Using Our Gifts Correctly

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This morning, I was downstairs getting breakfast ready. I was standing there cooking, and Benjamin came into the kitchen and got some cereal out and didn’t realize his siblings had put the cereal box in upside down and not closed the lid, so he pulls it out of the pantry and just cereal goes everywhere. And we just kind of looked at each other.

I’m not at my sharpest first thing in the morning. And we just kind of looked at each other, and he said, I’ll clean it up. And I said, yeah, you will.

so I’m not doing it. I’m going to burn eggs if I try to clean this up. But he goes and gets the broom and he’s sweeping it up and I’m thinking he’s doing a pretty good job, which is ironic because he used to complain.

And I told him that we were going to talk about this. He’s fine with it. He used to complain about being taught to do chores.

And now he comes home complaining about kids at school who don’t know how to do chores because they have to clean up the lunchroom. and I tell him I understand because charla and I were both teachers and when we were teaching the kids had to clean up the lunchroom and you’d be amazed how many of them didn’t know how to do it didn’t know how to didn’t know how to use a simple tool like a broom and I mean we could I’m not making fun of them for that somebody needs to teach them but they just never had been taught I remember being a sponsor at at kids camp years ago and we’d have to clean up the cabin every night and you’d be amazed at how many kids had never been taught how to use one of these. And I would see things like we’re using it like a person who’s blind would use the cane and like this is going to accomplish anything other than just scattering dirt around.

Have you ever seen a kid or even an adult do that? Or I’d see them wave it around like a, I don’t know, one of those musical movies and they’ve got an umbrella and they’re just spinning it. That’s not going to accomplish anything.

Let’s clean off the tables. No, get a rag. That’s not what that’s for.

All kinds of uses. They’ve got the right tool. But if it’s not being used correctly, it’s just going to make a mess.

You could say the same thing of a mop, a sponge, any kind of cleaning tool, a lot of regular tools. We might have the right tool for the job, but if we’re not using it correctly, it creates more of a mess than it cleans up. That’s how the Apostle Paul deals with spiritual gifts.

we are each given spiritual gifts those of you who’ve been here the last several weeks we’re doing this study through first corinthians and we’re seeing that paul talks a lot about spiritual gifts he spends three whole chapters in fact talking about spiritual gifts and he’s very clear and very repeated about the fact that if you’re a believer you have spiritual gifts you have at least one maybe more than one I’ve heard some people teach we all have all the spiritual gifts they’re just there in different measures. Maybe. There’s definitely some that I score higher on than others.

But if you’re a believer, if you’re somebody who’s trusted Jesus Christ as your Savior, the Holy Spirit has come to dwell inside of you, to take up residence inside of you, and that Holy Spirit gives you the spiritual gifts you need in order to serve God, in order to live out the calling He’s created you for. But as we come to this section of 1 Corinthians, Paul is pretty clear that even if you have a wonderful spiritual gift, even if you have an incredibly useful spiritual gift for what it is God’s called you to accomplish, if you don’t use it correctly, it makes a mess. And so we’re going to talk about this morning what it means to use our spiritual gifts correctly.

We’re going to be at the end of 1 Corinthians chapter 12 this morning, and we’re going to go into 1 Corinthians 13. Now, when you see that, that we’re in two different chapters, don’t panic thinking it’s going to be dinner time before we get out of here. It’s eight verses we’re going to look at.

But as I was studying this, I realized you couldn’t really do the last five verses of chapter 12 without bringing in some of chapter 13. And so we’re going to look at these few verses here this morning, starting in 1 Corinthians chapter 12, if you’d turn there with me, if you haven’t already. And once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, if you don’t have your Bible or can’t find 1 Corinthians 12, it’s all right.

It’ll be on the screen for you there just in case. But we’re going to start where we left off last week in verse 27 of chapter 12. Paul, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, says, now you are Christ’s body and individually members of it.

And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, administrations, various kinds of tongues. Now, these are not all the spiritual gifts, but he’s giving a list of some examples of the kinds of things that the Holy Spirit has gifted for the benefit of the church and some of the roles that they feel because of that. He goes on in verse 29, all are not apostles, are they?

All are not prophets, are they? All are not teachers, are they? All are not workers of miracles, are they?

All do not have healings, do they? All do not speak with tongues, do they? All do not interpret, do they?

And it’s very repetitive to the point where you’re probably thinking, okay, Paul, we get it. But he’s doing that to make a point that we see all of our spiritual gifts are not going to be the same. And yet they’re all there and they’re all useful.

Now he says in verse 31, but earnestly desire the greater gifts. And I’ll explain that in a few minutes because we’ve been talking about how he He tells us there’s not this ranking, this hierarchy where we can say one is more important than the other. But earnestly desire the greater gifts, and I show you a still more excellent way.

Then into chapter 13, if I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. And you may be seated.

And you may wonder, what’s the connection between the two? Because chapter 13, we read at weddings, right? Love is patient, love is kind.

Paul’s talking in chapter 13 about love. At the very last statement of chapter 12, he says, I’m going to show you a more excellent way. And that’s what he begins to show us in chapter 13.

that the love he’s talking about is the more excellent way of using our spiritual gifts. So when we start off back at the beginning of that passage we read, it teaches us that all of our spiritual gifts are good, and they’re all beneficial, as long as they’re used correctly. We’ve discussed this a little bit over the last few weeks, that we don’t want to look at one spiritual gift and compare them to others, to where we either look at somebody else and say, well, I don’t have the same gift as him, so I’m not as useful to the church.

And we allow that to lead us just to step out and sit back and let somebody else serve the Lord, and we miss out on fulfilling what God has created us for. Or, on the other hand, we look at somebody else and in comparison and say, he can’t really do anything because he doesn’t have the spiritual gift I have. And we begin to rank them and treat them like some are more important than others.

And we do this even unintentionally. As we were trying to, a couple Sunday nights ago, trying to come up with, I asked the question, what are some of the gifts that we tend to, it’s not even that we’d say, oh, that’s a worthless gift. But it’s just not one we emphasize a lot.

I think somebody pulled up one of the lists that we had compiled in a Wednesday night study and said, well, there’s mercy, and I thought, I didn’t even think of that one. And yet it’s a spiritual gift, but it tends to not be emphasized because it’s not on stage. It’s not done in front of people.

It’s a quieter spiritual gift. And so even just in terms of, I don’t think any of us in this room necessarily would look at somebody else and say, well, your spiritual gift is worthless. We might think our spiritual gift is worthless if it’s one of the quieter ones.

If it’s one of the ones that’s harder for us to see the impact of, we might even just forget about some of the spiritual gifts and not realize that what we just think we’re good at is really the Holy Spirit working through us. It’s actually God at work through us. We might not notice that.

But he says in verses 27 through 30 that the church has been assembled, it’s been gifted in different ways so that different ministries are accomplished, like those that are listed here. And I don’t want to spend too much time on this point because we’ve talked about it for several weeks. Paul’s kinds of people so that the work of the church gets done because we’re not all the same.

That’s not even an obstacle to overcome. That’s the point, that we don’t all have the same gifts. And I say all the time that if we were all exactly like me, there’s a whole lot of stuff that wouldn’t get done because either I’m not great at it or I just don’t see it.

And at the same time, if everybody in the church was exactly like you, there’s a whole lot that wouldn’t get done because you have things that are in the forefront of your attention. You have things that you’re geared toward. And that’s why God brings us together so that we complement one another’s efforts and the work of the ministry gets done.

We all have a valuable part to play here. And he talks about some of these that are more public, the apostles, the prophets, the teachers. And when he says first and second and third, he’s not ranking them.

He’s just saying, yeah, and first of all, we had apostles, those were the guys that started the churches. And then you had prophets who would, within the church, would bring a revelation from God and would teach. And you had teachers that would teach on that basis.

So it’s kind of a logical progression here. But you needed all of those guys. You needed the ones that were healing.

You needed the ones that had the gift of mercy. You needed the ones with the gift of generosity. It all works together.

But we see in verses 29 through 30 that the spiritual gifts and the ministries they’re used for, they’re going to look different from one another, but they’re supposed to. That’s why he says, not all of us are apostles. Not all of us are teachers.

Not all of us are healers. Not all of us are this. Not all of us are that.

If you have an idea of what God has gifted you in, think of what that spiritual gift is. And I guarantee you can find somebody in this room that would say, yeah, that’s kind of a weak spot for me. And we’re not all going to be the same.

Consequently, we’re not all going to have the same ministry because our giftedness is different. I’ve mentioned before, we have some we have some folks in this church who are very gifted in administration, and that is a spiritual gift. We have some people who are very gifted in administration, and I’m thankful for that, because they do a better job of it than I could.

I just kind of limp along beside them, but knowing that they’ve got some of these things covered so that the church runs in an organized fashion frees me up to do more of the things that God’s called me to do. And these are all needed. Now, we come to verse 31 where he says, but earnestly desire the greater gifts.

And I saw that and I thought, but all throughout these chapters, Paul has been, all throughout chapter 12, Paul’s been telling us there’s not a hierarchy where one’s better than the other. The hand doesn’t get to look at the foot and say, you’re less important than me. The ear doesn’t get to look at the eye and say, you’re more important than I am.

They’re all needed. And here he’s saying the more excellent gifts. He is not telling us here that some are greater than others.

What he’s telling us, he’s not necessarily agreeing that some are greater. He’s conceding that the folks in Corinth still think there are some that are greater. It’s kind of like if you look at your child and you just don’t want to argue with them anymore.

Okay, if I haven’t convinced you by now that the spiritual gifts are all needed, okay, fine. I concede that you think some are greater than others. It’s okay for you to want those greater gifts.

It’s okay. What he’s saying here is if there are gifts that are useful for the church and you see how useful they are, it’s fine for you to desire to have a gift that is useful. Now the hope there is that we recognize that all of our gifts are useful.

But he says, while you are praying and wishing and hoping for that gift that you think is the best and is useful, he said, I’m going to show you a more excellent way. I’m going to show you what the key to this is of how our spiritual gifts are to be used. See, the key to being effective in the use of our spiritual gifts is not that we long for a different spiritual gift.

It’s not for you to cry out to God to, oh, won’t you make me as good as Brother Rick? Won’t you make me as good as Miss Billy? Won’t you let me do what Miss Georgie can do?

Lord, I sure would love to have the abilities that Brother Mike has. It’s not about asking God to give us different spiritual gifts, although if He wants to, He can. It’s about learning how to take the gifts He’s given us and use them to do the things He’s called us to do.

The key is finding the way to use the gift we have and trusting that if we need another one for something He’s called us to do, trusting Him to provide it. He says, I’ll show you a more excellent way. And what is going to make our gifts useful, again, is not having a certain gift, but the way we use it and the way we use it is love.

The way we handle our spiritual gifts must be motivated by love. He said, well, you’re chasing the gifts that you think are going to be the most useful. I’m going to show you a more excellent way, a way that is going to make whatever spiritual gift you have useful.

This more excellent way that he’s talking about at the very end of chapter 12, given what follows in chapter 13, is that we are supposed to use the spiritual gifts we’ve received in love. Anytime we’re using our spiritual gifts and it is not motivated by love, it’s an improper use of those gifts. It’s not using those gifts correctly.

And at the very beginning of the message, I talked about the broom and how you can make a bigger mess if you don’t use it correctly. Spiritual gifts, if they’re not used correctly, can make a huge mess. I think that one of my spiritual gifts is discernment.

I can spot a false teaching at 100 yards. It’s like radar, red flags. I have seen people with that spiritual gift do enormous damage.

I pray that I am not somebody who has done enormous damage with that spiritual gift. But I have seen people who have that gift that are not motivated by love and just want to jump on any little thing that somebody says that may not be exactly precise and not just correct them, but chastise them for getting it wrong. This morning we were talking about St.

Patrick’s Day. Benjamin and I were, once we got all the messes cleaned up and sat down to breakfast. We were talking about St. Patrick’s Day and talking about how Patrick used the three-leafed clover as an analogy to illustrate the Trinity to the pagan tribes in Ireland, if the legend is correct.

And even looking at that, I was telling him, you know, there are some problems with that analogy because you don’t see that the three leaves of the clover have any ability to work on their own. pull them apart, they’re not fully the clover. But Jesus is fully God, the Holy Spirit is fully God, the Father is fully God.

So the analogy isn’t perfect in that regard. Benjamin brought up the analogy of steam, liquid water, and ice, all being water, and how that can be an analogy for the Trinity. There’s some problems with that too, because they’re not all there at the same time.

And there’s a false teaching called modalism that says that at various points he reveals himself as the Father. At various points, He reveals Himself as the Son. At various points, He reveals Himself as the Holy Spirit, but He’s not all three at the same time.

That’s incorrect. But you know what? I didn’t take the opportunity to jump all over my son and call him a false teacher for saying he liked that analogy.

My thought was, I need to correct that. But there’s a time and a place, and you know what? This morning, I was glad that he was thinking about how the Trinity works, Because that’s, I love studying Bible and theology, but I cannot sit there at the breakfast table and just ponder the Trinity.

I’ll go insane. As I said, I’m not at my sharpest first thing in the morning, and that’s a pretty deep subject. So I decided this morning to be glad that he was thinking along those lines.

Because I don’t want to be that person that misuses the spiritual gifts. Like I’ve seen when people have jumped all over somebody because what they said was not theologically precise. We need to have correction over those things, but it has to be done in love, and it needs to be done with a spirit of encouragement.

You can misuse any spiritual gift. You can misuse the gift of mercy, and you can do all sorts of merciful things for the benefit of other people, but if the motivation is just, here, let me get my selfie of me feeding the poor so I can put it on Facebook. If that’s the motivation, that’s a misuse of our spiritual gift.

We can end up hurting people because we make them feel like a project. Anything that’s not done in love is an improper use of our spiritual gifts. If we have the spiritual gift of teaching, and our motivation in getting up and teaching is so everybody can see how smart we are, that’s going to fall apart real fast. Any of these can be misused.

And the Corinthians here, they overemphasized some of the more public spiritual gifts. Teaching, prophecy, words of wisdom. Especially they overemphasized speaking in tongues.

Meaning they looked at that as the capstone of all of them. If you wanted to be truly spiritual, you spoke in tongues. To the point that they looked at everything else as though it was useless.

That’s why Paul spends so much time on speaking in tongues. But here in verse 1, he says that if it’s not motivated by love, they’re just making a lot of noise. That’s why he says, if I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, if I get up and I testify before the church every Sunday and speak in tongues and show how spiritual I am, but I’m not doing it out of a sense of love, He says, I become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. He says, you just make a noise.

Verse 2, he says, if I have the gift of prophecy, that’s the idea that I have revelations from God, or I can explain God’s truth. If I know all the mysteries and know all knowledge, and by the way, Paul is not saying if I did, because none of us know all of those things. But he’s saying, even if I knew everything, even if I had the most incredible faith that could just move mountains at a single glance.

Even if I had all of those spiritual gifts and I used them, but I’m not motivated by love and using them, he said, I’m nothing. Because they would look at those spiritual gifts and say, boy, I sure am something. And he said, it doesn’t matter what gift you have or how you’re using it.

If it’s not in love, you’re not anything special because of that. He even goes so far as in verse 3 to say, if I gave all my possessions to feed the poor. I mean, that sounds pretty loving, right?

But you can do that with the wrong motivation. If I gave all my possessions to feed the poor and I surrendered my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. Here he’s talking about some of the greatest acts of self-sacrificial service that we can imagine.

Here he’s talking about giving of himself in a way, even laying down his life, giving of himself in a way that we’d have to stop and think about at least for a minute, that is not going to just come naturally. But he says, if I lay my life down and do these things, but it’s not motivated by love, there’s no benefit to it. It profits me nothing.

The key to using our spiritual gifts and being effective in the use of our spiritual gifts is to be motivated by love. Now, the next thing we have to do is understand what he means by love. He goes on to a description of love in chapter 13 that we’ll get to next week, Lord willing.

But we have to understand what love means, because love is one of those words that seems to have a different definition to everybody. Love is warm, fuzzy feelings. Love is I agree with everything you say and want to do.

Love is I give you everything I have. Well, he’s made it clear you can do that without it being love. What did Jesus say the two greatest commandments were?

I promise it’s not a trick question. Love God, love your neighbor. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.

There are two aspects of this love that as we go through Corinthians and see the way he’s talking about the use of the spiritual gifts, this idea of love comes back to those two great commandments, and specifically within the context of the church. When he says that we need to have love, he’s talking about, first of all, a loyalty to Jesus Christ. He’s talking about a love for Jesus, and I would define it as loyalty because it’s not just warm, fuzzy feelings toward Jesus. Our love for Jesus is this idea that we are devoted to Him, we are dedicated to Him, that we want to please Him.

It’s a loyalty. And our love for our neighbor in the context of the church, because he’s talking about how we minister within the church and encourage one another, it’s a desire to seek the good of the others in the church. So as we’re talking about love, and we’re talking about Him using the word love in the Bible, we need to use a biblical concept of what love is.

We need to empty our minds of all the cultural definitions that we’ve picked up along the way and realize that the love he’s talking about is a loyalty to Jesus Christ and a desire to seek the good of his people. And that changes how we minister in our spiritual gifts. Because if I’m serving in some way because I want to glorify Jesus, and I’m serving in some way because I want to serve his people, that makes it really hard to use the spiritual gifts to build myself up and say, look at me.

That might even change the kinds of ministries that we engage in because it’s really easy to use those spiritual gifts and say, even subconsciously, I could get people to look at me. I could get people to want to be like me. I could use this for power or influence.

Any of these gifts can be misused and create damage, but it becomes a lot harder to damage other people. It becomes a lot harder to damage the church when we’re motivated by a desire to serve Jesus and a desire to seek the good of his people. Now, as we come to a closing point in this, one thing I want to be very clear about is that this is not just, hey, do better about being loving.

It’s really hard for us to love others the way we’re supposed to. As a matter of fact, when we look at the way love is described in Scripture, it’s just about impossible. Nobody in this room.

I don’t care how wonderful a person you are. And to the extent that I know you, I think you’re wonderful people. But I don’t care how wonderful you are.

Nobody in this room, myself included, has the capacity to love others like God does. And that’s what we’re being called on to do. The only way we have a shot at doing this is to let Christ love through us.

Because anything that we do that serves other people, anything that we do that serves the church, is not a mark of how good or how loving we are. We are just imitating the perfect love and the perfect sacrifice that Jesus modeled for us. So many times as I read what Paul said to the Corinthians about how they’re supposed to deal with one another, I think of what he said to the Philippians, different letter, but same idea, telling the church, let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God did not think of his godhood as something to be clung to, I’m paraphrasing here, but emptied himself, meaning he gave up his rights and privileges and came here to be among us.

It says he took the form of a servant and he humbled himself and became obedient even to death, even the death of the cross. There’s no sacrifice we could make. There’s no love that we could show that does not pale in comparison to what Jesus Christ did on the cross.

And our motivation in serving, our motivation in using our spiritual gifts is, again, not to make ourselves look better. It’s not even to do better and be more spiritual because, well, I’m being more loving in the way I’m using my spiritual gifts. It’s to imitate Jesus.

Jesus set the example. It’s to imitate the one who gave his life for us because we didn’t deserve God’s love. We didn’t deserve God’s forgiveness.

We didn’t deserve this relationship we have. We didn’t deserve the spiritual gifts or the opportunity to serve and be part of his church. We didn’t deserve any of it.

We deserve separation from God because of our sin. And yet God is so loving that He chose to make a way out of that sin. He chose to make a way out of the condemnation that we deserve for our sin.

And Jesus Christ, God’s Son, came willingly to earth, came willingly to take responsibility for my sins. Every wrong thing I’ve ever done or thought or said, Jesus took responsibility for. Every wrong thing you’ve ever done or thought or said, Jesus took responsibility for.

And he was nailed to the cross in our place. And he shed his blood and he died. Jesus Christ served his people better than we ever could.

We’re just playing catch up out of loyalty to him. And then he rose again three days later to prove that everything he said about who he was and everything he said about the forgiveness of sins was true. And now he offers it to us as a free gift.

Not something we earn by being spiritual, by being good, but something that he has already paid for in full. And something that we just need to trust him to receive. and we’ll have it.

And that’s where all of this starts, where the Holy Spirit comes to live inside of us. The Holy Spirit begins to change us. The Holy Spirit gives us the capacity to love as Jesus would love.

It gives us the capacity to love others in such a way that we use these spiritual gifts for good and not to cause damage. But it all starts with trusting Jesus as our one and only Savior.