands that and translates it for the benefit of the church.  And there are guidelines as we'll see in 1 Corinthians 14.  That if tongue-speaking took place in church, it had to take place one at a time, no more than three and the interpreter always had to be present.  If those guidelines were followed, I think we would all be comfortable with the issue.

Am I advocating speaking in terms in our church?   No, I'm not.  I'm advocating absolute submission to the Word of God for what he says.

Okay, now I know you've gone all directions. First of all, I made some of you really happy that Tony said we can still speak in tongues; then when I said they are all cognitive  languages you were unhappy with me again; others of you think I have gone charismatic and I'm going to start soliciting speaking in tongues.  I'm only scratching the surface of what I could tell you.  Then, in most modern tongues instances, studied in different cultures, in each culture, every tongue analyzed always is a mimic  of the person they learned it from and always is consistent with the sounds of their particular tongue and language.  It has never been, in modern day times, most of the time it is never an understandable language; it is not an earthly known language.  It could be the tongues of angels as Paul said you could speak in, but they still would be cognitive.

Alright, I'm going to leave you there to squirm for a bit because then we have the gift of prophecy and that's exactly why I tried to keep myself from going into this because I'm going to run out of time, and you are going to say, Oh, Oh, I want to know about that.  Prophecy?  Do we have prophets today?  I think we do.  I think men and women both can exercise the gift of prophecy.  Paul allowed for it in 1^st and 2^nd Corinthians.  But I do not think it is akin to the Old Testament gift of prophecy, because if you follow prophecy in the New Testament….in the Old Testament a prophet was stoned if his prophecy did not come true.  That was his legitimacy.  You don’t find that in the New Testament.  You also find prophecies, words of the Spirit, given directly to people that are disobeyed because they have been weighed.  As a matter  of fact, the church is told to weigh prophecies out… it is told to find out if they are genuine or not, to test them and to judge them. You don’t find any Old Testament prophecies judged or tested, except for the fact that they were true by seeing if the came true or not.  That will be helpful and we'll come back to that in Chapter 14 when we get to the delightful time where Paul told the women to be silent in the church; that will be another great time where we will have high-attendance day!  But that will help you understand exactly what he was talking about.  He was not telling women they couldn't talk in the church; after all he has already acknowledged the fact that they pray and prophecy in the church, and so this will give us a guideline in that.

Is it equal to revelation in scripture? No.  Can it be full of mistakes? Yes.  That's why they are to be weighed, but it is still a work of God.

Now, by the way…one more thing and we are going to have to leave this.  We always get hung up on miracles, healings, tongues and prophecy, and we forget in this very same chapter he lists the gift of helping and the gift of administrating.  But we only call miracles and tongues and things like that the charismata, the charismatic gifts, but, according to the Bible, helping and administrating are equally charismatic to speaking in tongues.  Why?  Because it is the Spirit of God.

Very quickly, some responses and some conclusions.  I wish that I had a way and I pray God the Spirit would do it, would be to come to you right now and get your little face in His strong and loving hands and pull your eyes and your gaze to Him and say "Listen to me.  If you want to see evidence that I exist, trust my Word and look for it in my people."  Then he takes us, his people, and says, "Now give them that witness." 

I look at spiritual gifts and think… I'm gifted of the Spirit of God. I'm gifted in a body to where my gift cannot properly be expressed  without the support and receiving of others.  Then, one of the major things is that I am dependent on God and other people, which breeds humility.  And in our world, I can't think of a quicker way to see the working of the Spirit of God, who is a gift of the Son of God, who humbled himself and became obedient to the cross and died for us.  I think of gratitude and my mind begins to draw conclusions in this power-hungry world, and this passage says to me, as God grabs my face and pulls me to Him and he says, "Tony, are you aware of my presence, or have you grown dull and stale to the supernatural work that is going on in your people every day and when you come are you reverent in my presence?  Are you seeking me with all of your heart? Do you see the wonder and the value  of being with God's people, and do you understand that you are in my presence?"