An Earnest Desire

We have been working through 1st Corinthians chapter 12, this series that we’re just kind of meandering through. I say meandering, that’s not the right word. We’re taking our time with it.

We’ve gone through chapter 12, next week we’ll kind of take a new turn on who we are as the body. But as we have worked through chapter 12, we’re going to see a line repeated today that Paul has over and over again. We in chapter 12, we have looked at how he starts off chapter 12 by just saying, now concerning spiritual gifts, I do not want you to be uninformed.

And he talked about the importance of with those spiritual gifts that it’s by Christ as Lord that we say Jesus is Lord. It’s by the power of the Holy Spirit. And he talked about the role of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit with our gifts and how we live and we move in those gifts.

And it talks about different gifts. We talked about how we can feel intimidated and hold back and then how we and others may feel superior and how that’s not biblical. We also looked at how we need each other.

It’s just important that we have each other. Without each other, we’re not the body. It’s like missing a part of the body.

Like if you have a headache, your whole body suffers. If you’re like me and you stub your toes sometimes, your whole body suffers. Now, as Paul concludes chapter 12, let’s hear what he says.

1 Corinthians 12, 27 through 31, will you stand as you are able? Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helping, administrating, and various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret, but earnestly desire the higher gifts, and I will show you a more excellent way.

The word of God, inspired by God, for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Amen.

You may be seated. In this short section that Paul ends on the body of Christ in chapter 12, he states it again. This is the one that we’ve heard.

I mean, if you haven’t heard this before, you haven’t been listening. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. As in, we are incomplete without coming together with all the parts.

By ourselves, we are incomplete. Now, today so many people will say, I don’t need to be around other people. I just have my own faith.

I don’t need the church because I got this covered on my own. And biblically, that does not work so well. Now, it’s tricky because the church is imperfect.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed that in your lifetime. The church is imperfect. The church can make mistakes.

The church can fall short. People who are the church can make mistakes and fall short. And people sometimes can go their whole lives and be more of a church member than a follower of Jesus.

That’s a strange thing to say. You might have to think about that a little bit. But is it all about being a church and the church’s survival versus how are we the body of Christ in the world today? How am I using my gifts to further the body of Christ and to strengthen the body of Christ? Now, Paul uses some strange language here when he says, and God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helping, administrating, and various kinds of tongues.

Now, if you look at those gifts, there is a sense of biblical scholar Mark Taylor says, points out there are several scholars who say that it’s not necessarily saying one is better than the other as it is saying they are chronological. If you think biblically about each one of those gifts, what do you need first? Apostles. Now, from an apostle standpoint, an apostle is the one who would start a church.

The apostles would go into different communities and help get churches started. They might not have stayed there, but they helped get it started. Now, biblically, an apostle is someone who has met the risen Lord.

So, does anybody know a number of people who have met the risen Lord? What’s the number the Bible tells us? How many people saw the resurrected Jesus? Over 500. And then, Paul adds himself to the number. So, I always think of it as 501, Paul on the road to Damascus.

And he calls himself one who is unusually born because he didn’t know Jesus or meet Jesus until after Jesus had ascended. So, when you look at that and you see apostles, think of it more of biblically it’s someone who met the risen Lord and goes out and starts churches and leads leaders and help raise up churches and communities. Some people forget the biblical side of it that says they have to meet the risen Lord, but the apostle, somebody’s got to start a church before it can be in any kind of order.

But then it’s got second prophets, third teachers. Now, when I look at that, I think of that as also being what is most important about a church. Number one, what’s most important about a church is for us to know Jesus.

Does anybody doubt that? You’re not going to have much fun here if you think differently than that. The most important thing is to know Jesus. So, you need someone who can teach about Jesus, people who can help us grow in our faith.

And those teachers come in different ways. The teachers come from preaching, but they also come from classes we take, Bible studies, Sunday school classes, or from our hope builder groups. And we are teachers one of another, sharing our experiences of life, growing as a community.

It’s most important as a church to know Jesus. The best ways to know Jesus are, of course, through worship, which I think you guys agree with because you’re here today, through studying the Bible, through prayer, and through having a smaller community around you of people who speak life into you and encourage you on your walk in your faith. Those are kind of the things we need to keep growing and learning about Jesus.

And those are the basis. Then you have more of what might be the supporting miracles, healing, helping, administrating. Those are important for the ministries of the church to happen.

I mean, how many people do you know that are very gifted? They might even be charismatic. They may be a good teacher, but they would forget every appointment unless their phone dinged and reminded them. I mean, we all need people in our lives who are organizers.

We need to have that in order of a church to function because a church is chaotic without people who are administrative. I mean, it might not seem exciting, but I think we should get an amen for that. We need some administrators in the church.

We need people who serve, who are behind the scenes, who speak and use their hands and the feet for the body of Christ and helping others and lifting others up and working one-on-one with people or caring about others. Those people who call one another, who reach out to one another, who care about one another. Now, the interesting thing that the one thing that makes this list not chronological is that Paul ends with.

Now, these are not exhaustive of gifts. In fact, if you go back to the beginning of the chapter, Paul talks about gifts, services, and activities. And he mentions wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, distinguishing between tongues, speaking in tongues, interpretation of tongue, distinguishing between spirits, speaking in tongues and interpreting tongues.

And he has more listed there. So it’s not an exhaustive list. But I think what he is kind of trying to tell us that he says this later that, I mean, how many of you does the gift of tongues just kind of freak you out? It seems kind of odd.

And what happens in the early church, especially in Corinth is that what was happening is people were using the gift of tongues to try to say that they were more spiritually inclined than other people. That if somebody else couldn’t speak in tongues, that they didn’t really have the Holy Spirit in them. And amazingly, even though Paul tried to resolve this in the first century, some churches still have that issue today.

And other churches just go the opposite way. Paul says this after 1 Corinthians 13. What’s the number one word in 1 Corinthians 13 that we’re going to study the next few weeks? Love.

And we end chapter 12 by him saying, and now I will show you a more excellent way. And the more excellent way is the way of love. That people were using their spiritual gifts to make themselves look better instead of with love.

In verse 14, he says, pursue love, earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy. And he goes into those who are speaking in tongues without an interpreter there. So basically, he’s saying, if you speak in tongues, and we’re going to talk about that in the love chapter.

He says this again, how it can be a noisy, gong, or clanging symbol, that without interpretation, it does not edify the body. Okay? So we have two extremes on that. So that’s why Paul, being upset with them, is putting tongues like at the bottom.

He does also say that he speaks in a lot of different languages, and he would have loved to have other people do it as well as he does. But there has to be an interpreter there. The gifts are designed for you, but not for you to look like you’re something.

Does that make sense? The gifts are gifts from God, but they’re designed for us to build up the body. Every single gift, it is designed to build up the body. And whether or not, what I’ve had more issues with is when we talk about the Holy Spirit or about spiritual gifts in Methodism, more people say, I don’t really think I’m gifted, than say, I think I have a bigger, better gift than you.

So I don’t know, how many of you guys have ever seen or heard of a show called American Idol? American Idol, what can sometimes happen on American Idol is someone is at home, and they sing along with the radio, or they sing in the shower, and their mom tells them, moms, that they are so good. And they go in and audition, and they cannot sing a note on key. Have you ever seen one of those auditions where they’ve been told by someone close to them that they should go audition, and they’ve never sang publicly, and it just falls apart? Now something kind of like this, Charles Stanley tells a story about how this happened to a woman named Sammy, who in her church, people were telling her, you are called by God to lead worship.

You’re going to be a worship leader someday. You are great. And she would just sit in her pew, and when the congregation would sing, she would sing at the top of her lungs, and finally she took it to heart, because she loved singing.

And she went to the worship team, was having auditions, and she went, and people were getting up. They were auditioning different instruments, and different people singing, and she got up and sang, and it was terrible. And finally they let her end, and had her sit down, and when it was time to leave, the worship leader said, will you stay here and talk to me for a minute before everybody leaves? And it was, I don’t know if you can understand how devastating this must have been for her, because everybody had been telling her this was her spiritual gift.

This is how she was going to take over at the church someday, and she couldn’t sing. So instead of making her feel bad, he just said, hey, what do you really like to do? What have you done in your life that you’re really good at? And he asked her about her relationship with Christ, and as they talked, she joked with him about how when she was younger, her grandfather taught her how to play the accordion. And she loved playing it, but it was pretty old-fashioned, so there weren’t many opportunities to play it.

The worship pastor said, hey, next week bring that accordion, and after worship, I would like you to play me a song. So after worship, she pulled out that accordion with the praise leader, and he was blown away at how good she was at playing that accordion. And he said, have you ever thought of playing it for praising God? She had never thought about that before, and he said, bring your accordion to church next Sunday, and after the service, we’ll practice.

So she did that again, and she practiced, and he had her come and practice with the praise band, and she had no more stage fright, no more anxiety, no more mess-ups. And during the next service, she played perfectly sweet music, and Sammy brought down the house with her a rendition of We’re Marching to Zion on that accordion. So it turns out the adults in the church who made prophetic predictions about Sammy were right after all.

She might not have been gifted in the ways that they thought, but she was gifted. All she needed was to find out how her particular gifts could be used in the right way, in the right place, at the right time. So don’t take this that if you play the bagpipes that you need to come to praise band, but there are gifts that you have that the church doesn’t use, that doesn’t know.

And you may be thinking it’s like an accordion. It doesn’t fit in the church, but God can find a way to use what God has gifted us. There’s a reason that God has given us those gifts.

If you look at the concordance or the lexicon of the Bible, the word kraton, which is interpreted here as higher, means more useful, more serviceable, more advantageous, more excellent. So when Paul says earnestly desire the kraton gifts, higher means more useful, more helpful, more advantageous, more excellent. The most excellent gifts are the ones the church needs.

Does that make sense? The most excellent gifts are the ones the church, the body of Christ needs, and God can work through you to do that. In our Hope Builders groups, we’ve all taken this, all who have taken this survey, Finding Your Spiritual Gifts by C. Peter Wagner. And there are two categories that we had.

One was dominant and one was subordinate. And that means if it says subordinate, I believe we have those gifts, but we’re just not getting opportunities to use them. So don’t diminish where it says subordinate.

But the three ways that he shows us in here on how we can know we have a spiritual gift are experience, motivation or frustration, and input of the body. Experience, he says simply with this question, what ministries are you now performing formally or informally in the body of Christ? Or other ways it’s put is, do you do this well? And think of it where, whether you’re at work or whether you’re at church, what do you excel at? How can God use that for kingdom use? What are you really good at? What have you done really well, whether it’s in the church or outside the church? And we can take that accordion and fit it into the praise band. Does that make sense? What is your experience? The other one is motivation and frustration.

Motivation is like a passion. What do you have a passion for? What do you love doing? What gets you most excited about being in the body of Christ, about sharing Christ with others? What gets you most excited and how can you do that in such a way? And the frustration can come is when that feels limited, it’s kind of like Jeremiah who doesn’t want to prophesy about God, but he says there’s a fire burning in me when I try to hold back. And when we can’t do that, it can get frustrating.

What frustrates us can actually help us discern what our gifts are too. And the other one that was emphasized in here is the input of the body. What do others say? Do they say you should come and sing? Do they say you should help out with missions? What do the other people see you do and say you are so good at that? God has gifted you with that.

What do they see in you and how can the kingdom tap into that for kingdom purposes? When I took this test, it made me realize for me, I have one passion and it’s hard for me to do much else outside of this passion. And it’s for you to experience Jesus. Seems pretty simple.

I’m not just talking about to hear about Jesus, but I’m talking about to know God, to love God, to experience the power of the Holy Spirit within you, to know beyond any shadow of a doubt that God is real and God is alive. And there is a point to the church that says we bring that all together with our diversity for the unity of Christ. So if you don’t want to do that in the church, I’m sorry.

That’s what is going to be my main thing. I want you to know God and to love God and to experience God in everything in your lives. That’s what I’m passionate about.

Finally, at the end of this, Paul said it’s based on the most excellent way. We’re going to spend quite a bit of time talking about love. And it might sound a little bit different than the love that you hear about in the world today.

But it’s quite a definition. But everything we do, how we reach out to other people, how we share with other people, even how we correct other people, the most excellent way is with love. How is the love of God working through you? How is the love of God calling you to use the gifts that God has given you to build up the body of Christ? Let’s pray.

Almighty God, thank you so much for your Holy Spirit. Thank you for the body of Christ. Thank you that you could do everything on your own, but you want to work through us because you love us.

You want us to have that same love for you and for others. Help us, God, to know you. Help us, God, to experience you.

Help us, God, each one of us, to have insight on how you have gifted us and where you are calling us to serve. May we glorify your name. May we be your church.

May we be the body of Christ that seeks you, that earnestly desires every gift you have for us. Put into us that desire. Put into us that hope.

Put into us that willingness to serve and to just say, God, where would you have me go? What would you have me do? How would you have me live? How can I build up the body of Christ? We pray this in your holy name. Amen.