“Now Concerning Spiritual Gifts…” (Part 1 of 6)

When we start discovering our spiritual gifts, sometimes we discover that we're serving in areas of ministry where we're not well suited.

So what do we do if that's the case? Today on Truth for Life Weekend, Alistair Begg begins a new series that teaches us how to use our God-given spiritual gifts effectively within the church body. We'll point out to the whole question of spiritual gifts. Although Paul was in Corinth and we are in Cleveland, separated by both chronology and geography, we discover now what he discovered then, namely that the whole question of spiritual gifts was something that was touched by confusion and by controversy. There was misunderstanding and abuse in first-century Corinth.

There is misunderstanding and abuse in Cleveland. The thought has probably crossed your mind just why it is that this whole arena of spiritual giftedness should be the focus of so much disruption and confusion. The answer must surely lie in the fact that the evil one, recognizing how vital the correct use of spiritual gifts is, both to the health and the effectiveness of the church, seeks to sow division, confusion, and uncertainty in order to foster amongst the people of God ignorance and unbelief. Because there is perhaps no other area of the church's life that has been beset by so much unbelievable stuff that has surrounded it. No other area of Christian doctrine has been subjected to so much disruptive confusion.

And one can only but believe that the evil one is alive and well and at work in this area because it is so pivotal in the life of the Christian and in the effective movement of the church of Jesus Christ. I'd like to try and summarize the opening section here, and we'll go no further than the third verse this evening, under three headings. First of all, in verse 1, we will notice the information they required. In verse 2, the superstition they recalled. And in verse 3, the explanation they received.

First of all, then, the information they required. This opening phrase, which Paul uses, now about, and then he adds spiritual gifts, is the same phrase that we've been finding as we've gone through 1 Corinthians. It comes a little differently, but it is the same phrase in Greek. For example, at the beginning of chapter 7, he says, now for the matters you wrote about. And then in chapter 8, at its inception, now about food sacrificed to idols. And now here he comes, in chapter 12 and verse 1, to this whole matter of spiritual gifts. The Corinthians had written to the apostle Paul and in the course of their letter had asked advice and clarification on a whole variety of subjects. And in addressing these subjects as he goes through, Paul takes them one at a time.

Their concern is about pneumaticos, which is an indeterminate gender in the Greek. It could refer simply to spiritual people, or it may refer to spiritual things, and therefore, by deduction and in relationship to the context, be referring to spiritual gifts. On account of this, Phillips uses his paraphrase in verse 1.

It reads as follows. Now, I want to give you some further information in some spiritual matters. And again, as I say, the context, as we read on through the chapter and indeed through the next three chapters, is clearly this whole issue of spirituality. What are the evidences of spirituality?

Who are the really spiritual people? That was the question in Corinth, and that frankly remains a question this evening. Then, as now, people were tempted to believe that spectacular giftedness was the real evidence of spiritual maturity—a spectacular giftedness in comparison with which the practice of basic Christian virtue seemed fairly colorless and, frankly, rather boring. And if you think about it, just jumping forward in our minds, here we are this evening in the context of the contemporary church, and many of us are tempted to believe the exact same thing that was the cause of confusion in Corinth—namely, that the really spiritual people are the people who are able to manifest dramatic things in and through their lives, whether it be a dramatic gift in proclamation, whether it be a dramatic ability to prophesy, to foretell, whether it be the ability to speak in tongues, whether it be the intervention of God in their lives with gifts of healing, whatever it was, tempted to believe that it is in these things that we can determine the nature of true spirituality.

It was therefore vitally important, and it remains vitally important, that the Church of Jesus Christ pays attention to these matters. And so he says, I do not want you to be ignorant. This, again, is one of Paul's favorite phrases.

He uses it to introduce matters which are exceptionally important. When he says, I don't want you to be ignorant, in actual fact, he wants us to be absolutely clear. And he uses this phraseology throughout many of his epistles.

Now, the word therefore ignorant is agno eo, from which we get our English word, agnostic. He says, I don't want you, Corinthian believers, to be in any doubt, to be uncertain about these spiritual matters relating to the whole nature of spirituality. Because if you are ignorant, if you are clueless, if you are agnostic, if you are unclear, then you will be susceptible to wrong teaching, and as a result of imbibing wrong teaching, there will then be wrong living, and if there is wrong living, then there will be ineffectiveness in the body of Christ. For the gifts which God gives to his people are essential for the effectiveness of the church, for it is in the giving of these gifts and in the exercise of these gifts that God chooses to mature his people and unleash them into areas of ministry and usefulness for his kingdom. And again I say to you, it is on account of the fact that Satan understands and recognizes this that he is so keen to be involved in counterfeiting and in confusing. And he recognizes that he has got a great gain when, as a result of his activities, the believer is tempted to ignore or to neglect the importance of spiritual gifts. And that, of course, is what has happened in a number of places. In a sort of fierce reaction to so much chaos—now, many churches have apparently almost thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

And if you read their doctrinal statement or you read what they have to write about things, they're very clear about everything that they do not believe about many things, but if you ask them what they actually believe concerning it on a positive basis, they're hard-pressed to give any kind of sensible explanation. In the most practical of terms, as we're going to see in going through 1 Corinthians 12, the church will always stumble—that is, the local church will always stumble on its way—when ignorance leads to people pursuing tasks of ministry for which they have never been gifted. And when people start to be involved in ministry, where there clearly is no gift, then disenchantment, disgruntlement, and disruption is inevitable.

Sometime during these studies, I think I'll bring a few golf clubs along with me as an actual illustration. But for example, God has put all the gifts in the body just where he wants them to be. He has dispersed gifts just as he intended.

He is manifestly and manifoldly wise in the doing of that. And if he has made you a putter—if I may use golfing terminology—you are foolish if you seek to live as a sand wedge. Because a sand wedge is in the bag and probably won't be used—hopefully won't be used—very much in a round atoll. And when it is taken out, it is used to cut through the sand and the grit and the grain, and it is presumably painful to the face of the club.

It is brief, it is vital, it is the only club in the bag that can be used effectively and continually in that way. And it's absolute foolishness, as you sometimes see—except in the strangest of circumstances—when people determine that they will try and putt out of a sand trap. Now, the Church of Jesus Christ and local churches, when they begin to understand the nature of spiritual gifting, are on the very knife edge of a dramatic development of ministry. And it surely is not a matter of happenstance that at this particular juncture in our church's life we should have arrived at 1 Corinthians chapter 12, 13, and 14. Because we are in need of a course in the nature of, discovery of, and implementation of spiritual gifts.

For we have a small number of people doing a tremendous amount of stuff and a large number of people doing, frankly, very little. The way in which that is going to be rectified is by the Spirit of God making clear to the people of God just why it is he has placed us in this church at this time and why he has given to us gifts for the express purpose of doing his will. That's why in Ephesians chapter 4 and verse 11 and following, Paul makes perfectly clear that without this coming to an understanding of the nature and function of spiritual gifts within the church, believers will always end up somewhat stultified and immature. And that's why, and you can turn to this, it was God Christ who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers to prepare God's people for works of service. So that the Bible may come alive in people's lives, that they may discover the reality of the work and ministry of the Spirit of God, that they may be coming to an understanding of spiritual giftedness. And these gifts are given not as toys to be played with, not as trophies to be put in a cabinet, but as tools to be used in the service of the kingdom.

And the task of these folks is to prepare God's people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be edified or built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Now, when this happens, says Paul, that's when we say goodbye to infancy. Until this happens, we live in infancy. Then we will no longer be infants.

What are infants like? Well, they're tossed back and forth by the waves. One minute they're blown here, and then they're blown there, and every kind of cunning wind of teaching and the cunning craftiness of men in deceitful scheming moves them all over the place. Instead of this, he says, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the head that is Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love as each part does its work. The effectiveness of this Parkside Church is directly related to you as an individual member of the church discovering and implementing your God-given giftedness. And one of the things that must inevitably come from these studies—if it doesn't, then they are less than they ought to be—one thing that ought to come is that people who right now, as I talk to you, and you're sitting there, and you're processing this, and you're saying, I don't know if I have a spiritual gift, and if I've got it, I don't know what it is, and certainly, since I don't know what it is, I don't know if I'm using it, and if I don't know if I'm using it, I'm probably not using it, and if I'm not using it, I am doing some things, and maybe the things I'm doing I shouldn't be doing, because I've got no notion whether that's a spiritual gift or not. So as we process these things, let us understand.

And I quote one of my friends here. He says, Spiritual gifts are divine enablements for ministry. They are characteristics of Jesus Christ that are to be manifested through the body corporate, just as they were manifested through the body incarnate.

Okay? So Jesus Christ, in his incarnate body, manifested his giftedness. Now he has gone, he has given the Holy Spirit, he's at the right end of the Father on high, and he manifests his giftedness now through his body. Each gift the Holy Spirit now gives to believers had its perfect expression in Jesus' own life and ministry. His church continues to live out his life on earth through the power of his Spirit working through his gifted people.

This is exciting. This ought to fill you with a sense of expectancy. It ought to raise within your heart and my heart to a consciousness of the fact that if we come to these studies prayerfully, if we come expectantly, if we come humbly, then the result of them ought to be that we will never ever be the same again.

That as much as in any other area of study, this particular series of studies should dramatically impact Parkside Church at this point in its history. I wonder, would you pray to that end and encourage others to do the same? The reason that he didn't want them to be ignorant was because that kind of ignorance wasn't bliss, but that kind of ignorance was confusion, it was ineffectiveness, and it was disintegration. It was important for them and for us to know that by means of these gifts, God's people are enabled to grow, to worship, to witness, and to serve.

So that, then, is the information they required. That's what he mentions in verse 1. Then when he comes to verse 2, he confronts them with the superstition they recalled. This isn't the first time that Paul has encouraged them to think about their pre-Christian experience. For example, even in 1 Corinthians 1, in verse 26, he reminds them, he says to them, Brothers, think of what you were when you were called.

Just think about it. Before you came to faith in Jesus Christ, what were you like? He uses the same approach here. He says, you know that when you were pagans, before you ever came to faith in Jesus Christ, there were certain things that marked your lives. And the things that marked their lives were superstitious pagan practices.

Now, a little background is probably helpful here. The pagan cults of both Greece and Rome were part of what are commonly called the mystery religions. These people, before they came to faith in Jesus Christ, lived in an environment that was occultic, it was superstitious, it was bizarre, it was dramatic, it was ecstatic, it was just a pulsating environment of all manner of weird forms of spirituality. When we trace the mystery religions to their root as we find it in Scripture, we will find ourselves back in Genesis chapter 11 at the Tower of Babel. Because it was there in the Tower of Babel that people said, Now what we're going to do is we will eventually mound up to the heavens, and we will take care of things essentially from this point out. The idolatrous practices, which were in their embryonic form in Genesis 11, down through history have scattered their seeds far and wide. And consequently, when we read history, when we read anthropology, we find all this stuff about gods and goddesses popping up all over the place.

Now, for our kind of mechanistic, scientific, rationalistic mind, we find it hard to identify with this, but the people to whom he was writing understood exactly what he was talking about. When we read of Aphrodite of Greece, or of Venus of Rome, or of Ishtar of Syria, or of Astarte of Phoenicia, or of Issus of Egypt, in every case the worship of these nonentities known as gods and goddesses find their root in Genesis 11 and find their expression in two things. Number one, in ecstasy. Number two, in immorality. All of the mystery religion was marked by ecstatic activity and by immoral activity. And so he calls them to think back to their pre-Christian experience to the paganism from which they have come. He has already, you will recall, and we've done this in our studies, tackled very carefully the matter of immorality, which they had clearly carried with them into the church at Corinth. That is why there were all kinds of lewd sexual practices going on, some of them even within the framework of the Lord's Supper, and Paul has addressed that head-on. Now, as he comes to the matter of spiritual gifts, he is going to tackle this question of ecstasy. These people understood that ecstasy was a kind of supernatural, sensuous communion with a deity. It was dramatic, it was bizarre, it was obvious, and it appealed to the natural man. Now, what has changed in twenty centuries?

Not a lot. Because within the framework of the Christian church and on the fringes of the Christian church, it remains true today that the ecstatic, the dramatic, and the bizarre has an immense appeal. And consequently, untaught Christians can be drawn into all manner of experiences because they are unable to identify counterfeit because they have never been introduced to the real thing.

Now, you can sense where Paul is going with this. The Corinthian believers were confusing ecstasy with spirituality. They had a thing called enthusiasmos, from which we obviously get enthusiasm, but enthusiasmos was an expression which revealed itself in mantic formulas, in divination, in revelatory dreams, and in visions. And the Corinthians confused ecstasy with spirituality and enthusiasmos with spiritual power. They were lacking in discernment, and therefore they were tempted to assume that what is dramatic must be divine, that because something works, it must be wonderful, and that power is the touchstone of reality. Let me say that again, because it is so apropos our day.

Untaught Christians came to assume that because something was dramatic, it must be divine, that because it worked, it must be wonderful, and because it was powerful, it must be reality. There's a lot more for us to learn about the subject of spiritual gifts, and we'll do that next weekend as we continue our series titled Firm Foundation. You're listening to Truth for Life Weekend with Alistair Begg. Well, we know this is a busy weekend for many of you as we celebrate with family and friends. On behalf of all of us at Truth for Life, we want to wish our listeners in the United States a very happy Fourth of July. We're grateful that you've taken time this weekend to join us.

The Fourth of July holiday is a sure sign that summer is fully here. If you've got a summer reading list, there's a book we want to recommend you add to it. It's a book that lays out a very clear purpose for knowing our Bibles. It's titled Our Ancient Foe, Satan's History, Activity, and Ultimate Demise. Alistair warns that one of the devil's favorite methods of attack is to persuade us to doubt God's Word. If we're unclear about what the Bible says, we'll be even more susceptible to the spiritual attacks that come from the evil one. So as you read this book, Our Ancient Foe, you'll learn who Satan is. You'll learn how he became our enemy and what it is he intends to do.

Most importantly, you'll learn how you can protect yourself by fully trusting in Christ. Each chapter in the book Our Ancient Foe looks at different scriptural references to the devil, his deceitful schemes, and his ultimate demise. Satan's days are numbered, but he will not give up without a fight. This book will help you be prepared, help you recognize his tactics so you can resist him in Christ's power. The book Our Ancient Foe is essential reading for every believer. You can request your copy today at truthforlife.org. I'm Bob Lapeen. Hope you can join us again next weekend. We're going to hear about what a big difference it makes when we are using our spiritual gifts rightly within the church. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.