Stain glass art is a great metaphor for us being built
together as the body of Christ. The image behind me is of the window in our
foyer with the picture of Jesus the good shepherd. It is built up of etched and
coloured glass put together. In and of themselves each piece wouldn’t really be
much, just a weird shaped piece of glass maybe something you’d think that was
broken and only fit to be discarded or dangerous. But put in the right place by
the artist it is transformed and plays it part in showing us a picture and
telling us a story. In fact we get the word story for the floors in a building
in English from the number of stories in panels in the stain glass windows in
cathedrals, they were said to be so many stories high. The windows come alive
the vibrancy of the colour and the way the work together comes alive as the
light shines through them. That light,
shining through different and diverse pieces of glass, give us, in this case, a
picture of Jesus Christ. We too are the body of Christ, with diverse and
different gifts with a place to belong and a part to play, that as the same
spirit shines and moves through each of us together embodies Christ to the
world.
We are working our way through scriptures looking at the
gifts of the Holy Spirit in the bible and how they apply to the church today.
We’ve seen that they are the means by which God empowers, enables and equips his
church to witness, to serve, and to be built up into maturity in the fullness of Christ. We’ve seen each of the passages has a list of gifts and each list is
different, they are examples not exhaustive: individually or all together they don’t give
the whole picture. Each must be looked at in the context they are given and as
part of the wider teaching of the scripture on how we are to be God’s Spirited
people. That’s what we are doing in this series.
In 1 Corinthians twelve there are two lists of gift of the
Holy Spirit, so we are going to look at this chapter over two weeks. Paul does
not use the word gifts of the Holy Spirit in this passage he uses the word
manifestations, Paul deals with the more spectacular, Gifts of the Spirit in
this section because that is what the church at Corinth is having issues with.
Paul starts his letter by dealing with the key issue at
Corinth that it is a church split into many different factions… Paul starts his
letter by giving them reason to be one people together. Then in the second half
of his letter he deals with questions they had written asking him, questions
about the issues that were at the core of their division. 1 Corinthians 12-14
form Paul’s response to certain issues to do with public worship. It seems one
or all the factions saw the manifestations of the Spirit as being a sign that they
were more spiritual than the other group, it proved they were right, in
particular the use of one gift, that of speaking in tongues.. In Corinth it
seems that worship was rather chaotic with people using speaking in tongues willy-nilly
and all the time, as a badge of their spirituality. Paul addresses this in
three ways. In chapter 12 with teaching on being the body of Christ, in chapter
13 in one of the most loved passages in scripture focuses on the importance of
love and finally gives some solid teaching on the use of gifts, mainly prophecy
and tongues in public worship. It’s
interesting how somethings don’t change and as the Pentecostal and charismatic
movements have rediscovered the gifts of the Holy Spirit in our day that these
same issues should to come to the fore as well. The manifestation of the Spirit
is a sign of being spiritually superior and the emphasis on speaking in
tongues.
In the section we are looking at Paul starts by saying he
does not want the Corinthians to be misinformed about the gifts of Holy Spirit.
This was a challenge to the people in Corinth who thought they had come to
maturity and had made it spiritually because of the manifestations of the
spirit in their midst. Paul goes on to
say that there understanding had more to do with their pagan past rather than
Christian understanding. They used to worship idols of stone and wood who could
not communicate with them. Whereas we serve a living God who wants to speak to
and through his people, an active God, who wants to move in and through his
people. In idol worship, there would be
certain manifestations; maybe people babbling in what seemed to be foreign
languages, people giving strange oracles. Usually these were the result of worshippers getting into a trance like state vis drug use or extatic dance. But Paul tells them that it is not
the actual manifestations that are important but their intelligible Christian
content. In a very Jewish way of thinking he tells them how to test these
manifestations. If they are from the
Holy Spirit they will bring glory to Jesus. No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’
except by the Holy Spirit, it’s not just the words like you were listening to a
message to get the key to the code, but rather it is that they fitted with the
very radical declaration that Jesus reigns. It calls us not just to look at
what is spoken but the life lived by the person speaking as well, are they
about the kingdom of God. On the flipside
no one speaking by the Holy Spirit would say ‘Jesus be cursed’, that is utterances
or manifestations that do not glorify
Jesus are not from the Holy Spirit, they are either from the person themselves,
or as Paul had said previously in his letter they are of demonic origin.
Even in the world today we need to be aware that there are counterfeit
spiritual experiences. We are more used in things of the more spectacular
spiritual things to do with the occult. People look to horoscopes for guidance,
they might think a medium can give them advice and answers, where scripture
says why bother trying to communicate with the dead when we have a living and
active and communicative God. They may
consult cards, crystals; these things are simply mute idols. There are cults based round a gifted leaders who manifests spiritual gifts but when thee content is tested points more to their own glorification that focusing on the death and ressurection of Jesus Christ.
Then Paul in a very early Trinitarian formula moves to deal
with the diversity of gifts, not just the prominence of one gift. The same
spirit gives different kinds of gifts, there are different kinds of services
but the one Lord, and different kinds of works but one God at work in them all.
The word biodiversity is important at the moment, and I think that great
diversity of flora and fauna shows the creativity of the one creator, the word
and the spirit involved in that creation, so it is with God’s people he moves
and speaks to and through us with a great diversity of ways.
Before giving a list of these things, Paul reaffirms that
the manifestations are not given to a person to show they are spiritual or have
arrived, but rather are there for them to serve, they are given for the common
good. Let’s have a look at these gifts…
Words or messages of Wisdom: Earlier in his letter paul had
talked of the wisdom of God shown in the cross being foolishness to the world.
So there is an idea here of true wisdom being messages and words that draw us
back to Christ and his death on the cross. In the opening chapter of Joshua,
Joshua becomes the leaders of Israel and is said to have a spirit of
wisdom. It’s interesting that when the
people pledge allegiance to Joshua as their commander in chief they says they
will follow him but call him to focus and meditate and be led by the word of God. That was where his
words of wisdom would come from.
Closely related to that is Words or messages of Knowledge,
that the spirit reveals knowledge to people that they would not otherwise know,
knowledge to help minister to other
people’s lives. If you read through Paul’s shipwreck in the book of Acts Paul
seems to have knowledge that comes from God, about not sailing and also about
how to make sure everyone gets safely off the boat. Jim Wallace tells the story of speaking to a
man at a party about Christ, the man said he didn’t need Christ because his
whole life was all together, Jim was rather taken aback a he sensed God say to
him “ask him why he sleeps with a gun under his pillow?” which Jim did and the
man turned white and started opening up about what was really going on in his
life and became a Christian
To another Faith! This is hard for us because we are aware
that all of us need saving faith; trust in what Jesus had done for us, but it
is linked together in this list with healings and miracles. So it speaks of a
spirit inspired faith to trust God in a particular situation. We might mistake
this with a sort of hyping ourselves up, but in scripture faith seems to be the
steady calm assurance of God’s presence and activity.
Healings by the one Spirit: that God heals. It’s interesting
to see that the word used here is plural and that it may refer to gifts of the
spirit being given to definite situations and a specific person. It also leaves
God’s healing open to be both by supernatural means and a gifted medical person
as well. WE often wrestle with this one
and the next which is miraculous power, but Gordon Fee comments historically it
is “Only among intellectuals and in a ‘scientific age’ is it thought to be too
hard for God to heal people.”
Miraculous Powers, is one I must admit I find the hardest to
define, but refers to other things that Jesus and the apostles did alongside
healing. It may refer to such things as deliverances. I’m not advocating the
old’ Appalachians snake handling as part
of worship, but an example from scripture would be Paul in Acts 20 being bitten
by a snake and not dying, which had an effect of leading to the evangelisation
of the people of Malta.
Prophecy, this gift tends to be in all the lists of the
Gifts of the Holy Spirit, in this case Paul wants to highlight it and come back
to speak about it. But it is the telling forth of God’s word, taking the
timeless word of God and in an intelligible way making it timely. You know that sometimes a verse in scripture
will hit home to what is going on in your life. Or a speaker or someone will
share something and it is spot on right for you, as if God himself as speaking
to you. One night in church a man stopped me on the way out and said he
believed God was calling me to go to Bible College, that was the furthest thing
from my mind, but it started me thinking about it and praying about it and it
was an important step in my call to ministry. Plus it’s where I meet Kris,
added bonus.
Distinguishing between Spirits, what we might call
discernment. It’s interesting that this comes right after prophecy, because the
congregation is to weigh everything that is said to see if it is from God and
so this is a gift that goes along with prophecy, being able to discern or know
if it from God or just human thought or from another spiritual source.
Finally Paul adds speaking in tongues and their
interpretation. He places tongues last and with the added gift of
interpretation because this was the problem gift for Corinth and by putting it
last he is stressing that it is one amongst many gifts given by the same
Spirit. Tongues is giving a message or praying in a language that is unknown to
you. At Pentecost it was used as a sign that the gospel was for the whole
world, everyone heard the good news proclaimed in their own language. In and of itself it is a language to
communicate between a person and God, but used in public worship it needs to be
interpreted to be seen as God communicating. The first time I ever heard
tongues being used in church was in an evening service in Titirangi
Presbyterian Church. It was done in a very Presbyterian manner. We had a time
in the worship service set aside for people to share back what God had been
saying. One elder said they believed God had given them a message in tongues
and gave it. Then on the other side of the church another elder gave a message
in English. The minister at the front asked the person who had spoken in
tongues if they thought it was the interpretation and they confirmed it. Then
the wife of a third elder spoke up that she could also confirm it because she
had spent a few years teaching in Tonga, and while it wasn’t Tongan it had a
definite pacific feel to it and she recognised certain words that appeared in
the translation in the place she would expect. It caught our attention and was
a profound way for God to speak to us as a congregation.
Paul finishes this section by reaffirming that all these
gifts are different but come from the same Holy Spirit for the common good.
ONce again it was school holidays at St Peter's and our Children were in during the service. To helpthem to keep engauges=d with the message this week I used a twenty questions format. inviting anyone who wanted too to follow me through the message by answering these simple questions... There was a prize for everyone who did...even if they missed a couple of answers.
No comments:
Post a Comment