Making the Most of Spiritual Gifts

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Well, originally my plan was to ask the kids a question, but after listening to Brother Rick’s lesson, I realized I might never get a word in edgewise. So I’m going to ask you all a question instead. When you were kids, think back to that time, was there a particular birthday gift or Christmas gift that you ever got that you were excited about?

Okay, you still are a kid, but okay. What was the gift? Well, there goes my sermon.

Okay. All right. Somebody else.

Was there a really fun gift you got that you were excited about? Your first piano. Okay. Bicycle.

All right. Toy soldiers. A keyboard.

I got one of those too. I’m still excited about it. All right.

Very good. Okay. Nerf.

All right. Yes. Nerf guns.

I heard something over here. A doll that was as tall as you were and could walk with your help. All driver’s license.

Is it a gift if you have to earn it? You worked hard for that, I assume. Most of us, when we were kids, got gifts like that that we were excited about.

Now, 90% of those gifts that I was excited about as a kid, I don’t remember. I do remember what I was not excited about, and every Christmas, my great-grandmother would give all of her great-grandkids socks. And I just..

. No kid. I mean, okay, maybe there’s a couple in here.

But most kids are just not excited about socks. I mean, looking back on it now, I get it. She had like 30 great.

. . I’ve lost count of how many second cousins I have.

She had a lot of people to buy for. So I get it. And it was a practical gift.

But as a kid, you’re not excited about those things. As an adult, I find myself more excited about those practical gifts. My mother-in-law buys me socks, but they’re not just the white tube socks like my great-grandmother bought.

I’m wearing bison socks today that she bought me. I think you’ve bought me Tabasco socks. I mean, they don’t have Tabasco in them.

It’s just a pattern. That would be uncomfortable. Pickle socks.

I’ve got several things that she’s bought. My wife, I was excited two or three weeks ago when she, for no reason at all, bought and gave to me as a gift a pair of jeans. And she did that because she knows I own one pair of jeans at a time.

That’s all I buy. And I don’t know if she felt bad about that or if she was annoyed that every Saturday night I was having to use the washer because I’d worked out in the chicken coop and wanted to wear the jeans to church the next day. But she bought me jeans, and I was excited about that.

I read an article this week talking about this difference between the exciting gifts and the mundane gifts that we get as kids especially, and how we as Christians a lot of times treat spiritual gifts the same way. There are some that are more prominent and more exciting, and we want to focus on those, and we want to run to those. And there are others that are a little quieter, and they’re a little less prestigious.

They’re a little less exciting. And we kind of treat those as an afterthought. We kind of treat those as though they’re second-class gifts.

We’ve talked about similar ideas over the last few weeks. This is a little bit of a repetition of what we’ve been talking about. But there’s reason for that.

Paul spends three solid chapters of 1 Corinthians talking about spiritual gifts. And as I’ve said to you many times, why does he keep going over the same themes over and over? It’s because we’re hard-headed.

and we’re slow learners. At least I am. I can’t speak for you, but I can speak for me.

And sometimes when I see that God has repeated something over and over and over, I need to take notice and realize it’s, hey, you know, if you’d learn this a little faster, he wouldn’t have to say it so many times. So I know that’s true for me. But there are certain gifts that just by their very nature, we want to be excited about, we want to emphasize, and those aren’t the only ones there.

And so we’re going to look this morning at what Paul says about some of these gifts and what it is we should look for. And I’ve noticed that as we’ve been studying through these chapters on spiritual gifts, as we’re making our way all the way through 1 Corinthians, there are numerous times where he says something along the lines of, pursue these spiritual gifts, long for these spiritual gifts. I believe God gives us the gifts he wants us to have to equip us for the work that he’s called us to do.

I think, though, there’s a sense in which we can ask Him for spiritual gifts. Now, I don’t know that it means He’s going to give us every spiritual gift we ask for, but I think He does want us to pursue and grow in spiritual gifts. But as we do that, we need to keep in perspective what the purpose of those gifts are.

And that’s what we’re going to talk about this morning. So we’re going to be in 1 Corinthians chapter 14. And once you find it, if you’d stand with me as we read from God’s Word together, if you don’t have your Bible this morning or can’t find 1 Corinthians 14, it will be on the screen for you.

But let’s read this together. We’re going to start in chapter 14, verse 1, and we’re going to go through verse 19 this morning. The Apostle Paul, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to the church at Corinth, said, Pursue love, yet desire earnestly spiritual gifts, but especially that you may prophesy.

For one who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men, but to God. For no one understands, but in his spirit he speaks mysteries. But one who speaks to men for edification and exhortation and consolation.

One who speaks in a tongue edifies himself, but one who prophesies edifies the church. Now I wish that you all spoke in tongues, but even more that you would prophesy. And greater is the one who prophesies than the one who speaks in tongues, unless he interprets so that the church may receive edifying.

But now, brethren, if I come to you speaking in tongues, what will I profit you unless I speak to you either by way of revelation or of knowledge or prophecy or of teaching. Yet even lifeless things, either flute or harp in producing sound, if they do not produce a distinction in the tones, how will it be known what is played on the flute or on the harp? For if the bugle produces an indistinct sound, who will prepare himself for battle?

So also you, unless you utter by the tongue speech that is clear, how will it be known what is spoken? For you will be speaking into the air. There are perhaps a great many kinds of languages in the world, and no kind is without meaning.

If then I do not know the meaning of the language, I will be to the one who speaks a barbarian, and the one who speaks will be a barbarian to me. So also you, since you are zealous of spiritual gifts, seek to abound for the edification of the church. Therefore let one who speaks in a tongue pray that he may interpret.

For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful. What is the outcome then? I will pray with the Spirit, and I will pray with the mind also.

I will sing with the Spirit, and I will sing with the mind also. Otherwise, if you bless in the Spirit only, how will the one who fills the place of the ungifted say the amen at your giving of thanks, since he does not know what you are saying? For you are giving thanks well enough, but the other person is not edified.

I thank God I speak in tongues more than you all. However, in the church, I desire to speak five words with my mind, so that I may instruct others also, rather than ten thousand words in a tongue. And you may be seated.

So there are a few things that we need to understand just right off the bat. He does say a couple of times in there, pursue spiritual gifts, desire spiritual gifts. As always, we want to look back to chapter 13 where it talks so much about love, that chapter that is read at every wedding ever, which really isn’t even about romantic love.

I mean, yes, it is a recipe for a happy marriage, but ultimately what he’s talking about in chapter 13 with love is how we’re supposed to deal with one another in the church. That’s what that’s about. We look back at chapter 13, and as he’s talking about desiring spiritual gifts and pursuing spiritual gifts, I think if we look around and we see the needs of the church, we see the needs of our fellow believers, and we’re motivated by love to want to meet those needs, I believe we can go to the Father and we can ask Him to gift us in areas, and I think He’ll do it as long as it’s in accordance with His will.

I think there’s a lot about spiritual gifts that are mysterious, and maybe the answer to that is we don’t need to know. He gives us what we do need to know, but I do notice here that He says, pursue, desire. He wouldn’t tell us those things unless there was a sense in which we could ask for them and seek for those needs to be met.

Another thing here is that he talks about the one who prophesies being greater than the one who speaks in tongues. We need to understand what he means by being greater. Because he spent chapters talking about how we shouldn’t treat spiritual gifts like there’s a hierarchy.

Like one is better than the other. Like I’m more spiritual than you because I have this spiritual gift, but he’s more spiritual than me because he has that one. There’s not a hierarchy of saying, oh, this one’s more spiritual than this one, because they’re all the result of the same Holy Spirit working in our lives.

But when he says here that the one who prophesies is greater than the one who speaks in tongues, we look at the verses around it and we see that here in context he’s talking about what’s going on in the church and he’s talking about their ministry in their worship services and their time gathering as a body. We’ll see next week, Lord willing, that he talks about how when we speak in tongues, it’s a sign to the unbeliever, but prophecy is a sign to the believer. So when he’s talking about coming together as the church, and he says that the one who prophesies is greater, he means greater in the sense of being more useful in that context.

He says for somebody to get up and speak in tongues is not as useful. And he clarifies at one point, unless there’s somebody to interpret. If I began to stand up and began to preach God’s Word to you in some language I’d never learned, if I began to preach to you in Swahili, does anybody in this room speak Swahili?

I mean, y’all are an impressive group. There may be somebody in the room that speaks Swahili. I don’t know.

Okay, I picked a good one because nobody speaks that. If I began to preach about Jesus to you in Swahili, does it benefit any of you? Not really, because you don’t know what I’m saying.

Unless the Holy Spirit gifts somebody to interpret that. And then we can understand what’s being said. There’s a benefit to me.

There’s a benefit of that feeling of closeness with God, the feeling of the work of the Holy Spirit. It builds my faith. He said it edifies the one who’s speaking in tongues.

But it really doesn’t do much to edify the church. Whereas a prophecy, and we need to understand that that doesn’t necessarily mean telling the future. Prophecy in a scriptural sense is just proclaiming the Word of God.

And in some cases, you know, Jeremiah, Isaiah, they were talking about things that were to come in the future. There are a lot of prophets that God has gifted that talk about what’s going on right now and what God is doing now. And so when he says prophecy, he’s talking about somebody proclaiming the Word of God.

And he’s saying that it’s greater in terms of usefulness for somebody to get up and speak things that are understood rather than things that are not understood and are not being interpreted. And if you’ve spent much time in church at all, you understand this. Because there are preachers who are very gifted and very intelligent and would make excellent seminary professors.

There are people that I’ve sat there and listened to and thought, I understood about 10% of what you were just talking about. The 10% I got was brilliant. But I wish you brought the other 90% down to where I could understand it.

And you think, I didn’t get much out of that because I didn’t understand it. And that’s what somebody’s speaking in our own language. And he’s saying the same thing here, that one is greater than the other in terms of usefulness because one can be understood.

So this whole section of the text that we’re looking at today is about the usefulness of our spiritual gifts. And what we find here is that in the early church, tongues and prophecy were both valuable because they were both gifts of the Holy Spirit. They were both instances where the Holy Spirit showed up and showed off.

They were both valuable, but they weren’t equally useful in every setting. As we come into verses 22, 23, later on, he talks about the setting where tongues is more useful. But he says here in the church setting, there’s not as much benefit to the speaking in tongues.

And the reason he singles this one out is because the church at Corinth seemed to overemphasize speaking in tongues. I think it happened in all the early churches, but the Corinthians just went nuts over this gift. The Corinthians thought this was the mark of somebody being spiritual. If you spoke in tongues, you were like this with the Lord.

And if you didn’t, well, I’m not too sure about you. They overemphasize the use of tongues. And we see here in verses like verse 5 and verse 18, Paul didn’t necessarily discourage them from speaking in tongues, but he sought to correct their faulty view of the practice.

That’s why he says, I wish that you all spoke in tongues, but even more that you would prophesy. He says there are more important things that you could be doing and focusing on than just running after this one spiritual gift like it’s the only one that mattered. And so he’s talking about their gatherings as the church, and he says it would be far more beneficial for them to prophesy, as I’ve already talked about.

The reasons for that are that when they prophesy, they’re speaking to the people instead of speaking to God. You say, what’s wrong with that? There’s absolutely a time and a place to speak to God.

Every one of us should talk to God on a daily basis. Every one of us should keep that prayer communication going. And he said to the church at Corinth, thought I was about to start speaking in tongues there for a second.

Sometimes I just get tongue-tied. He was telling the church at Corinth, when you’re speaking in tongues and nobody’s interpreting, I mean, God understands you, but He’s the only one. But when you prophesy and you’re speaking in the language of the people and you’re sharing that word from God, then you’re speaking to the people, which is the purpose of the church gathering is to strengthen one another.

And they were speaking truths that would be beneficial to the spiritual walk of the church, as we see in verses 3 and 4. He said, if you want to focus on something, focus on what’s going to bring edification, meaning building people up. Exhortation, that means encouragement.

Consolation, that means comforting somebody when they’re downtrodden. He said, if you want to focus on a spiritual gift, when you come together as a church, Focus on the things that are going to do that. Now, there’s a lot about this discussion that doesn’t apply directly to us.

There’s a debate in Christian circles over how much these sign gifts are still in operation. We talked about this a couple weeks ago on a Sunday night. And you could easily divide it into what we call continuationists, who believe that these sign gifts, speaking in tongues, raising the dead, casting out.

. . All of these things have continued since the first century just as they always did.

Then there are cessationists who believe somewhere along the way these ceased. And as far as I know, the consensus of this church generally falls onto the cessationist side of things. Now, on Sunday night, we talked about how there’s even a wide variety of views on that side.

And I think most of us don’t want to put God in a box of saying He can’t do these things. I mean, He’s God. He can do what He wants with or without my permission.

He doesn’t need it. But I think the evidence from Scripture and the evidence from history point to the idea that this is not the normal way God operates nowadays. It’s not something we all should look to and expect, that we all have to speak in tongues.

And I say that without trying to put anybody else down. I have family members, and I have lifelong friends who their churches teach that, you know, we’re speaking in tongues. It’s just another day of the week.

And I love them, and they’re brothers and sisters in Christ. I understand why they think that, and I think they understand why I think what I think. And one of these days, we’ll get to heaven, and it won’t matter anymore. But as a church, I mean, I think we fall generally on the side of the spectrum that this is not something that takes place as a normal course of events, especially I’ve not seen it since I’ve been here.

And so this whole discussion of tongues and prophecy doesn’t directly apply to us today. But the lesson still applies to us in the sense that there are some spiritual gifts that are more useful than others in particular contexts. Just like if you go out to work on something, go out to work on a car, some tools are going to be more useful in certain contexts than others, right?

There are some things you don’t want to use a sledgehammer for. on your engine. Now there are many, many jobs where a sledgehammer comes in handy.

Brad has come out to help me with some things on my car. Sledgehammer was like the second order of the day. Get things off the tire.

But you don’t want a sledgehammer for every job. You don’t need a Phillips head screwdriver for every. .

. that’s not going to get a bolt off very easily, a hex head bolt. Same is true with our spiritual gifts.

Every spiritual gift is not equally useful in every context. That’s what he’s talking about here. You come together, it’s a really good thing to be understood.

Now you go out among the unbeliever and you begin preaching the gospel in a language you don’t know and the people there do know it and they know that you don’t know that language. That says something to them about the power of the message. That gift of tongues comes really in handy in that context.

Folks, the spiritual gifts that we have today, they’re all useful in the appropriate context. Some of them are going to be more useful than others. There are going to be some places that the gift of discernment is much more useful than the gift of mercy.

The gift of being able to see God’s truth and apply it to a situation and detect false teaching is going to be much more useful in some circumstances than that gift of mercy that just says, I want to love on everybody and comfort everybody, because sometimes people need to be confronted and not comforted. But you know what, there’s also circumstances where that gift of mercy is going to be way more valuable, way more useful, I should say, than the gift of discernment. Not saying that either one is not valuable, but depending on the circumstance, sometimes you need the gift of mercy, sometimes you need the gift of discernment.

Sometimes you need the gift of shepherding, sometimes you need the gift of teaching. They all have their uses and they all have their places. And we should seek spiritual gifts that are going to be useful.

Which leads me to the second point that we see in verses five and six. We shouldn’t desire the most prestigious gifts or the most exciting gifts, but the ones that are most useful in the work God has called us to. So we see all throughout this book that they’ve overemphasized things like tongues and Paul’s saying, hey, that’s great, but it’s got its place.

But when the church was assembled for worship, it wasn’t the most useful gift. And so what do you tell them to do? I want you to pursue the gifts that are going to be useful for what you’re trying to do.

If you’ve got a job that needs the sledgehammer, go get the sledgehammer. If you’ve got a job that needs a socket wrench, go get the socket wrench. Seek the things that are going to be useful for the things that God’s called you to do.

And sometimes I think we get frustrated and burnt out in trying to serve because we have in mind what we think we want to do in God’s service, and God has gifted us for something else, and we don’t want to do that because we want to do this over here. And sometimes we’re using the wrong tool for the wrong job because God has gifted us the tool for this job and said, go do that. And we’re trying to use this tool for this job over here.

We should concern ourselves with the gifts that are most useful in the work that God has called us to. And we should desire those gifts. We should pursue those gifts.

Spiritual gifts are a gift from God. They’re not something that we make happen. At the same time, we can pursue them and we can cultivate them.

If God has called you to teach and God has gifted you for teaching, there’s nothing wrong with studying and practicing and doing things to get better at exercising that gift. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing that gift. I told some of you, when my grandfather passed away, he had an audio cassette that we found at his house that was a recording of my very first sermon.

and I listened to that and it was, oh my goodness, it was bad. It wasn’t heretical. It was just painful to listen to. I’m like, I don’t know that I would have given that guy a second chance to preach.

I like to think that over the 20 years or so since then that I’ve grown and I’ve pursued that gift. I’m not saying I’m a great teacher, but I like to think I’m better than I was when I started out because you pursue that gift. You long for that gift.

You desire the gift that God you for the job He’s called you to do. If God has gifted you for shepherding, one of the ways you pursue that and get better in exercising that gift and become more useful in using that gift is to be around your sheep. If God’s gifted you for generosity or hospitality or mercy or any of these other things, we pursue those by working through them and putting them to use and getting getting better.

And even as I say exercising them and getting better, I recognize that it’s God working through our efforts to improve us in those areas. But we should concern ourselves with using our gifts in the most useful way possible. And finally this morning, the question that naturally arises is what makes a gift useful?

Here I’ve told you we need to seek after useful gifts. We need to use our gifts in the most useful way possible. Well, what makes a gift useful?

What makes the way we exercise a gift useful? I think there are a few things that Paul talks about in this passage that are good advice to any of us that are trying to use our spiritual gifts. And by the way, I’ve said this before, but I want to say it again today.

If you have trusted Jesus Christ as your Savior, if you’ve been born again, if you belong to Him, whatever terminology that you use there, if you belong to Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit of God lives inside of you. The Bible tells us that the Holy Spirit indwells us from the moment of conversion. The Holy Spirit brings with Him spiritual gifts.

The Holy Spirit gives you spiritual gifts. So, what do they call that in math? The transitive property?

That means that if you belong to Jesus Christ, you have a spiritual gift. I don’t have a spiritual gift because I don’t know what it is. Well, there’s lots of things I don’t know what they are, but they’re still there.

We were finding these weird worms outside the chicken coop. I don’t know what they were, but they exist. whether you know what it is whether you know how to slap a label on it yet or not you have a spiritual gift at least one, very likely more than one do you know why he’s given you that spiritual gift? for you to use it for you to serve for you to serve him, for you to serve your fellow believers to build one another up to bring people to Jesus Christ and I want to be very clear about that that if you are a follower of Jesus Christ if you belong to him, you have spiritual gifts and they’ve been given to you for service so that when we talk about what makes these gifts useful, you know that that applies to you.

So what makes a gift useful? First of all, does it communicate God’s truth clearly? And we can see in some of these verses 7 through 11 here, he’s talking about lifeless things, the flute, the harp.

There’s so many details in this that I would love to get into, but we’ll be here all day if I do. Come back tonight. We’ll have our Q&A session about this text.

We’ll go over some of these details that we don’t have time to get to and give you an opportunity to ask questions. but he’s talking about these things that make noise, but you can’t really understand what the noise means. He’s talking about speaking to others and not being able to understand each other’s language.

I’m a barbarian to him. He’s a barbarian to me. Barbarian is a word the Greeks made up because their language just sounded like bar, bar, bar, bar, the people that they couldn’t understand.

And you go back to the discussion at the very beginning about tongues versus prophecy. He said it needs to be understood. If you’re going to talk to somebody about the Lord, if you’re going to exercise your gifts, it needs to be something that makes people understand something about God that’s true.

It’s not something that just shows off where we get to say, look, I’m so spiritual, I’m so wonderful. It’s a gift that needs to communicate something about the Lord. You can do that with any of these gifts.

I’ve got the gift of generosity. How does that communicate something about God? Because as you’re giving to people, You have the opportunity to talk about the generosity of the Lord, who did not spare even His own Son for our salvation.

I’ve got the gift of mercy. There’s no one more merciful than Jesus Christ, who paid the ultimate price for our salvation. If you’ve got the gift of evangelism, that right there, that’s the whole gift, is telling people about Jesus.

If you’ve got the gift of shepherding, you have the opportunity to lead people to Jesus Christ, lead believers closer in their walk with Him. All of these gifts can be used to communicate the truth about God clearly. And he’s saying that’s where they were falling short on their use of the gift of tongues.

If they were using it outside, great. They were drawing attention to the change that the gospel made. He said, but using it inside the church, it’s really adding nothing as far as communicating the truth clearly.

We move on to verses 12 through 17, and in this section, we can see the importance of this. Does it build up the body of Christ? That makes a gift useful.

He says, seek to abound for the edification of the church. Seek to abound in spiritual gifts. Seek to grow so that you can build up the church.

And folks, when I say the church, I’m not talking about the building, the institution. It’s talking about the people, the body, that we are supposed to be building each other up. If I exercise the gift of teaching just for the purpose of people thinking I’m smart or well-spoken, I may be smart, I don’t think I’m well-spoken sometimes.

But if that’s my goal, that’s not a good use of spiritual gifts. I should be teaching for the purpose of helping people in their walk with Christ, building up the church. And we can use all of our spiritual gifts to build one another up.

And third of all, I think this is most important. Does it bring glory to Jesus Christ? He says in verses 18 and 19, I thank God I speak in tongues more than you all.

However, in the church, I desire to speak five words with my mind so that I may instruct others also, rather than 10,000 words in a tongue. Paul’s goal was not to make himself look good. Paul’s goal was not to build a following around himself.

Paul’s goal was to instruct people so that they could know Christ, so that they could follow Christ, so that Christ could be glorified. What makes a spiritual gift useful is when we can answer yes to all three of those questions. Does it communicate God’s truth clearly?

Does it build up the body of Christ? Does it bring glory to Jesus Christ? Because ultimately, the church cannot and should not be about the glory of anybody other than Jesus Christ. As members, our exercise of our spiritual gifts should not be about the glory of anybody but Jesus Christ. It can’t be about glorifying the musicians.

It can’t be about glorifying the pastor. It can’t be about glorifying the deacons. None of these people died for you.

There is one person in all of history who laid down their life to pay for your sins in full. There’s one person in history who shed his blood on that cross so that you could be reconciled to a holy God. There is one person in history who rose again from the dead the third day to prove it, and that’s Jesus Christ. So he deserves the glory from everything that we do, from all the gifts we have, from the way we exercise those gifts.

Jesus even said the Holy Spirit himself did not come to glorify himself, but came to point others to Jesus. And so the exercise of the spiritual gifts is about bringing glory to Jesus Christ. He deserves it because He paid for your salvation. He paid so that we could be made right with God.

And if you’ve got questions about how you can be right with God, it’s very simple. We make it hard, but it’s very simple. Our sin separates us from God.

We all on a daily basis do things that dishonor and displease God. And because God is holy, that sin is offensive to Him. And God could have written us off and said, you know what, we are separated by this sin and I want to stay separated.

They’re awful, they’re rebellious, I don’t want anything to do with them. He could have done that. But instead, He loved us.</