Spiritual Gifts – Part 1
Romans 12:3
Now many of us, at some point in our
lives, I hope, have memorized the first two verses of chapter 12. These are
foundational and it’s a positive thing that we should memorize verses like
that. It’s one of the greatest statements in Scripture related to the spiritual
life. To review, “Therefore I beseech…” The NASV translates that as urge. It could
also be translated as exhort or challenge. “Therefore I challenge you by the
mercies of God that you present your bodies…” By that we saw that Paul means
the entire person.
That you “present” is a term often
used with the presentation of a sacrifice in the temple or of an offering. “To
present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God which is your
reasonable service…” Some translations say your spiritual service of worship
but the word there indicates reasonable or rational. It’s a logical result of
the premise that you have trusted Christ as Savior. That’s the challenge that
he presents.
Now that verse comes at the
beginning of this final section in Romans, which is chapters 12, 13, 14. Why is
this important? He’s making a transition from the didactic section explaining
the righteousness of God in relation to justification, in relation to
sanctification and in relation to God’s plan for Israel. Now he begins this
next section as a conclusion, as a logical conclusion from the previous eleven
chapters. What is he doing here? What is he saying that should capture our
attention? He challenges us on the basis of everything seen in the first eleven
chapters to present ourselves to God as a sacrifice. That’s all of who we are,
to be presented to God.
In contrast he says “and do not be
conformed to this world.” Now we studied verse 2 in the last couple of classes
that the contrast here is to not to be conformed to the world. The word
translated world here is not the one we might expect which is kosmos which often relates to the
inhabitants or the organized thinking of the inhabitants of the earth but to
this word, aion, which relates more to a time-based period. So it’s
emphasizing a way of thinking in certain time periods.
Every time period thinks a certain
way. The Germans have a word for it called the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.
Literally zeit
is time; geist
is ghost. So zeitgeist is the spirit of the time or the spirit of the age. So
we’re not to be conformed or pressed into the mold of the world but instead
we’re to be transformed. This is how we present our bodies as a living
sacrifice, to go through the transformative process of not being pressed into
mold of the world system and the way of the world in terms of thinking but to
be transformed by the renovation of our minds. So we see that the emphasis here
is on thinking.
That’s going to be important for
what we study in the coming chapters. Many people today just have a hard time
thinking about … well, thinking at all. I could just stop right there and say
amen and we’ll all go home early. Those of you who want to see the Alabama game
will be very happy. The point is that people today don’t think. We live in an
America today which is in such a cultural slide. We have almost hit avalanche
speed in terms of deterioration and self-destruction. We operate on emotions.
People can’t think if they’re not educated.
We’ve destroyed the ability of many people in this country to think critically
because of the way they have been educated over the last fifty years. Many
people in churches are the same way. We’ve dumbed-down the Bible. Now you have
modern translations that come out that are geared for the fifth grade or sixth
grade reading ability. I understand the importance of that because many people
can’t read beyond the fifth or sixth grade level. They do well if they can read
at that level. That’s what’s happened.
Now if you can’t read or think
beyond that level you’re not going to be a good citizen and you can’t handle
the kind of thinking needed to process what’s going on culturally or if you’re
a believer to process it spiritually. Now we understand that we all have the
Holy Spirit to help us understand the Word of God. Anyone who walks in off the
street, starts coming to Bible class, and not have much of an education at all
and not have done very well in the education that they got can learn the Bible.
These people knew there was something there about the Word of God so they stuck
with it over a period of three or four or five years and they assimilated a
tremendous amount of information. That’s important since anyone can understand
the Word of God and the principles and the doctrines because of the Holy
Spirit.
But you have to think. You have to
learn to think. It can’t be done on the basis of emotion or feeling or
mysticism or intuition, which is what’s popular in the culture as a whole. People
want to respond emotionally to images. This is what has driven a lot of the
culture the last forty or fifty years, whether it’s film, television, or
commercials. Commercials have basically framed and taught people to react to
certain kinds of music, images, certain things that are presented instead of
thinking about it critically they just react to it as if they’re trained that
way. They’re just like animals reacting to certain stimuli but the Bible
emphasizes that Christianity is for thinking people.
The world is going to try to portray
all Christians as if they’re some sort of backwoods, Appalachian
snake-handlers. They say no Christians have brain cells that can recognize each
other. But the opposite is true. Many Christians throughout the ages have been
tremendous thinkers. If you study the great men of science up through the
middle of the 19th century—until science was
perverted by Darwin—you see that those who laid the foundation for
modern science were all deeply committed Christians. Isaac Newton wrote more
about theology, more commentaries on Scripture than he did on science. Yet
those kinds of facts are easily and quickly ignored by science teachers today
because they can’t assimilate the fact that these committed Christians were the
scientists who made it possible for them to do what they do today.
Christianity is based on thinking,
on thoughtful reflection. The Old Testament calls it meditation, which is
thoughtful reflection upon God’s Word. In the Bible Study Methods class that we
have on Sunday night we emphasize the importance of thinking and observation.
Right now we’re in the middle of interpretation. But it takes a lot of time and
effort. You have to learn to really read. Anything that’s written well is
written in a logical manner. Reading means you have to follow the logical
development of the thought of the writer that’s been put down in writing. So
Christianity more than anything else and more than any other “religion”, is
based on thought.
It’s based on the fact that God has
revealed Himself to us in propositional truth. Propositional truth is a
technical term that means that God expresses Himself in propositions. A
proposition is like a declarative statement. The term proposition is a
technical term that means a statement that can either be verified or falsified.
It’s not just sayings. A question asking what the weather’s doing outside can’t
be proved true of false. A command telling someone to go to the store can’t be
proved true or false. Only a declarative statement or proposition can be
declared to be true or false.
Now in order to demonstrate whether
it can be true or false a person has to think through all the issues involved
in that sentence. They have to understand the vocabulary, the logical structure
that’s laid down in that sentence and when it comes to the sentences of
Scripture, that’s not always easy. Sometimes the Apostle Paul uses what would
appear in an English Bible to be seven, eight, nine, or ten verses, even as
much as thirteen verses, to express one sentence. Now in English they’ve often
broken that down into sentences but in the original Greek it was often one
sentence. Often we see a sentence of the Apostle Paul that’s several verses
long but that’s a long statement. To understand it you really have to stop and
think.
It used to drive me nuts when I was
in high school I spent many summers on the work crew at Camp Peniel. The
founder’s son, David Whitelock, has just graduated from Dallas Seminary at that
time. He had an hour long Bible study every day and one of the things he had us
do is to take two or three verses in English and paraphrase it, writing that
out so we could understand it in our own words. Now this was before the New
American Standard Version. We had to wrestle with the old King James Version.
That was a real challenge for anyone with a public school education. We were
never taught to think that way.
Look at any two or three verses of
Scripture. Go home tonight and paraphrase it so your eight year old kid or your
ten year old grandkid can understand it and you’ll realize that it’s not that
easy to do. You really have to understand what the author is saying. Those were
incredibly difficult exercises. As a ninth grader, that was the first time I
realized that when you’re talking about the Bible, you have to think. That’s
what Paul is getting at in verse 2.
We have to renew our thinking for a
purpose. We saw this last time. The purpose is for “demonstrating” which is a
Greek word meaning testing something. So we’re proving with our life that God’s
will is good, acceptable, and sufficient. Many translations take that last word
and translate it as perfect. It’s teleios. We’re going to get into a passage
that I’ve always struggled with but I think I’m getting a grip on it right now
which is in Matthew 5 or 6 where it says, “Be ye perfect as God is perfect.”
That’s the only place where it appears that the word has the sense of
perfection or flawlessness but we can never be flawless as God is flawless.
Whatever it appears that the Lord is teaching there, He’s not teaching us to be
totally perfect or morally perfect or spiritually perfect as God is.
This word group always indicates
something related to sufficiency or completion so when we get there in Sunday
morning study we’ll figure out where I’ve come in my understanding of that
particular verse. The idea here is clearly sufficiency. God’s will is
sufficient for us but we only get there if we study it and we make that
exchange in our thinking between God’s way of thinking, not only the content of
the thinking, but how God thinks. Also, how God wants us to think, and it’s not
based on anything other than accepting the truth of His authority as the
foundation for our thinking.
Now Paul starts this next section
with those two verses. How do we think that the rest of Romans 12-16 relate to
that? This is the topical preface to the next four chapters. Why has Paul done
this? That’s an important question to ask. What he is stating here is a
framework for understanding the basic issue in the Christian life is to get rid
of all the garbage in our soul, all the human viewpoint, all the wrong ways of
thinking that put rationalism or empiricism or mysticism first, and to replace
that with a way of thinking grounded in revelational authority and building upon
the Scriptures as the foremost presupposition in our soul. That calls for a
radical overhaul of the way we think.
The first thing that Paul does is
state this challenge that we need to present our whole life as a sacrifice to
God. That just means we’re going to give our life over to serving Him and that
this is primarily done by first exchanging the wrong way of thinking in our
soul for the right way, the wrong content with the right content. And then look
at verse three. Verse three says, “For through the grace given to me I say to
everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think;
but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a
measure of faith.”
One of the things we have noted many
times in Bible class and one of the things we’ve noted in our Bible Study
Methods class are those little connective words, those conjunctions we find at
the beginning of verses, words like “therefore”, “wherefore”, “because”, and
“for” are very important. When we see that first word “for” it tells us that
Paul is starting to explain the implications of what he’s said before. He
giving a reason for why he has said what he has said and he’s developing it.
What that means is this shift of topic that occurs in verses 3–8 which
gets into the topic of spiritual gifts and the topic of the relationship of
every individual believer to one another and the body of Christ is fundamental
to the application of the command in verses 1 and 2.
I would bet that most of you have
never thought about that, that when we think about spiritual gift often in our
self-absorbed culture we start wondering what spiritual gift God gave us.
Spiritual gifts connect to these first two verses because spiritual gifts are
enablements or spiritual enhancements that God has given us to serve God within
the body of Christ. There’s important.
Now we’re going to start an
introduction here so that will answer a lot of questions that come up initially
about spiritual gifts but that’s the first thing Paul goes to when he is going
to cover areas related to how we present ourselves as a living sacrifice and
how we flush out the human viewpoint and exchange it for divine viewpoint. It’s
going to start in terms of how we think about the body of Christ.
It really doesn’t matter whether
you’re an ancient Greek rationalist/Platonist, Aristotelian/empiricist or a
Neo-Platonist or a modern rationalist, evolutionist, nihilistic secularist
post-modernist, there’s one thing that every one of these systems have in
common. It’s the product of a sin nature. What have I been putting in the
middle of the sin nature for the last several times I’ve used it? The whole concept of self-absorption.
From the instant of Adam’s fall the
human race has been absorbed with itself—the whole human race. It’s all
about me. That’s the orientation of the sin nature. You may think it’s all
about you but it’s really all about me, me, me. That’s the only one we care
about: me, me, me. Just think about some of the wonderful popular magazines we
have today. First of all remember we started off with People. Then it wasn’t
long, less than a decade in fact, that it was about US. Then it wasn’t long before it was
about Self.
So it’s all about each individual. So when we come to understanding the body of
Christ there is something revolutionary and radical about the body of Christ.
That is, it’s no longer about each of us as an individual.
Arrogance is supposed to be flushed
out as part of that process of renovating the mind. It’s about one another.
It’s about the body of Christ ministering or serving God by ministering to one
another. There are things that are said here in these coming verses that just
come categorically opposite of our natural instinct. It’s important if we’re
going to function as a church, as a body of believers, to understand these
principles. So he’s going to talk about it first of all how this radical
transformation impacts our relationship to others in the body of Christ. Then
it’s going to go on and develop that further in verses 9 -20 in terms of how we
handle different circumstances and different problems with different people.
We’re going to see some things indicated there that aren’t too different from
what we’re studying in the Beatitudes on Sunday morning.
Then in chapter 13 he relates it to
government. We think differently about government from a terrible government,
even a tyrannical government like Nero Caesar. Then he goes on talking about
other believers in chapter 14 and 15 so this is very important from the standpoint
of the doctrine that we learn, how the teaching and the instruction that we
learn is to replace the self-absorbed orientation of our fallen soul to the
regenerate nature which is now supposed to be a slave to righteousness
according to Romans 6 and not a slave to the sin nature.
So Romans 12:3 continues to carry
forth this theme of thinking. This theme where we are to have our mind renewed.
The word for mind in verse 2 was the Greek word nous which is the thinking part, the mentality of the soul. That is
referring to that part of the soul that performs a certain action. That action
is what we see talked about in verse 3. We see the introduction of four words
built upon the root verb phroneo. The first word is huperphroneo. The root verb phroneo basically means to be wise or to think or to cogitate or any kind of
mental activity as opposed to emotive activity.
Paul uses four words that tells us
that what Paul is talking about here in this whole issue of thinking which goes
right back to what he’s talking about in verse 2 of renewing our mind. He
starts this out by saying, “For through the grace given to me I say to everyone
among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to
think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of
faith.” The phrase “through the grace given to me” is parallel to the words
used in 12:1. The only difference is that in 12:1 we read “by the mercies of
God” and here it’s by the “grace given to me”. It’s the same construction, dia plus the genitive in the Greek so it should be translated the same way
with the same English preposition. Translators don’t do that but that’s the
point the Holy Spirit is making. Romans 12:1 should read, “I urge you,
brethren, by the mercies of God…” If you’re going to use “by” in verse 3 you
should use “by the grace given to me”. If you want to translate it with the
English preposition “through” it should be the same thing in both places
because the phrase is the same in the Greek. It’s indicating the intermediate
means by which something is accomplished.
Paul is talking about the mercy of
God which is explained in chapters 1–11. In all that God has supplied us
through His righteousness, justification, sanctification, all of this has been
supplied to us and what he’s really saying is on the basis of this and our
understanding of what God has done for us in mercy and grace we should be
motivated. Grace is unmerited favor. Grace emphasizes more the principle
whereas the word mercy indicates its personal application to individuals in
difficult circumstances. So they represent the opposite sides of the same coin.
So “I say through or by the grace given to me to everyone who is among you…” In
other words he’s applying it to every single believer. You can’t opt out. This
isn’t an elective class. This is essential to spirituality and spiritual
growth.
“I say, through the grace given to
me, to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly…” Now
there are two English infinitives here, “not to think” and later in the verse
“ought to think”. Those two verbs are the root verb phroneo. The word translated “more highly” is the word huperphroneo. Huper is a preposition that often indicates “in the place
of” or “beyond” or “more” and here when it’s added to phroneo it has various ideas such as to despise or to hold an opinion of one’s
self that is too high, to overthink, to think too highly of one’s self, to be
in a state of fantasy about one’s own capability rather than thinking honestly
and objectively about who we are and our weaknesses and our failures and our
strengths. It’s having an over-inflated view of one’s self.
So what Paul says here is a warning
that we’re not to think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think. That’s
part of what it means to be transformed by the renewing of our mind. We have to
quit being so self-absorbed. We have to quit thinking that church is all about
my spiritual life and my spiritual growth. Part of our spiritual life is to
serve one another and to serve one another within the framework within the
local church ministry.
We have to think about how serving
one another that we often find in many churches is a little superficial. As
soon as you hear a sermon on serving the Lord in the local church it’s followed
up by an announcement that we need more prep school teachers or we need helpers
with the Five-Day Club or we need ushers or we need something like that. Those
kinds of things might be true and there’s nothing wrong in a sense with that
but this is going a lot deeper in terms of our spiritual life. This is
impacting who we are as individuals and how we’re relating to one another in
the local church. We’re here to serve each other. We’re to care about each
other. We’re to support each other. We’re to encourage each other.
Now we can’t do that equally to
everyone in a local church. We all have circles of friends. We have five or six
people with whom we’re a little more intimate. We have five or six or seven
more than that we might be a little acquainted with and we might have spent
some time with them socially. Then we have others that we know because we can
sit in the congregation and look across the congregation and at least we know
their name. That’s one of the things that’s important in a local church and one
of the reasons why we have some of these social events we do is just so we can
get to know one another and not just sit there and know that’s so-and-so over
on the other side of the church that I’ve seen them a lot but don’t have a clue
who they are. We’re not that large.
It’s different if you’re a
congregation of five hundred or a thousand or fifteen hundred. Often you have
some people who come to large churches because they seek anonymity. They don’t
want to be known. Some people are very shy. They really don’t want to be known.
They just want to come in the back door, sit down, and learn the Word and go
home. One of the areas where God has to work on them is that they need to
realize that’s a form of arrogance just like the person who is too exuberant
and too hyper about getting to know everybody in the congregation. It’s just
another form of self-absorption. Some people are more private. Other people are
less private and we have to recognize those personality differences. That runs
counter to a lot of stuff that I think goes on in the practice of church in a
lot of places.
Having gone through seminary I saw a
lot of professors that are expecting everybody to sort of be the same. But the
whole point of this passage is that everybody’s different. They’re gifted in
different ways. Some people are extroverts; some people are introverts; some
people are more private; some people are less private. We have to respect those
differences but don’t let those differences become an excuse or crutch for your
not being involved in the local body of Christ. The principles we see in Romans
12 and 1 Corinthians 12 is that we’re supposed to be involved in each other’s
lives but the reality is we can’t be involved equally in everybody’s life. That
is often lost in the way this is presented in some churches and we have to be
careful because this can also become an excuse for gossip. It can become an
excuse for people violating the principle of privacy and getting involved in
other people’s lives in ways that they shouldn’t but it’s based on a genuine
Biblical love and care for one another.
So the fundamental principle here is
that first of all we have to get rid of the self-absorption. We’re not to think
of ourselves more highly than we ought to think but in contrast we are to think
soberly. The word translated soberly here is the word sophroneo. We have phroneo again repeated but we also have the word sophroneo, which
means to be in a right mind, reasonable, objective, self-controlled or prudent.
It’s not thinking soberly in contrast to being drunk. It is thinking in an
objective, balanced, temperate manner. It is understanding the issues calmly
and objectively.
We are to think on the basis of
truth, which means we have to know truth. In order to think objectively you
have to understand the issues and we have to know truth so we’re to think
objectively and then Paul says, “As God has allotted to each a measure of
faith.” In this last phrase we have to be a little careful. This seems to
indicate that God has apportioned faith differently from one person to another.
We have to make some important observations here. First of all this is not a
section dealing with saving faith. There are different types of faith or
different categories of faith discussed in the Scripture. There is saving
faith. There is faith in relationship to our ongoing spiritual life or
spiritual development, which we might call sanctifying faith. I use the phrase
faith-rest drill because that describes the process of mixing our faith with
the promises of God, trusting God in the midst of a difficult situation and so
we’re going to put our faith in the promises in His Word and we’re going to
trust or relax in terms of God’s control, God’s provision for the situation or
circumstances.
Faith is also listed in 1
Corinthians 12 as a spiritual gift. That would be a further enhancement of
everyone’s ability to trust God. One of the things that we see here is that the
context is in terms of spiritual gifts. We know that this isn’t saving faith so
he’s taking about faith in relation to something. The context tells us this is
faith in relation to the spiritual gifts that God has given us. Faith in
relation to using the spiritual gifts that God has given us. Look at verse 6
which says, “Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to
us…” That indicates that people have different degrees of giftedness.
Some people have the gift of
pastor-teacher to a large measure; some people have it to a smaller measure.
Some people have it to a small measure and maybe in where they use that is in a
Sunday School class, or something of that nature. I know I have pastored many
churches and most of the churches I have been involved in have had 200 or less
people in them. I had a high school Sunday School teacher that some of you knew
by the name of Dick Seman who went to First Baptist and taught a Sunday school
class of about 600 to 800 people. It was broadcast on KHCB here in Houston every Sunday
morning. He had a Sunday school class that was larger than many churches and
congregations of pastors I know. He wasn’t the pastor of the church but he
functioned as a teacher, which he certainly had the gift of. If you know Dick,
he had the gift of gab. He was quite humorous and had a great ability to
communicate.
Everybody has a different spiritual
gift to a different measure. Some people have a great degree of mercy. Some
people not so much. Back in the 70s they started applying psychology to
Christian life. That’s not valid in my opinion, but they were always coming out
with these little tests which said to answer these 50 questions, and you could
figure out what your spiritual gift is. You’d find out that one or two gifts
are probably your major area of giftedness and one or two aren’t. Of course,
those things are flawed because they reflect what you’re thinking about
yourself at the time. But people do have different gifts, different abilities
to different degrees and the issue in verse 6 is that we have gifts that differ
according to the grace given to us.
It goes on, “{each of us is to
exercise them accordingly:} if prophecy, according to the proportion of his
faith.” So this says we are to apply or utilize our spiritual gift in relation
to the proportion of our faith which if you’re a baby Christian that’s going to
be a baby or small portion of faith. If you’re more mature then you grow in
your faith and in your knowledge of doctrine and in your ability and you’ll use
your gift in a greater way. That’s the idea here, to serve Christ in proportion
to your faith. So God has given each one a gift and we use that in proportion
to our faith.
In verse 4 we read, “For just as we
have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same
function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members
one of another.” We’re different. We’re not all supposed to be the same. What’s
interesting we all have a tendency to a little hero worship and personality worship
but what God’s emphasizing is that we’re all different. We don’t imitate one
another in gifts; we imitate in terms of character but not in terms of
personality or giftedness. We’re each different and we need to function as God
has intended each of us to function within the body of Christ.
In verse 5 he says, “So we, who are
many, are one body in Christ and individually members one of another.” That’s a
challenge for people in a culture that has valued rugged individualism, which
is an American character value. We appreciate that. We flaunt it but when it
comes to the body of Christ that is not a primary virtue. The primary virtue is
that we’re to serve one another and we’re one in the body of Christ. It’s not
about each individual. It’s about the body of Christ, serving one another. So
Paul says we’re one body and then he makes a difficult statement, “and
individually members one of another.” There’s an interdependency among
believers in the body of Christ. We’re not all running out on our own, depending
on our own strengths and our own abilities exalting ourselves. We’re not to
think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think. We have a mutual
dependency in the body of Christ because some people can’t teach. They’re
dependent on those who do teach to come to a better understanding of the Word.
Some people don’t have the gift of mercy so they’re dependent on others who
have the gift of mercy to serve in terms of areas of visiting homes where
people are shut-ins, where people are in tough health situations, visiting the
hospital. That’s where they exercise their spiritual gift and where it’s
important for them to exercise.
Some people have the gift of giving.
It’s very important to them to utilize that gift of giving. Whatever the
spiritual gift you can find passages where everyone has that same
responsibility. Every believer is supposed to give but we can really learn
about giving by watching someone who has the spiritual gift of giving. Or
someone who’s teaching and really has the gift of teaching, we can learn from
them and it challenges us to improve the quality of our own teaching whenever
we’re called upon to teach. Just because you don’t have the gift of teaching
doesn’t mean you shouldn’t teach. Just because you don’t have the gift of giving
doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give. None of us would say they weren’t going to
witness to anyone because they don’t have the gift of evangelism. We know how
absurd that is but functionally many of us act like if it’s not our spiritual
gift we don’t do it. No, we learn in the body of Christ from those who have
those gifts so that we can improve in our own application in those areas.
So that brings us to what the
Scripture teaches about spiritual gifts. We’ll start this this evening. First
of all, let’s get a definition of a spiritual gift. A spiritual gift is a
talent, an ability, or an aptitude that is sovereignly
bestowed on every believer in the Church Age by the Holy Spirit at the moment
of salvation. It’s not something you get later on. In the early church they got
it at the instant of salvation. It’s related to the Baptism by the Holy Spirit
as Paul defines it in 1 Corinthians 12. So it’s different from natural talents.
Now I have a theory that God often
uses or enhances our natural talents with a spiritual giftedness. There are men
and women who are gifted teachers and they were gifted teachers before they
were ever saved. But now after they’re saved they have a spiritual enhancement
to that gift that functions in the spiritual realm. Same thing can be said
about other areas of service, such as administration, management, and these
kinds of things. It may be that your spiritual gift is different from your
natural talent but somehow God takes our natural talents and abilities and when
we’re saved he gives us these spiritual enhancements that work and intersect
with our natural talent. So the manifestation of these gifts is going to be
different from person to person.
If you think about it, the gift
you’re most exposed to and see regularly are pastor-teachers. You see a lot of
different personalities. I have a colleague who’s a pastor of a Bible church
out in Katy. When he was in his early to mid-thirties, his wife had a series of
strokes. It was an extremely difficult situation. It lasted about twelve or
thirteen years. They were very dependent upon many members of the congregation
helping to be caregivers but if you had a problem in your life and you started
talking to him about it, it was just like every pore in his body oozed
compassion. You knew this guy really had walked the walk in your tough shoes.
You knew that he understood. Some people you talk to about your problems and
it’s like they have a machine gun of five doctrines they throw at you and
they’ve never truly gone through difficult times, it seems, and they don’t
really have a genuine Biblical identification to come alongside someone who’s
going through difficult times. Some people get the wrong idea of compassion. It
doesn’t mean you legitimize their weaknesses when they’re going through a hard
time but you knew with him that was true. He was a good teacher but his
teaching came across in an extremely compassionate manner.
I had another pastor friend of mine
who was in business for about fifteen years, was an investment banker. He
thought in a very cold, calculated manner and his personality someone once
described as trying to “snuggle up to a porcupine.” He was very much different
from the other. Both were excellent teachers but because of their personalities
and other talents how that gift was utilized was very different. No two
believers are going to express themselves the same way because of different
measures of the gift as well as different personalities and different
backgrounds.
Every believer is given a talent, an
ability or aptitude at the instant of salvation by God the Holy Spirit, for the
purpose of serving one another in the body of Christ. I had someone tell me
that he just went to church and left, that he was using his spiritual gift at
work or with others in the family. No, you’re to use your spiritual gift for
its purpose, to minister to the body of Christ in the local church you’re in.
Not your family. Not your co-workers. Not the people in your neighborhood. It’s
for service within the body of Christ. That’s the emphasis in passages such as
Romans 12: 6-8 which we’ll go through. Also 1 Corinthians12, Ephesians 4:11-12,
and Hebrews 2:4.
In terms of Biblical terminology
there are a couple of terms we’ll use. The term pneumatikos emphasizes the source and the nature of the gifts, that they’re related
to the Holy Spirit who gives this and its related to our spiritual life, our
spiritual relationship with God and it related to the spiritual life of the
believer. Another term that’s used is charisma, which
emphasizes the grace nature of the gift. The root is charis, the Greek word for grace: that God in His sovereignty freely bestows
these abilities on us. It’s not based on any merit. We haven’t earned these
things. They’re given at the instance of salvation. As I pointed out already,
in some believers it may enhance a natural ability or inclination. In others it
might not.
Then we have a third term, merismos, which emphasizes a distribution or an apportionment
so that it’s not all the same. Your spiritual gift may not be the same or to
the same degree as someone else. For example, in Hebrews 4:2 we read, “God also
testifying with them, both by signs and wonders and by various miracles and by
gifts of the Holy Spirit according to His own will.” The Greek word for gifts
there is merismos. It’s understood to relate to spiritual gifts but
it’s not pneumatikos or charisma, which is what you normally expect for gifts. It means
distinctions of the Holy Spirit. God the Holy Spirit makes distinctions among members
of the body of Christ according to His own will. So spiritual gifts are
distributed on the basis of the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit.
The third point is that spiritual
gifts are unique to the Church Age. We didn’t have spiritual gifts in the Old
Testament. You had giftedness in terms of God giving some the ability to
prophesy. You had some who had the ability to lead but they’re never called
spiritual gifts. This is something that is distinct to the body of Christ. So
don’t take something in the body of Christ and read it over into something
else. Where this is important is that no gifts are given prior to the Day of
Pentecost. Why? There’s no Baptism of the Holy Spirit prior to the Day of
Pentecost so you didn’t have any spiritual gifts. There won’t be any spiritual
gifts given after the Rapture of the Church. Now why is this important?
Whenever I talk about the cessation of the sign gifts, the cessation of
prophecy, knowledge, and tongues in 1 Corinthians 13 it’s very clear it’s
talking about two periods in the Church Age. Before the canon of Scripture is
completed the Church, the body of Christ, was dependent upon people who had
these revelational type spiritual gifts for new revelation because they didn’t
have the New Testament yet.
When you think about it, up until
the period of about A.D. 60 only a little over or less than half of the New Testament was
written. That’s thirty years from the death of Christ. They were dependent upon
new revelation from God through the apostles, the prophets, and others who had
these kinds of revelatory gifts. But once the canon of Scripture was given it
was no longer necessary for God to communicate that way. At the end of 1
Corinthians 13 you have this contrast between “now” and “then”. Now is that transitional
period up through A.D. 70 to A.D. 90 when these gifts ended. After that there was a completed canon of
Scripture so those gifts were no longer needed.
Whenever I teach that and it
happened this last year in Pennsylvania someone always says, “Well, what about
the tribulational period? There are prophets in the tribulational period. How
can you say the gift of prophecy ended?” I answer, “Wait a minute. The
tribulation period is not part of the Church Age.” By definition that’s not a
spiritual gift any more than the gift of prophecy in the Old Testament was a
spiritual gift. We’re talking about Church Age gifts and we have to restrict it
that way. So spiritual gifts are unique to the Church Age. No spiritual gifts
after the Rapture. No spiritual gifts before the Day of Pentecost. We’re going
to stop there. We’ll come back and continue this next time as a prelude to
understanding what’s going on in verses 3–8 in Romans 12.