Spiritual Gifts Introduction –
Part 4
Permanent vs. Temporary
Romans 12:3-4
Before we go to
Romans 12 open your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 13. Last time I talked about
permanent versus temporary gifts. This is a problem today and it has been in
the Bible believing segment of the Christian Church in its broadest,
sociological sense, since the advent of what is known as the modern Pentecostal
movement that began on New Years’ Eve in 1901 when a Bible college student in
Topeka, Kansas by the name of Agnes Ozman thought she
was speaking in Chinese and spoke in “tongues” that night.
This was
preceded by a decade or two of an increasing awareness of what is known as the
Holiness movement that there needed to be an overt sign of what they thought
was the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. They defined it as a second work of grace
that came after salvation. Now no movement has probably been as divisive in
Christianity as the Charismatic movement. It’s been divisive for a number of
reasons but primarily because it put its emphasis on experience over doctrine.
How do you understand the Bible? Do you understand it on the basis of your
experience or do you understand it on what the Word of God says. In the
Charismatic movement, known as the Holiness/Pentecostal movement because it
came out of that, the problem that they had was that they were interpreting
their own spiritual life on the basis of experience.
Unfortunately
this is so true about many believers. It’s part of a subtle form of mysticism
that has entered into evangelical Christianity. Actually it’s been there since
the Protestant Reformation. It was very strong within the Anabaptist tradition.
Later it became strong in what became known as the Pietism tradition and
there’s always been a weak strain of this in the Bible church movement. It’s a
little strong in some Baptist traditions because that goes back to the old
Anabaptist roots and it’s very subtle.
Last summer I
noticed with great joy that when there was teaching on certain topics that
touched on this at Camp Arete that Jeff Phipps and
Mark Perkins and David Roseland, and even Jim Myers all made it a real
“slam-it-home” point to try to kick this out of the thinking of young people I
wish we could figure out a way to get some spiritual dynamite and blast it out
of the thinking of a lot of adults. I was having a conversation with Pastor
Roseland this last week. He had come down for a three day Bible conference in
Corpus Christi last weekend and he had a great illustration that I just thought
I’d pass along. He heard from a number of people who had come there for one
reason or another. They hadn’t thought about coming and then there was some
sort of circumstance in their life that they took as some sort of indication
from God that they ought to go to this conference.
If you’ve heard
me teach on how to know the will of God, that is how to know the will of your
emotions, how to know the will of your subjective experience, how to know the
will of anything but it’s not how you know the will of God. And David had a
great illustration. Remember he’s living outside of Preston City, Connecticut
where the temperature has been a little bit colder than it’s been here. They’ve
got a little bit more snow of the ground. The heaters in their houses usually
don’t work like ours. They operate off of a radiator like most of you had in
school at one time if you go back a certain distance. Heated water generates
steam that goes through radiators and heats the house. I forget what they call
them but they’re basically floor vents. The hot water cycles through there and
heats the home. So when your well goes down, you don’t have hot water, and when
you don’t have hot water you don’t have heat. So about a day and a half before
David was to leave to come to Corpus Christi something in the well broke and
they couldn’t get any water out of the well. They still haven’t figured out
what the problem is unless they have since he went home Tuesday. He spent a day
and half instead of getting to study the Word and get ready for the conference
trying to get the water to flow, so they could get heat in their house, and so
they could take showers, and wash their dishes and do all the things they do
with water. So he made the comment that how many people had taken certain
positive circumstances to indicate that it was God’s will for them to go to the
conference. He said if he was basing his decision on
being there on circumstances, he never would have left Connecticut.
The apostle
Paul if he were basing his decisions about the will of God on positive circumstances
he would have bailed half way through the first missionary journey. Probably
before that, maybe the time they were trying to stone him in Damascus. When he
headed into Arabia he wouldn’t have returned. This is all part
of the core problem we’ve got with the whole Holiness/Pentecostal Charismatic
movement. The symptom of the problem is their wrong, not Biblically derived
emphasis on the Baptism of the Spirit signified necessarily by speaking in
tongues as a work after salvation. The real root problem is interpreting
Scripture on the basis of experience rather than interpreting experience on the
basis of the Word of God. This leads to all kinds of distractions in the
Christian life.
I’ve been
surprised although I shouldn’t be at how many people, some of whom are in this
congregation, some of whom have been part of this congregation or other
doctrinal teaching congregations in this city, who, when they said when they
read some of these books published recently about people who have an
out-of-body experience. I don’t remember the names of these books but one was a
young boy who told his father about an experience he’d had when he’d had
surgery when he was three or four years old. He said he’d had the experience of
dying on the operating table and having all these experiences there in heaven.
Over the last few years there have been two or three of these kinds of books
that have come out.
I have just
been amazed at some of the so-called mature believers that I thought knew
better who thought how wonderful these stories are. “They tell us so much about
heaven,” they say. Well why you aren’t reading your Bible to learn about
heaven? The apostle Paul went to heaven and when he came back God wouldn’t let
him tell anyone about it. So this little boy is better than Paul? Some of these
other people are better than Paul? See, the problem here is that we’re judging
the Bible on the basis of our experience and we’re not learning from the Word
of God what it says and then taking that as our spotlight and shining that on
our experience and thinking that no matter how much the experience may feel as
if something is happening, the Word of God just tells us we’re being deceived.
What does Jeremiah say? “The heart is deceptive above all things.” It also says
it’s wicked but I’m emphasizing that one attribute. The heart is deceptive.
You’ve got something inside you that is constantly deceiving your mind into
thinking that your experience is one thing when in reality it’s something else.
The only thing
that cuts through that, that shines a light through that, is the Word of God.
So this is part of the problem whenever people teach on the spiritual gifts.
The spiritual gifts have to do with people’s abilities to serve the Lord within
the body of Christ. Especially this is true in our self-absorbed culture. I’ve
witnessed this going back to the time I was a teenager that as soon as you
start talking about spiritual gifts people start turning inward and trying to
figure out, “Oh, what’s my spiritual gift?”
A spiritual
gift is not a key to growing spiritually. A spiritual gift will manifest itself
in your life as you grow spiritually and as you seek to serve the body of
Christ. If you are living the Christian life, applying the Word, as you seek to
serve in any capacity your spiritual gift will manifest itself over time. It
will indicate itself simply because you will end up ministering in areas where
you feel most competent and comfortable. Just because you don’t have one gift
or you have some other gift isn’t an excuse for not functioning in all these
different areas.
Giftedness or
spiritual gifts are only enablements in certain
areas. All believers are still held accountable for ministering in all of the
different areas of the spiritual gifts. Serving one another, teaching one another,
encouraging one another, giving, all of these are spiritual gifts. Leadership, for instance. Some people will lead in one way,
some in another. You lead in the home if you’re a parent. If you’re teaching in
a Sunday school class, you’re teaching and you’re leading. All of these are
just functions of the service ministry that every believer is responsible for.
So going back
to our doctrine of spiritual gifts, we just covered the one point last time.
There are two categories of spiritual gifts, permanent and temporary. This has
been such a distraction for a lot of people. I want to go back over it one more
time just to hit the high points and help you think through this passage. There
are times when you may get involved in a conversation with someone and need to
understand what these passages are saying. So we looked at 1 Corinthians 13 which is really the primary passage for understanding
that some gifts are temporary, specifically revelatory gifts. A couple of the
temporary gifts, though, were not necessarily revelatory, such as healing and
miracles. So the best clarification is to classify them as temporary versus
permanent.
The temporary
gifts had their own basis. The key passage is 1 Corinthians 13:8-13. I just
wanted to review some of the observations that we see here. There are three
gifts mentioned: knowledge, prophecy, and tongues. Knowledge and prophecy are
both said to be partial and they’re both said to be abolished
at some point in the future. A different verbiage is used for tongues but
tongues are said to cease. So those three gifts are not permanent. They’re
contrasted with three virtues of the Christian life that are more permanent:
faith, hope and love. While knowledge and prophecy are said to be partial or
incomplete, the gift of languages or tongues is not incomplete. So 1
Corinthians 13:8 says that “prophecy will faith [be
abolished], knowledge will also fail.” That’s the same verb used for prophecy
and then 1 Corinthians 13:9 says, “We know in part; we prophesy in part.” So
those have to do with something that’s incomplete.
Paul then
states that the partial knowledge and the partial prophecy are abolished when
something called the “perfect” comes. This is the Greek word TELEIOS. Perfect is not the best translation here. It has to do with something
complete because it’s contrasted with that which is partial. So
last time I used the term quantitative. You have an incomplete quantity
or a complete quantity. So knowledge and prophecy are incomplete but when the
perfect [that which completes] comes then that which is partial is done away.
Why is it done
away? Because it’s no longer needed. That which is complete has arrived. So
that’s clearly showing that knowledge and prophecy are incomplete and will not
continue. The fact that tongues are said to cease indicates that it probably
ceases and dies out on its own before something happens that completes the
prophecy and knowledge. Then Paul uses that word KATARGEO, the word
translated abolished or cease or will fail, again in 1 Corinthians 13:11-12
showing that those verses down there are illustrations of what happens.
So 1
Corinthians 13:11 uses a growth metaphor, “When I was
a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, and I thought as a child.”
A child’s thinking is incomplete. It’s also immature. Now there are some who
hold a view that really isn’t talking about the completion of the canon but
maturity. Let me help you understand that. In the view of the Church, what
makes the Church shift from being immature to being mature is that the apostles
and prophets pass off the scene. The apostles and prophets function like a
tutor. They function like a nanny. Okay? So the early Church functioned under a
system of nannies, of baby sitters, of parents that could guide and direct the early
Church because they were receiving new revelation from God which wasn’t yet enscripturated and wasn’t yet available for all believers.
So the apostles and the prophets are said in Ephesians 2:20 to be the
foundation of the Church.
So when the
apostles and prophets moved off the scene there wasn’t anyone left to oversee
and guide the Church so that when someone said that God told him to do “x”
there wasn’t a group to say that you’re wrong, that God’s not telling you that.
They didn’t have that authority structure. In that sense the Church moves from
immaturity to maturity but what it is that ultimately makes that difference?
When the apostles and prophets are there the reason they’re needed is because
the revelation from God hadn’t been completed yet. The New Testament canon
hadn’t been completed yet so the early Church was functioning on an
insufficient knowledge base and it was through the apostles and prophets that
you had a system of checks on anyone who claimed to be giving new revelation.
They were the ultimate authority to guard the Church.
Once the
canon is completed then you have all the information to continue through the
centuries. So this is where the maturity view and the canon view are two sides
of the same coin. The apostles and prophets pass off the scene because the
Church is reaching a maturity stage. What makes it a maturity stage it that it
has a sufficient canon. It has a complete canon.
Now when I was
teaching this at the conference on Dispensational Hermeneutics at the Baptist
Bible Seminary there was a pastor who asked a perceptive question and one I’ve
thought about since. He said, ‘Well, when’s the canon closed? Does this really
end when the apostle John puts the last period and the last verse of the last
chapter in Revelation 22? Or is there a transition stage even though at that
point even though the canon had objectively been completed most people didn’t
even have ten books of the New Testament and probably never saw more than ten
books. It actually took a period of collection and circulation over the next
hundred years before people had most of the New Testament available to them.”
I’ve thought about that and most of us has this idea that God sort of separates
dispensations with a guillotine. I think I’ve abused a lot of people with that
notion by understanding the idea of transition in Acts. You see this happens
every time there’s a dispensational shift.
When Abram was
65 years old, God appeared to him in Ur of the Chaldees
and told him to get out and to head to a land God was going to show him. That’s
an objective dispensational shift. But how many people knew that? Abraham. It
was a long time before it became apparent that God had shifted how he was going
to work in history. But the shift had come objectively. The revelation of that
shift took time for it to be communicated. People didn’t have Twitter account.
They couldn’t just flash the news all the way around the world instantly. It
took time. I think it’s helpful and this is something I’ve just kind of worked
through recently to realize that was probably a bit of transition time there.
Let’s just
think about this. Let’s say you’re saved and you’re about twenty years old and
the year is A.D. 55. So you were born in A.D. 35. You’re going to be 65 when
the century shifts or technically 66 in 101. Okay? So you get saved when you’re
20 years old. You were born in A.D. 35. You get the spiritual gift of knowledge
or prophecy or tongues or wisdom. Did that gift disappear when John put that
period at the end of Revelation? Or did it still continue throughout your
lifetime because that still was needed through that early period of the
collection and circulation of the canon?
Now I don’t
know but I think those are interesting questions to kind of think through and
when you read the literature in the early Church at the end of the 1st
century and at the beginning of the 2nd century it’s clear that they
were still dealing with a people who claimed to have some of these gifts. Now
there were very strict regulations on this. That’s helpful for us because it
causes us to understand how the early Church understood these gifts and they
understood them the same way the Old Testament did, especially the gift of
prophecy.
I pointed out
last time in terms of Wayne Grudem’s idea that the
New Testament gift of prophecy was something different from the New Testament
gift. I’m not talking about the apostles. I’m talking about the ones who heard
the apostles and listened to the apostles like the Epistle of Barnabas, the DIDACHE of Clement, a 1st century pastor. These were written, some
arguably as early as A.D. 60, 70, 90, maybe early into the next century.
It’s very clear
that by the time you get to A.D. 160 you have the rise of one of the first
heresies in the early Church that was known as Montanism.
In Montanism you had an early form of the charismatic
movement. They weren’t speaking in tongues but they were emphasizing prophecy
and the Church came down hard on Montanus and his
followers. Incidentally, Tertullian, the man who is known as having coined the
word Trinity that we use today describing the triune God, was a Montenist and they believed in the continuation of the gift
of prophecy. But the standards that the Church used to show Montanism
was a heresy came right out of Deuteronomy 13 and 18.
So basically
what I’m saying and it’s a new thought for probably everyone here, is that
maybe you have a little bit of a transition period between A.D. 95 and A.D.
130, 140, 150 that these gifts died out as the canon was taking hold and being
passed around. But clearly it’s because there’s a completed canon and the
Church is shifting from that immature dependency view in the early Church to a
mature Church based on a completed canon that these gifts died out so that by
at least the mid-point of the 2nd century, if not twenty or thirty
years earlier, these gifts would have all passed from the scene.
So 1
Corinthians 13:8 which says “love never fails” emphasizes the permanence of
love in contrast to the temporary nature of this set of gifts. Then we look at
the way in which people have interpreted the “perfect”. And this is the real
issue. Does it refer to the completed canon or the mature Church? That’s the
objective view that there’s something that happens at the end of the 1st
century that brings knowledge and prophecy to a completion point. They’re no
longer needed so they’re no longer given.
Then you have
the other view that is really the dominant view. You’re going to hear that from
a number of people that somehow when we move from this life when we’re
face-to-face with the Lord, whether that’s death or the Rapture or the Second
Coming or the eternal state or sometime in the future that that’s when
perfection arrives. Now this is the key to understanding the interpretation
here one more time. If the perfect arrives when we enter an eternal state
face-to-face with the Lord, then what that means is that knowledge, prophecy,
and tongues continue until we go into heaven when we’re face-to-face with the
Lord in whatever sense that is and faith, hope, and love continue from that
point on in heaven where we’re face-to-face with the Lord.
The problem is
that since hope and love are contrasted with sight, such as “today we walk by
faith, but then by sight” but when we’re in heaven we’re going to be face-to-face
with the Lord. We’ll be walking by sight, not by faith. Faith is limited to
this earth. Romans 8:24 says the same thing regarding
hope. When we’re face-to-face with the Lord it won’t be hope anymore because is
a confident expectation of something and that expectation will be fulfilled.
Okay, so hope and faith are for temporal environment
today, not an eternal state environment. So obviously we can’t have the
temporary gifts continuing in a temporal environment and then faith, hope, and
love continue in an eternal state environment. Faith and hope won’t be there so
that means that the temporary gifts must continue to a point in time and then
they end. Faith, hope, and love continue after that in time but then when this
temporal environment is over with and we’re face-to-face with the Lord what
continues is love. Faith, hope, and love. Love is
permanent. 1 Corinthians 13:8, “Love never fails.”
So that makes
it very clear that the faith and hope position as related to eternity just
doesn’t work. The “perfect” as the eternal state just doesn’t work with the
rest of Scripture. The other key element in opening up this interpretation is
that the “now” in 1 Corinthians 13:12 and the now in 1 Corinthians 13:13
reflect different words in the Greek and that’s huge! Paul doesn’t shift
synonyms that close together without a reason. The Scripture doesn’t. Now you
have a trend in modern studies to shift words for stylistic purposes. Well,
Paul uses that verb KATARGEO four times in this passage without changing it. He doesn’t
change words for stylistic reasons. He changes words for doctrinal reasons.
So the “now” in
1 Corinthians 13:12 is the Greek word ARTI which according to a number of Greek grammars, when
these two words are used in the same context, the ARTI means right
now, like today or this minute. It’s an immediacy.
Whereas NUNI, the word used in 1 Corinthians 13:13 has a broader
sense like now in this decade, or now in this century or now in this age, in
contrast to now today, now in this immediate period.
So the contrast
then is between a now that Paul is talking about when knowledge and prophecy
are operational and an end in the same Church Age when they’re not because love
will eventually continue. The same thing is true in relation to the
illustrations that he gives. The Church goes through a period like a child and
then when he reaches maturity, he puts away childish things, which is
incomplete knowledge of life. He next uses the image of a mirror. As I pointed
out last time a mirror is not like the old King James version
where it says we see through a glass darkly. We’re not seeing through glass.
We’re seeing a mirror that reflects back on us so what we’re looking at in the
mirror is us. If the mirror is incomplete or if the
mirror is foggy then we can’t see ourselves clearly. And when knowledge and
prophecy are partial and that relates to the mirror, you can’t know, so he uses
this image of the mirror to say it’s face-to-face with the mirror, not
face-to-face with the Lord Jesus Christ.
The reason why
many people have missed this is that they read it and they read theology into
the passage. How many times do you hear someone say that when we die we’re
going to be face-to-face with the Lord so then you see face-to-face again and
you think it should mean with the Lord. That’s reading your preconceived
notions into the text. When you’re looking in a mirror, you’re not face-to-face
with someone else. You’re face-to-face with yourself. That’s what this is
describing. When the mirror is incomplete it’s a puzzle. You don’t see the
whole picture and that’s a picture of knowledge.
See, looking in
the mirror is related to partial knowledge. It’s a fuzzy mirror, it’s a foggy
mirror, it’s enigmatic but then when the mirror is complete then we’ll know
completely. We’ll have a sufficient knowledge or ourselves. Someone called that
the perspicacity of Scripture. That’s a great term. The Scripture is not
perspicacious if it’s insufficient or incomplete. But when the Scripture is
complete then it shows us who we are in all of its completion so we move from
knowing in part to knowing fully.
Knowing fully
doesn’t mean omniscient. Even when we’re in heaven we’re not omniscient. Only
God is omniscient. A million years from now when we’ve been there ten thousand
years as we sing in “Amazing Grace” we’re still not going to know everything.
When we’ve been there ten thousand times ten thousand times ten thousand there
are still going to be things to learn. We’re not going to know everything. So
we know partially from the Scripture but the Scripture gives us a complete and
sufficient knowledge of who we are.
The “now” that
Paul talks about is in the timeframe he’s living in, when Scripture is still
being composed. Remember he wrote 1 Corinthians sometimes around A.D. 54 or 55 when
he’s in Ephesus and this is during the pre-canon period so he’s still a good
sixteen years away from the destruction of Jerusalem and the judgment on
Israel. That what ends the use of tongues because according to 1 Corinthians
14:21 the purpose for tongues was a sign of judgment for Israel. It’s a quote
from Isaiah 28:11-12. Israel was warned even in the Mosaic Law that a sign of
judgment was that they would hear the Word of God in strange languages, in
foreign languages. That was a sign that God was bringing judgment on the nation
and on the land.
Paul is talking
about this period in which he lived when talking about the immediate “now” when
knowledge, prophecy, and tongues were operational. But after A.D. 70 tongues
ceased and once the canon was complete then knowledge and prophecy died out.
Then you enter into the mature stage of the Church Age, the post-Apostolic period which began in approximately A.D. 95 and will
end with the Rapture. After the Rapture comes the Tribulation and the
Millennial Kingdom and what endures into eternity is love. As long as we’re in
this period which includes the Tribulation and the Millennial
Kingdom love and then faith and hope will be operational but in the
eternal state, God sets up His dwelling upon the earth and the Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit dwell upon the earth.
So I concluded
then that the perfect completes the two partial gifts which
are revelatory, therefore the perfect must be revelatory which means the canon
of Scripture. The arrival of the perfect separates the immediate “now” from the
future “now”. This is then illustrated by the child/adult and
then the mirror statement in 1 Corinthians 11-12. So the final point was
that the completion of the canon and the passing of the apostolic era
transitions the Church from a childhood stage based on an incomplete canon to a
maturity stage based on a complete canon.
The bottom line
is that you can’t evaluate on the basis of some sort of subjective experience.
This was the problem the Corinthians had. Corinth is located just across the
Isthmus of Corinth and down the road from a place called Delphi. Delphi was
known because there was an oracle there, the Oracle of Delphi, who was said to
possess a PUTHONOS, a python snake. She sat over this hole in the
ground—and no one knows what really came up but some kind of vapors or
gas came up and she would enter into some sort of trance—and she would
speak in glossolalic utterance, the language of the
gods. You also had this tongues-speaking kind of thing in the worship of Dionysius.
He was the god of wine. The worshippers would go up into various sacred groves
and drink enough wine until they started speaking in these glossolalic
utterances because the idea was that if you drank enough wine then the spirits
[no pun intended] would enter into you and the god would speak through you in
these divine-like languages.
So within the
charismatic movement you have people who often make these claims that they’re
speaking in angelic languages or it’s a special prayer language. I had a conversation
one time with a charismatic who said, “But when I pray in tongues, God always
answers my prayers. It’s so much more effective.” I said, “Really, do you know
what you’re praying for?” He answered, “No.” Then I said, “Then how do you know
that God is answering them if you don’t know what you’re praying for?” He
didn’t know, but they make these kinds of claims all the time.
Okay, so the
seventh point is that there’s a difference between temporary and permanent
spiritual gifts. The permanent gifts are given for the edification and the
strengthening and service to the body of Christ. These gifts
are given to every believer at the instant of salvation by God the Holy Spirit.
They’re sovereignly distributed. We’re given a list
of gifts as I pointed out last time in the New Testament but I do not believe
that these lists are necessarily exhaustive but a number of these gifts are
very broad, like the gift of service or the gift of helps. They’re very broad
categories and people can have the gift of service and the gift of helps and it
can be manifested a lot of different ways. Singing in the choir is not a
spiritual gift. Playing a musical instrument is not a spiritual gift. Going on
the mission field is not a spiritual gift. But these reflect spiritual gifts.
If someone is singing in the congregation in the aid of worship that can be a
function of the gift of helps. Some of us really need a lot of help in that
area. It can be a function of service.
Someone who
goes on the mission field may have the gift of evangelism, may have any of the
spiritual gifts, actually because all of those things are operational on the
mission field. Many of them have the gift of pastor-teacher. But one of the
things I’ve always been concerned about since I was a young man is that on the
mission field you have pastors and teachers who are always the most obvious.
But in order for any pastor to be effective in carrying out his ministry there
are dozens and dozens of people who are working behind the scenes to make that
happen. We have deacons who serve in the church leadership. We have a lot of
other volunteers who do many, many things in this congregation that are often
unseen or unknown by most of the people. They just assume that bills get paid
and the floors get vacuumed and websites get built but people in the
congregation help do all of these things. That’s the body of Christ working
together.
And that’s true
on the mission field. I find that it’s a little bit shallow for a lot of
Christians who say they want to support Billy Graham, Jim Myers, or George Meisinger, but what about supporting the secretaries? What
about supporting the people who are working in the offices that help them
produce the materials they need to produce? Working on translating materials? All of these kinds of things. Some of that can be done by
volunteers, some of it needs to be done by people who do it full time and need
to have enough financial remuneration to be able to live according to that.
It’s just as important as supporting the person who’s at the front, the one who
is seen and heard most of the time. All of that is important. All of that is
part of the mission field. So missionary is not a gift. It’s just someone who
decides that instead of being a pastor in Houston, Texas or in Cleveland, Ohio
or in Los Angeles, California that he’s going to just be a pastor in Berlin or
Kiev or in Rome or in Thailand. They’re just using their gift of pastor-teacher
or evangelist in another location.
This takes us
to the eighth point which is the purpose of these
permanent spiritual gifts. It’s for mutual ministry within the body of Christ.
The purpose of spiritual gifts as I pointed out a couple of lessons back isn’t
for you to use it at work. If you have the gift of evangelism, you as stated in
Ephesians 4:11-12 you are to equip your co-workers. Right? No, it doesn’t say
that. It’s to equip the body of Christ to do the work of the ministry. It’s to
equip your family. No, it’s not to equip your family. It’s not to equip your
neighbors. It’s to equip the members of the body of Christ to be more effective
in evangelism.
The work of the
spiritual gifts is to minister to one another. That’s other believers in the
body of Christ. This is one of the weaknesses we have when the body of Christ
gets atomized into small groups, usually one, sometimes two, who are crutching
along on tapes or media or internet or something like that because they don’t
have a group of believers to minister to. It shortcircuits the operation of their spiritual gifts to the
body of Christ. On the other side one of the things I’ve witnessed (and
its good and bad, depending on where it is) is that in some internet
communities it’s provided people who are isolated to get together with other
believers via the internet so that they cannot gossip. That’s a failing that
can happen some times, but it’s so they can have a ministry to one another.
We live in a
world today where the body of Christ, in terms of a true
disciples who are seeking to grow and mature on the basis of the Word of
God, is shrinking. In some locales, even in large urban areas, it may be
extremely difficult to find a local church where the pastor is teaching the
Word of God and where there’s not too much heresy and too much distraction.
I’ve always counseled people that you can go someplace and things may not be
everything you want them to be but the pastor may give you a great opportunity
to teach a Sunday school class or just to help out here or help out there and
you may have a tremendous ministry in that local church. You never know how you
might impact that local church over the next five or fifteen years. Just
because you go in there and the pastor is pretty shallow and superficial, don’t
just write that off. Look at going to church as not what you’re going to get
from it, me, me, me, but how you can have a ministry to this local body.
Now I’m not
addressing this to people here in West Houston Bible Church as much as I’m
addressing that to a lot of people who listen. A lot of people have drifted
into a bad habit where they just flip on their iPad
or their iPhone or whatever and listen and they think
that’s great, that’s wonderful. You’re missing out on a whole portion of your
spiritual life, which is ministering in some capacity to the body of Christ
within a local church ministry. The local church was instituted by Jesus
Christ, not the internet.
Now it’s great
to have the internet. I had a guy listen to me one
time when I was talking about this. He lived up in Vermont. He sent me an
e-mail that said, “Pastor, I’ve really tried to be part of a local church. The
best church in town is a Congregational Church and the pastor doesn’t believe
in the physical, bodily resurrection of Christ and I just don’t feel
comfortable taking my kid there anymore. We’ve been going there about five
months.” I said, “No, you don’t need to go there.” You don’t sacrifice core
orthodox Biblical doctrine to be part of a local church but there are a lot of
local churches that aren’t that bad. They may not be that great and you may not
be the most comfortable all the time.
I know of one
person. I’m not going to mention his name because he brings his pastor to the
pastor’s conference all the time but he could run intellectual circles around
almost every pastor we know and his pastor isn’t that well-educated but this
man has had an incredible ministry with that pastor. Another one is George Meisinger. George goes to a huge church in Albuquerque and
since he’s been going to that church he’s been meeting with that pastor
one-on-one and challenging him in areas of exegesis and getting deeper in his
messages and has had a tremendous ministry there. When I went to Israel last
year one of the ladies on the trip helps with her husband teaching a Sunday
school class and whenever her husband can’t be there, George teaches it. It’s
had a tremendous impact on the adults in that congregation.
But George or
someone like that could say, “You know, I could run intellectual, theological
circles around this pastor and leave them in the dust but I can have a great
ministry here serving the Lord and have an impact on this congregation instead
of being self-absorbed and saying you’re here just to see what you can get out
of it.” I’ve heard that from a lot of believers over the years. They say,
“Well, I went there once or twice but I can’t get anything out of it.” On the
other hand, I recognize and I know someone who may even be listening tonight
who really put forth a strong effort to be involved in a local church that was
fairly close to where he lived. He doesn’t live here in Houston,
he lives somewhere else in the state. It just finally got to a point where the
pastor asked them to leave because every time the pastor would ask them to
teach a Sunday School class or this thing or that thing this man would teach
something and the pastor would say, “No, no, no. That’s not right.” There were
just too many little doctrinal conflicts that eventually they just couldn’t
operate there.
So we have to
understand that we have a role as believers in mutual ministry in service to
the body of Christ. That’s something that’s true at West Houston Bible Church.
Another thing that’s part of that is that you have to get to know people in the
congregation in order to be able to minister. Now you can’t know everyone in
the congregation but you ought to get to know four, five, or six people fairly
well. Not just walk in at the last minute and walk out as soon as I say Amen.
You have to know people to have this kind of ministry with them in the body of
Christ. I keep coming back to that because it’s so obvious. But I keep hearing
Christians say they can function in their spiritual gift at the office or with
other Christians I know but the focal point of these passages is within the
local church. That’s what was established by the Lord Jesus
Christ. So we have to function there.
We also have to
balance this by realizing spiritual gifts are not the means of spiritual growth
or church growth. The reason I added that last part is because we live in an
era when something started, something horrible started, in the late 1960s. It
doesn’t sound like a bad idea. It spawned a lot of bad ideas and that’s known
as the church growth movement. The church growth movement came mostly out of
Fuller Seminary. A few other places were influential. C. Peter Wagner was one
of the leaders. This spawned a lot of those mega-churches and it believed in
building churches just on the basis of human skills and human tactics.
I
interviewed Wagner around twenty-five years ago. We got around to talking about
this. I had had him recommended in a couple of seminary classes telling me I
had to read Peter Wagner’s book on spiritual gifts because you have to get your
people to know what their spiritual gift is. Otherwise you can’t build a
healthy church. Well, I’ve known a lot of healthy churches that never did that.
They weren’t going to go along with the self-absorbed culture of the day, but
that’s where the self-absorbed go. It says, “You’ve got to get people plugged
in to their spiritual gift.” No, you have to get people plugged in to the Word
of God. You have to get people plugged in to doctrine. And you have to get them
walking by the Spirit so that the Holy Spirit can enable them and strengthen
them in their spiritual growth and spiritual maturity. The issue is the Word of
God, not the experience.
You may go your
whole life and never know for sure what your spiritual gift is if it’s not one
of the more obvious one. But that doesn’t mean that you’re not utilizing it in
your spiritual life. That’s really the ninth point, which says that it’s really
not necessary to identify your spiritual gift in order to use it. As you’re
growing and maturing in Christ, as you seek to serve the Lord, you will use
your spiritual gift. The tenth point I have is that there’s a distinction
between natural talents and abilities and spiritual gifts. Some of us were born
with great natural talents, natural skills mentally, an I.Q. of 140-150-160.
Other people had great skills with numbers in mathematics. Other people had
great skills in their ability to think logically. Some people didn’t. I’ve
known some people who really weren’t all that bright but they sure were
faithful to their study of the Word. I think some of those people are going to
be in some tremendous places in the kingdom because they were just faithful to
the Lord. They weren’t given a lot of natural talent but they used it well.
People are born
with natural talents and abilities in music. Some people are naturally good
orators, good speakers. That’s not their spiritual gift. They would be that way
even if they were unsaved. They just have a natural ability or talent in that
area. Spiritual gifts are divine enhancements that are given at the point of
salvation. It’s developed in some degree as you develop spiritually and it
becomes more and more apparent.
Sometimes I
believe, although I can’t give you a Scripture on this, but I think spiritual
gifts often intersect with your natural talents and your natural abilities and
they work together so that spiritual gifts look different in everybody.
Everybody is different; they have a different personality. If you’re a pastor
then you’re going to have a different personality than the pastor that
influenced you because he’s a different person. Doctrine doesn’t change.
Teaching the truth doesn’t change. But be true to yourself, be true to your own
personality, be true to your own style, your own talents, your own abilities
and whatever the spiritual gifts are that God’s given you. But don’t make the
mistake of identifying spiritual gifts with natural talents or abilities.
Point eleven
says that spiritual gifts only have spiritual efficacy when operated under the
filling of the Holy Spirit. I don’t mean that you can’t use your spiritual gift
unless you’re operating under the ministry of God the Holy Spirit. I don’t mean
that. Just like anything else in your spiritual life, unless you’re walking by
the Spirit when you’re doing it, it’s either going to be gold, silver, and
precious stones or wood, hay, and straw. If you’re walking according to the
flesh it’s just going to produce wood, hay, and straw. People may benefit from
it because God is going to bless His word even if you’re out of fellowship but
if you’re in fellowship it’s going to accrue spiritual significance to you and
to others.
The twelfth
point is that we have to recognize that the body of Christ is like a team.
Think about a team like the Seattle Seahawks as much as you may not like them.
Where would they be without a quarterback? Where would they be if all they had
were quarterbacks? See, there’s a lot of different
positions and a lot of different talents and a lot of different skills that
need to come together to produce a healthy team. That’s what the body of Christ
is. There’s a lot of different people doing a lot of different things and they
don’t have to all be the same way so we have different positions, different
spiritual gifts, and when we’re all walking by the Spirit it is a magnificent
and wonderful thing.
The thirteenth
point is that the purpose of spiritual gifts is to edify the body of Christ and
not unbelievers. And I mean the local body of Christ. There are ways in which
we can minister to other believers at times but the primary purpose as seen in
the New Testament is functioning in the local body of believers. Spiritual gifts is not about what you get out of it.
Although a person may receive edification as a by-product of his use of his
spiritual gift, this can be a big problem in the charismatic movement. They
think they’re edified when they use their spiritual gift of tongues. Well, buddy,
the use of your spiritual gifts is to edify somebody else and not yourself. If
you’re doing it for yourself then you’re carnal and it’s a wrong use of a gift.
You may be edified as a by-product.
Let me tell
you. I learn a lot studying the Word of God when I’m preparing for a message
but I don’t study the Word of God for what I get out of it just in terms of my
own spiritual life. I’m studying it so I can utilize my spiritual gift to help
guide, teach, and inform believers so that they can be more effective in their
spiritual life. And yeah, I enjoy that, and I get something out of it but I’m
not doing it for what I can get out of it. I’m doing it because I want to serve
other people. There’s a by-product of knowing that you’re
being used by God but the personal enrichment side of it is not why we
utilize our spiritual gift.
Then the last
point is that a person may have more than one gift. A person may have different
proportions of those gifts. So some people may be richly given the gift of
pastor-teacher or just have it in a smaller amount. He may have smaller gifts,
such as mercy, such as helps, such as evangelism so no two pastors are going to
be the same and God uses each individual in rich ways to minister to the body
of Christ. That tells us we shouldn’t ever idolize a pastor because God has
given many different pastors in the Church Age and they contribute many
different things to the body of Christ. There are some wonderful pastors and
there have been some great pastors and there have been some intellectual
pastors and there have been some very caring pastors but every one of them are
fulfilling God’s mission for them and God has provided many different pastors
for the body of Christ and not just one.
We need to
recognize that there are different pastors for different congregations.
Sometimes the congregational needs shift and another pastor needs to come in.
Think about the church at Ephesus during the 1st century. Paul was
there. Timothy was there. Apollos was there. There
were a number of different pastors. The last pastor they had was the Apostle
John. So over a course of about forty years they have four or five great men in
that congregation in Ephesus. They had other congregations there as well and in
some of the other towns around Ephesus. Ephesus was sort of the Las Vegas
playground of the ancient world and so they had a lot of distractions to deal
with. But there were a lot of different pastors who just came and went. There
wasn’t just one. Timothy was there for about twenty years. You didn’t hear
people say, “Well, you can go listen to Timothy but I’m going to listen to the
Apostle John. He was Jesus’ best friend.” You didn’t have that kind of nonsense
going on there. We need to correct our attitude on some of these things. Next
time we’ll come back and we’ll get into our final discussion on spiritual gifts
in Romans12 and then we’ll go into the next section dealing with love in the
body of Christ.