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

When we start discovering our spiritual gifts. Sometimes we discovered that we are serving in areas of ministry where we're not well suited. So what we do. If that's the case today on Truth for Life weekend. Alister beg begins a new series that teaches us how to use our God-given spiritual gifts effectively within the church body.

Let's take our Bibles and turn to first Corinthians chapter 12 here in the opening section of this chapter we are introduced as the heading perhaps in your Bible will point out to the whole question of spiritual gifts. Although Paul was in Corinth and we are in Cleveland separated by both the chronology angiography, 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 is probably crossed your mind disquiet is that this whole arena of spiritual giftedness should be the focus of so much disruption and can usually 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 sell division fusion 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 is surrounded. No other area of Christian doctrine has been subjected to so much disruptive. Usually, and one can only but believe that the evil one is alive and well and that 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 will go no further than the third verse this evening under three headings. First of all, in verse one we will notice the information they required inverse to the superstition they recalled. And in verse three the explanation they received first of all, then the information they required. This opening phrase which Paul uses now about and that he had spiritual gifts is the same phrase that we've been finding as we've gone through. First Corinthians 8, comes a little differently, but it is the same phrase in Greek.

For example, in the beginning of chapter 7 he says now for the matters you wrote about and then in chapter agencies at its inception. Now about food sacrificed to idols.

And now here he comes in chapter 12 in verse one to this whole matter of spiritual gifts.

Corinthians had written to the apostle Paul and in the course of their letterhead asked advice and clarification on a whole variety of subjects and in addressing the subject as he goes through. Paul takes them one at a time.

Their concern is about humanity costs which is an indeterminate gender in the Greek it could refer simply to spiritual people, or it merely fair to spiritual things and therefore by deduction, and in relationship to the context. Failing to spiritual gifts on account of this, Phillips uses his paraphrase in verse one.

It reads as follows not 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 in 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, spectacular giftedness in comparison with which the practice of basic Christian virtue seems 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 others 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 B, a dramatic ability to prophesy forth tell 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 that it remains likely important 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 and agile fight. He wants us to be absolutely clear and he uses this phraseology throughout many of his epistles at the word therefore ignorant as Agnello ale from which we get our English word agnostic because 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 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 five that Satan understands and recognizes this, that he is so keen to be involved in counterfeiting and in confusing the recognizes that he's got a great gain when as a result of his activities.

The believer is tempted to ignore or to neglect the importance of spiritual gift that of course is what is happened in a number of places in a sort of fierce reaction to so much chaos that many churches have apparently almost throwing 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 him what he actually believe concerning it. On a positive basis. They're hard-pressed to give any kind of a sensible explanation in the most practical of terms as were going to see him going through first 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 a 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 metaphorically. Why is in the doing of that and if he has made you up pots or if I may use golfing terminology you are foolish if you see to live as a sandwich because sand wedges in the bag and probably will be used hopefully won't be used very much in around the tall and when it is taken out. It is used to cut through the sand and the grits and the green and it is presumably painful to the face of the club is brief, it is vital. It is the only club in the bag that can be used effectively and continually in that way and its absolute foolishness. As you sometimes see except in the strangest of circumstances.

When people determine that they will try and point out the Sentra now the church of Jesus Christ in 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 churches life. We should have arrived at first Corinthians chapter 12, 13, 14, because we are in need of a course in the nature of discovery. All 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 is given to his 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 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. Okay, 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 he may be coming to an understanding of spiritual giftedness and these gifts are given notice toys to be played with noticed trophies to be put in a cabinet but as tools to be used in the service of the kingdom and the task of these forms 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 dating to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Now when this happen, says Paul, that's when we say goodbye to infancy. Until this happens, we live in infants, then we will no longer be infants. What are infants like mother tossed back and forth.

By the way, one minute and blown here and there blown the air in every kind of cunning wind of teaching and the cunning craftiness of men in deceitful scheming move 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 part. Sorry 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 done 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 your sitting there your processing issues and I don't know if I have a spiritual gift and if I got it. I don't know what it is and services.

I don't know what it is I don't if I'm using it and I don't if I'm using I'm probably not using it, and if I'm not using. I am doing some things and maybe the things I'm doing I should be doing because of the known ocean with her as a spiritual gift or not. So as we process these things. Let us understand my quote one of my friends here, he says spiritual gifts are divine enablement's 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 is gone he is given the Holy Spirit is 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 at 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 excited to start to fill you with a sense of expectancy, it ought to raise within your heart and my heart to a consciousness of the flag that if we come to these studies prayerfully if we come expectantly. If we, humbly, than the result of them ought to be that we will never ever be the same again.

That is 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 and encourage others to do the same 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 in effectiveness 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 require. That's what he mentions in verse one, then when he comes to verse two he confronts them with the superstition they recall this in the first time that Paul has encourage them to think about their pre-Christian experience. For example, even first Corinthians 1 verse 26 he reminds them he says them brothers.

Think of what you wear when you were called. Just think about it before you came to faith in Jesus Christ. What will you like a 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 liens and the things that marked their lives were superstitious pagan practices now 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 a cultic. It was superstitious, it was bizarre. It was dramatic.

It was ecstatic it was. It was just a pulsating environment of all manner of weird forms of spirituality when we trace the mystery religions to their roots as we find it in Scripture we will find ourselves back in Genesis chapter 11 at the Tower of Babel, because it was there and the Tower of Babel that people said know 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. Foreign wind 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 kind of mechanistic, scientific, rationalistic mind, we find it hard to identify with this for the people to whom he was writing understood exactly what he was talking about when we read of Aphrodite of Greece or Venus of Rome or of Ishtar of Syria or of Astarte of third Felicia Oro thesis of Egypt.

In every case, the worship of these nonentities known as gods and goddesses find their roots in Genesis 11 and find their expression into 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, he is 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 of 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 Paula's address that head on now is he comes to the matter 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 is changed in 20 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 bazaar has an immense appeal and consequently on taught 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 that you can sense where Paul is going with us. The Corinthian believers were confusing ecstasy with spirituality. They had a thing called enthusiasm loss from which we always beget enthusiasm but enthusiasm loss was an expression which are revealed itself in romantic formulas in divination in reveille to be dreams and envisions the Corinthians confusing ecstasy with spirituality and enthusiasm loss 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 say that again because it is so apropos our day on chart Christians came to assume that because something was dramatic must be divine that because it worked, it must be wonderful.

And because it was powerful and must be reality. There's a lot more for us to learn about the subject of spiritual gifts and will do that next weekend as we continue our series titled firm foundation your listing to Truth for Life weekend with Alistair Begg. We know this is a busy weekend for many of you as we celebrate with family and friends. On behalf of all of us the Truth for Life was her listers in the United States, a very happy Fourth of July were grateful that you've taken time this weekend to join us 4 July holiday is a sure sign that summer is fully here if you 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 titled our ancient foe Satan's history activity and ultimate demise. Alister warns that one of the devil's favorite methods of attack is to persuade us to doubt God's word. If were unclear about what the Bible says will 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 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's 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 hope you recognize his tactics so you can resist him in Christ's power. The book our ancient foe is essential reading for every believer can request your copy today at Truth for Life.I'm Bob Lapine.

Hope you can join us again next weekend 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 learning is prolific