Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

The Detroit News carried a humorous little story about Bill Cosby's aged mother that illustrates how useless gifts are unless they are used.

She had been raised in poverty, and the family had very little money as Bill was growing up.

As a result, she never had modern conveniences and had gotten accustomed to doing things the hard way.

When the children were old enough to get jobs, they often gave their mother appliances as Christmas gifts to make her life easier.

But she wouldn't use them.

Bill especially remembered that after a while his mother had two or three toasters.

But she left them in their boxes and put them on top of the refrigerator.

At breakfast she would still do the toast in the oven.

If the boys protested, she would say, "Leave them on the refrigerator.

I'm used to doing it the old way."

I can attest to the truth of this story as my grandmother was the same way for quite a while when it came to things such as technology and appliances.

After she “gave into” modern things such as computers, cell phones and appliances, she realized that these things made her life much easier for the most part (technology is not perfect by any means!).

She could do things in half the time and talk to her grandchildren face to face through her cell phone instead of having to wait to see us at our next family gathering.

You could say that these things helped her get through some difficult times (including losing her husband).

Spiritual Gifts are similar in that they are things that help us in our daily lives.

They help the life of the church and they aid in our evangelizing of the lost.

While we sometimes can use them incorrectly (for our own glory), they are not taken away from us simply because we mess up.

Tonight we are going to be looking at in order to see what Paul has to say about Spiritual Gifts and how they are to be used by the church.

We looked at last Sunday night, and tonight we are going to look at the Purpose, Plan, Personality and Practice of these Spiritual Gifts.

Please turn in your copy of God’s word to as we continue our study on Spiritual Gifts.

Purpose of Gifts (1-3)

Gifts are useless unless we know how to use them!

We talked about the purpose of spiritual gifts last Sunday night as we looked at and saw that Spiritual Gifts are given to us from God.

We are all given at least 1 of these gifts and we are tasked with using that gift within the church and outside of it in order to reach other people for Christ!

In these opening verses, Paul says that he does not want Believers to be unaware about these gifts as they were led astray before they came to know Christ.

Paul uses their past to contrast life in Christ.

He is showing that it was easy for them to be led astray to false, mute idols because they did not have discernment because that is a gift from the Holy Spirit (as he will show in the coming verses).

In these opening 3 verses, it seems as though Paul lays out various religious experiences.

Pagans being led astray, Jews rejecting Jesus Christ and a Christian who confesses Jesus as Lord!

Paul is not saying that everyone who says “Jesus is Lord” is saved and led by the Spirit but those who speak with conviction and under allegiance of the Holy Spirit.

For Paul, everything depends upon how someone aligns themselves with Jesus Christ.

You are either with or against Jesus.

There are not 2 Lords or gospels but 1.

You are either of Christ and use your gifts to glorify Him or you are against Christ and have no spiritual gift inside of you.

As we talked about last week, the purpose of our Spiritual Gifts is to glorify God and expand the Kingdom.

As a non-Christian you are led to various idols and false teachings because you lack a firm foundation.

Think of the analogy of the house built on sand and how it lacks a solid foundation whenever a storm comes and the flood water rises.

We see this seemingly every year when a hurricane hits the coast of Florida.

Millions of people are forced to evacuate their homes and seek high ground and shelter because their homes lack a firm foundation and are at risk of collapsing due to the storm.

Likewise, non-believers are led astray due to philosophy and society telling them that there are multiple ways to heaven or maybe that heaven doesn’t even exist!

As Christians we know that these “idols” are useless and pointless, however people keep on coming to these wells that never satisfy time and time again.

Paul goes on in verse 3 to say that no one speaking with the Spirit of God will say that “Jesus is cursed”.

Likewise, no one can say that “Jesus is Lord” without with the prompting of the Holy Spirit.

Like we talked about last Wednesday night with the church in Ephesus, we must keep our eye out for false teachers!

We must see what they say and how they live their lives.

If people live their lives and bear fruit and we can see the Spirit of the Lord active in their life then we see that they are truly born again.

On the other hand, if someone completely rejects Jesus then we see that they are not filled with the Holy Spirit and are on the opposite side of the coin.

We must understand that there are false teachers out there, however one of the ways that we can “test” if they are genuine or not is by examining their gifts and to see if the Spirit is inside them.

Plan for Gifts (4-6)

In these verses, Paul illustrates that there is 1 God who provides different manifestations of His Spirit.

There is similarity and difference in these verses.

All of our Spiritual gifts come from the same Spirit, however they are manifested differently in our lives.

Think of all the ways that God has revealed Himself to us.

We see God’s greatness in creation.

We see His presence in our lives each and every day.

Some people have encounters with Christ in their dreams (Muslims, especially).

Others see the love of God whenever the church acts as the hands and feet of Jesus.

Just because there are different things that reveal the nature and love of God, it does not mean that there are multiple “Gods”.

There is 1 God but different manifestations of Him.

Think about what would happen if we witnessed a miracle in our congregation.

There would be 1 action however there would many different accounts of the story.

Likewise, the Holy Spirit manifests itself in our lives in different ways even though it comes from the same place.

I mentioned last week that sometimes we desire to have a different gift than the one that we actually possess.

The reason that we are not called to wish or hope for one gift over another is because they all come from the same source.

In the secular world, people often have “dream jobs” that they aspire to get one day.

As a child, my “dream job” was to be a professional baseball player.

As I grew into my teenage self, that dream shifted to wanting to become a neurosurgeon.

There was nothing wrong with these aspirations, however in desiring these jobs I was searching for something that would be “MY” dream.

In the secular world, this makes sense.

For the church of God, though, this cannot exist.

Our hearts desire must be to fulfill God’s purpose rather than fulfill our personal dream.

One Biblical scholar noted that:

“Divine gifts become opportunities and obligations for service.

The proper response to receiving such gifts is not boasting, which in effect suppresses the acknowledgment that these qualities stem from God’s endowment, but sharing God’s gifts with the whole church and world.

We are to exercise stewardship of the varied gifts that God has granted with the result that the honor and praise offered to God increases.”

Verse 5 and 6 illustrate further the point that there are various ministries that the church does and different effects of the Spirit yet there is 1 God from whom all things come!

If the President of the United States were to come up to you and tell you that you are now the US Ambassador to the nation of Liechtenstein (one of the smallest countries in the world with a population of just over 30,000 people), you would feel honored to be given this job by the President.

Even if you had spent your entire life building up an impressive resume to be a government diplomat, you would serve in this position with the best attitude possible.

As Christians, we are given an assignment from the Creator of the Universe.

Our task is not necessarily to move across the ocean as in the example above, although it could be.

Our task is simple: submit to His plan.

Every Christian is to be respected because we all have the same assignment and we are serving a royal and holy service from the King of Kings.

So, you might ask, what is the plan for these gifts?

Simple.

For the gifts to be operating in the local church as God desires.

Paul points out in that when this happens, the outside world will see the presence of God in our community and they will fall down and worship Him.

The gathering of Christians on a Sunday morning is not simply a gathering of human beings but an activity in which God Himself works in our lives as we encourage one another and point one another towards Him.

Personality of Gifts (7-10)

There are 3 different types of gifts mentioned in verses 7-10.

As we see in the coming slides, there are a variety of gifts mentioned in this passage and elsewhere in scripture!

The 3 different types of gifts mentioned here are Support gifts, Service gifts, and Sign gifts.

The first gifts we see here in are Words of wisdom and knowledge.

Something worthy to note about a “word of wisdom” is that it is the exact opposite in Greek as “wisdom of word” which would mean clever human speech.

There were some individuals who could speak very convincingly in an attempt to boost their own credibility and empty the cross of Christ (as we see in )

This gift of wisdom seems to mean a gift of speech that is given from the Spirit.

Now this does not mean that wisdom and knowledge are not given to all Believers!

The distinction here with this gift is that a special manifestation of this gift is given to some individuals so that the whole congregation can benefit!

Sometimes knowledge can seem like a bad thing.

Some individuals say that they are “too smart” for God or that they have figured out a new way to live their life because they discovered.