We are Spiritual
Notes
Transcript
Handout
1 Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, I would not have you ignorant.
Ignorance of Spirituals
Ignorance of Spirituals
spirituals (plural) - gifts is supplied and not there in the greek.
This is the first descriptive term for the ministries of Christ given to the church and it speaks of their source.
Whatever the ministries are that God has given the church they are called spirituals.
Now what does it mean?
Pneuma is the Holy Spirit. Anytime you say an “tikos” ending in a Greek word it means controlled by or characterized by.
Whatever these things are they are controlled by and characterized by the Holy Spirit. So he says, “I want to talk to you concerning ennoblements or endowments that the Holy Spirit has given you as characteristic of Himself; the spirit of Christ.”
The translators supply gifts because of chapter 14 and
1 Corinthians 12:4 (KJV 1900)
4 Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit.
Now concerning certain gifts under the control of the spirit brethren I would not have you ignorant. Now you learn a lot about spiritual gifts right there in that word don’t you.
Because that word tells you spiritual gifts are controlled by whom? The Spirit. If you go down to verse 5, you’ll see another word. He uses five different terms to refer to these spiritual gifts. Verse 4, the word gifts that’s charisma, grace. It means they receive by grace. You can’t earn them.
You go to verse 5,
1 Corinthians 12:5 (KJV 1900)
5 And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord.
he uses the word administration. In the Greek it’s diakoneo which means serve. The word indicates that spiritual gifts are used to do what? To serve.
And you go down into verse 6
1 Corinthians 12:6 (KJV 1900)
6 And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all.
and he uses the word that refers to energy (effect, activity), energeo, and uses that in reference to gifts which means they are energized by God.
So spiritual gifts controlled by the spirit given by grace from God, used to serve the body and controlled by the Lord or empowered by the Lord.
So you see the different terms that he uses come at the same term or the same idea of gifts with a different emphasis. So here he’s just calling them spirituals. That is these items that he’s going to talk about are those things under the control and characterized by the spirit.
So I want you to understand spiritual gifts. I don’t want you to be ignorant about it. You must understand it.
You say why? Because the church can’t mature without it. The church can’t function without it.
Satan is going to counterfeit it and it’s going to confuse and cause chaos and it’s going to split the church and folks that is exactly what it’s done today? You must understand it. You must understand how you are to understand a gift and how you are to minister your gifts. And what is a gift and what isn’t a gift. There’s a lot of ignorance today.
Ignorance manifests itself in the abuse of gifts, ignoring them, neglecting them, over-emphasizing the wrong ones, confusing them with counterfeits and Paul says the ignorance has got to end.
We are to be Christ in the world. This is a very vital concept. The church is to be Christ in the world.
The incarnation was body one, Christ in flesh, a human body. We are body two, Christ, spiritually, alive in the world, in the church.
This is a very vital reality and it’s something that we have to understand. The Lord Jesus wants to leave Himself in the world even after He ascends. He wants us to be Christ in the world.
He wants to reproduce, in us, His very essence, His very life, His very personality, His very character, so that we manifest to the world Christ, in as real a sense as Christ was manifest into human form when He was walking in the world.
Now how is it that God has designed us to be Christ in the world?
How is it that we can literally represent Him?
How is it that we can manifest His character to this world?
First of all, the Bible says that
8 So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God. 9 But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. 10 And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness.
Therefore, Paul says,
20 I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.
So Christ then will reproduce Himself in the world by living in me as an individual believer.
Now a step further than that, Christ not only indwells every individual believer but he dwells the corporate church. Ephesians 2 says that the entire church is built together as a habitation for the Spirit of Christ. Christ exists, not only in the individual life of a Christian, but in the corporate life of the community of believers known as the body of Christ. So He produces his character in us, first of all, by dwelling in us.
Christ’s presence is there, but his character becomes manifest in this way:
7 But unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ.
Now Christ has given, by grace, certain gifts. They come from Him. They are divine ennoblements given to the believer onto every one of us. No Christian is excluded, is given grace … that is, we can’t deserve it, we can’t earn it, according to the measure … that is, it is measured out individually and uniquely for every Christian … the gift of Christ. Christ then gives a gift; a spiritual endowment, a spiritual ennoblements to every believer, unique to that believer. He has given all of us gifts.
11 And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers;
Now listen to this, “They are the gifted men given to the church.” Verse 7 says, “He has already given individual gifts to the believers and it is the role of the gifted men to equip the gifted believers to use their gifts.” That’s the purpose and that’s what verse 12 says,
12 For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ:
Now the Lord Jesus Christ has given every believer a gift, and that gift is known as spiritual gifts to us today. But that gift is for the purpose of manifesting Christ in the church and ultimately in the world. In order to allow us the fullest use of those gifts and to bring them to maturity and to maximum output. “God has also given to the church … verse 11 … gifted men, and the gifted men equip the saints to use the gifts they have.” And the result … verse 12 … the edifying of the body of Christ … verse 13 …
13 Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ:
Now that’s a great concept and it’s very basic in identifying the church: gifted men equip the saints to use their gifts to build the body, that the body might manifest Christ. That we might literally be Christ.
Now I want to go a step further because it’s important that you understand this: all of the spiritual gifts, and there are many of them listed in the New Testament, we’ll be studying them in detail next week, but all of those gifts in their fullest sense are complete in Christ.
Now when we preach or teach or show mercy or help or lead or give or have faith, or whatever of those gifts we exercise, we find that that is a supernatural activity endowed and enabled by the Spirit of God, which manifests and attribute of Christ for the building of body. Thus Christ becomes real in the world as the body grows up. So we see these are not random things but the gifts specifically find their source in God, their channel, in the Spirit, and their pattern, their example, their completeness in the person of Jesus Christ. Now they are essential then because they are the things that will manifest Christ, the things that will build the church.
Now the amazing thing about the Corinthian church was they had all the gifts—all of them.
1 Corinthians 1:7 (KJV 1900)
7 So that ye come behind in no gift; waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ:
First chapter verse 7 says, “You come behind and no gift.” You lack nothing.
They had been endowed with all spiritual gifts. They were fully equipped for maturing, they were fully equipped for ministering, they were fully equipped to be Christ-like, but instead there was absolute chaos. There was a failure on the part of the gifted men to do the job they were supposed to do in maturing the saints. There was a failure on the part of the saints to minister the gifts they had been given, instead they were being counterfeited, they were being exploited, they were being neglected, they were being abused, they were being confused, and the result was the terrible chaos that appears in chapter 12 to 14 in the Corinthian church relative to spiritual gifts.
The church at Corinth was Carnal and Chaotic.
Image of Non Spirituals
Image of Non Spirituals
2 Ye know that ye were Gentiles, carried away unto these dumb idols, even as ye were led.
Gentile = heathen, anyone who knows not God.
Carried away - lead away, deceived, exucuted
Now you have a picture there of a victim, of somebody in a system of religion who has little or no choice about what is going on there. He is being led, he is being carried away … those two terms … to dumb idols.
He is strictly a victim. The word carried away is a verb used frequently in the Bible to speak of leading a prisoner or a condemned person away to prison.
So the verb then pictures somebody who is caught, shackled, and dragged away to a dumb idol. He has little choice. In fact, he has no choice. This is not something he chose, not something he selected, something that has fallen upon him. “The heathen then … now mark this … are pictured not as intelligent, choosing freely following what their mind has concluded, but they are helpless victims who know no better than to be led away by constraint to a dumb deity.”
Now this is a picture of the heathen—the ungodly man. He is led away to worship a non-God; he is led away to worship a no-deity. And believe me everybody worships somewhere. You don’t choose whether or not you’re going to worship, you just choose what.
In the case of the Corinthian people they had been led away to their idolatry, God’s who were dumb idols. He calls them dumb, that is, dumb in the sense that they couldn’t speak, the couldn’t answer, they couldn’t respond, they couldn’t give any direction, they couldn’t give any revelation, they can’t say anything, authoritative they can’t say anything in response, they utter nothing. But that’s the plight of the religious man, the religious man without Christ. The religious man who doesn’t know the true God is led away to a dumb deity and he never knows the true freedom and the true dignity of a Son of God.
Remember,
19 What say I then? that the idol is any thing, or that which is offered in sacrifice to idols is any thing?
Remember, chapter 10 and chapter 11, after showing all their carnality in chapters 4-11, Paul is explaining, you cannot eat at the world’s table and the Lord’s table.
And we discovered last week the difference between the world’s table and the Lord’s table.
The bread is the life and body of Christ.
The cup is the blood and death of Christ.
Everything was opposite from the World’s Table where they were drinking, being selfish, stingy, boastful, not understanding the AUTHORITY and SUBMISSION in this world and designed by God.
Paul says to the Corinthians then … and
I’ll paraphrase verse 2 … “You used to worship the way the pagans do, led away by demons to ecstasies and enthusiasm that characterize the mystic religions,”
that’s what he’s saying. “You have brought those old patterns now into the church and are letting the demons invade your worship. You used to do a certain kind of worship. It was a worship of being led away into ecstasy. It was a victim-type worship. You went there and those demons got you and led you away. They carried you away. You gave up your will, as it were, to them.” And he’s saying, “That’s the way you used to do.”
Verse 2 says, “You were this way and now you’ve dragged it into the church.” They were unable to distinguish between the usual and the unusual, between the demonic and the divine. Everything was going on in their worship and they couldn’t distinguish what was God and what was Satan. There was intrusion, there was corruption, there was chaos. They literally mistook the work of Satan for the work of the Spirit.
So Paul is saying this … now listen … “The truly spiritual … the truly spiritual … pneumatika … is not marked by being carried away, it is not marked by being led away. That is precisely the IMAGE (characteristic) of your former kind of religion.”
Now you get the point? “You used to have a led away religion, you don’t anymore. You used to have a religion where you went there and the demons just carried you away as a victim into ecstatic orgiastic-kind of activity. That was a former religion and now you’ve dragged your fanatical type of religion into the church and created chaos.” Listen, again, “The truly spiritual is not marked by being swept away into trances and ecstasies and emotional frenzies.”
1 Corinthians 14:15 (KJV 1900)
15 What is it then? I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also: I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also.
1 Corinthians 14:33 (KJV 1900)
33 For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints.
1 Corinthians 14:40 (KJV 1900)
40 Let all things be done decently and in order.
The Spirit of God does not operate the gifts of God when you are out of control, when you are under sort of supernatural seizure. When someone goes out of control, a trance, or faints, is supposedly slain in the Spirit, or speaks ecstatic languages, or goes into frenzied behavior, that is never of God, never. They are reflecting a pagan style of religion that corrupted the Corinthian assembly and continues to do the same. “All … listen to this … all spiritual gifts function in full control (Submission) and consciousness (Authority)of the user.”
So Paul refers to the heathen ecstasies. And just to show you how bizarre it had become and how bold the demons had become when they knew they could get away with it in the church, look at verse 3.
3 Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed: and that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.
Intentions of Spirituals
Intentions of Spirituals
Now here Paul shows us the first principle that the genuine spiritual gift will be determined by.
In light of the confusion and in light of the failure to distinguish the Holy Spirit’s activity from heathen demonic leading Paul gives a basic test and it’s a positive and negative.
Let’s look at negative first.
The Negative
The Negative
This is very, very amazing to me. Here’s the negative part of the test, “No man, speaking by the Spirit of God, calls Jesus accursed.” Now listen to me. Do you know what they were doing in the Corinthians assembly? Listen to this. Some folks were standing up in the Corinthians assembly, supposedly manifesting the gifts of Spirit, and cursing Jesus. That’s what they were doing. You say, “How do you know that?” Because that’s the thing Paul is dealing with.
You understand? You see, if it was far out, and ecstatic, and supernatural, and obvious beyond a human, they figure, “It’s got to be the Holy Spirit. After all, it’s in the church and it’s happened here.” And here somebody had gone so far as to literally curse Jesus and the people could not determine that it was not, in fact, of the Holy Spirit. Beyond belief and doubly unbelievable after their training under the Apostle Paul. Such a thing actually occurred. Someone led away by demons; here they’re going and everybody’s up.
And this is the way it would go: everybody doing something at the same time, somebody singing, somebody speaking, ecstatic speech, somebody giving a prophesy, somebody shouting out a word of wisdom and a word of this and that, and everything going on, and somebody in the middle of it all, “Jesus is Anathema.” “Oh, there’s the Holy Spirit. Bless you brother.” See? No ability to distinguish. You say, “How in heavens name could they ever believe that was of the Holy Spirit?”
Now listen to me, it is the heresy that denies the deity of Jesus Christ and denies His sufficiency to save. Haven’t we seen it? We saw it in our study 1 John. It’s all over the place. It became, later on, by the second century, what is known as an ostracism (EXCLUSION). This is kind of infant ostracism or the basic formation of it. And it was apparently growing in the Corinthian assembly—a non loyalty to Jesus Christ.
Notice what it says. It doesn’t say Christ is accursed but Jesus. Perhaps what they were doing was buying this heresy that separated the true Christ from the human Jesus. See?
This was the Gnostics’ view, that the Christ Spirit dwelled up in space and kind of ruled the world and did the whole thing. And then when Jesus, the man, who was not the Christ, when he was baptized, the Christ Spirit descended upon Him. And just prior His death, the Christ Spirit left so that Jesus died as a cursed criminal. So that the dying Christ was just a man. The dying Jesus was nobody. And that’s why, you see, when Jesus rose from the dead the Corinthians didn’t understand it.
He had to write the whole 15th chapter to explain the Resurrection. Remember? “If Christ be not risen, then our hope is in vain,” and so forth. The reason was very likely they were beginning to accept the fact that the Christ Spirit and the human Jesus were separate. And so they were cursing the Jesus while supposedly acknowledging the glorified and divine Christ.
Now let me take you a step further. This is really important. Look at 1 Corinthians 16:22. And here I think is something that really supports it. Now listen,
22 If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maran-atha.
“If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be.… what?… Anathema. You might say, ‘Curse Jesus,’ I say, ‘If you don’t acknowledge Him, curse you.’ ” Paul says. “And what do you mean Paul?” “Well if it’s in this verse, Lord Jesus Christ, then you have to believe that the whole thing comes together. He is Lord Jesus Christ,” one in the same.
Paul is saying, “Look, you will be cursed unless you accept the Lord Jesus Christ.” That’s the fullness of his deity. If you say, “Well I accept the Christ but deny the Jesus,” curse you.
If you say, “I accept Jesus but deny Christ,” curse you. If you say, “I accept Jesus but deny His Lordship,” curse you. “If I accept the Lordship but deny the Man Jesus,” curse you.
The Lord Jesus Christ. All one in the same, incarnate God.
Do you see the point?
And here … what had happened is, this creeping idea had come in, distinguishing the historical Jesus and the Christ as some floating Spirit to deny the incarnation. See? Do you know what this does?
Now listen to me, if you’ve got the Christ leaving Jesus before the cross then what is the significance of His death? It hasn’t any.
And what is the significance of His Resurrection? It hasn’t any. And that’s why he writes chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians and tells them, “If Christ be not risen … then what?… then your faith is in vain.”
You can’t just have Jesus you’ve got to have Christ. You see, they were hung up on the Resurrection if they believe this, cause if you’ve got a human Jesus then you’re going to have trouble getting Him out of the grave, and if He doesn’t rise then we’re all hopeless. See, by believing this, you see, you destroy the cross and you destroy the resurrection, as well as the deity of Christ.
Now I believe, this is what was creeping in, look at the 11th chapter of 2 Corinthians. This is just a few months later. Second Corinthians 11, look at it, verse 3,
3 But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.
“I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his craftiness, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.”
Do you see? He says, “I’m afraid for you because there’s a corrupting process going on in relation to your understanding of Christ. For if he that comes preaches another … what?… Jesus. If somebody comes to you and preaches another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if we receive another spirit, which you have not received, or another gospel, which you have not accepted, you might well bear with him, and where we could explain all that, that means.” But he’s just saying, “Look, avoid falling into a trap of believing in another Jesus. Don’t let anybody corrupt your mind from the simplicity that is in the true Christ.”
What is simplicity? It’s a single thing, the single identity of the true Christ, that’s the meaning of the word simplicity. A simple thing is something that can’t be what? Divided.
The simple thing about Christ, the indivisible Christ.
Now they were then separating the historical Jesus from the Christ the Spirit and he says, “That has been tolerated so that somebody saying, ‘Jesus is accursed,’ can be accepted in your community as having a gift from the Holy Spirit by which that thing was said.” Incredible. So the doctrinal test is the first test of a gift.
Anybody ministers a gift, I don’t care what that gift is, the first test: what do they say about Jesus? What do they say about Christ? Anybody who says Jesus is accursed is not speaking of the Holy Spirit.
Now, folks listen to me, the first test of the operation of any gift is its connection with the authoritative revealed Word of God. The reason they were out of line was because what they said did not agree with what? Scripture. When somebody comes along and says, “I have a Word from the Holy Spirit.” If it agrees with Scripture, it isn’t necessary, and if it does, then it isn’t right.
Now let’s go to the positive in verse 3.
The Positive
The Positive
“That no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Spirit.” This is the positive.
When somebody comes into your midst with all of his faculties, and with all of his mind, and with all of his heart, and with all of his being, says, “Jesus is Lord,” you know that’s of the Holy Spirit. Now it isn’t simply the words, it’s the commitment. No man can say … and the word say here doesn’t just mean to pair. A skeptic can say, “Jesus is Lord.” You can pay a guy ten dollars and say, “Would you say Jesus is Lord, Jesus is Lord. Here’s your ten dollars.” That isn’t the point. It’s not quite that simplistic. No man can truly say, no man can truly confess, no man can truly acknowledge, “Jesus is the Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit. When that deep conviction of genuine understanding about who He is comes forth it is of the Spirit.
When somebody curses Jesus, that’s sufficient evidence that they’re not of the Spirit.
When somebody confesses Jesus, that’s sufficient evidence they are. And I want you to notice something, verse 3, “That no man can say that Jesus is the Lord.” Oh, that’s important.
Lord is kurios. That’s the Old Testament name for God, Yahweh. The regular New Testament term for translating the Old Testament name of God is kurios.
The confession is that Jesus is God. You see? When somebody confesses that Jesus the Man … he’s using the human term … that Jesus the human is, in fact, God; that there is no separation. There is no Gnostic division there. That is of the Holy Spirit. And that leads me again to believe that what they were doing was separating the human Jesus from the divine Christ. So the Spirit prompted confession is distinguished from the counterfeit by the acknowledgement that Jesus, the Man, is, in fact, God.
Now test one: in anybody’s gift, in anybody’s use of that gift, is an accurate doctrine of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit always leads men to ascribe deity, lordship, and all sufficiency to Christ. And that’s the test you have to begin with. There are going to be many more tests on these gifts that we’re going to see, but that’s to start.
Now let me say this in closing. Spiritual gifts are important people. I mean, they are very important. You know how I know they’re important? I know they’re important because verse 1 says, you shouldn’t be what? Ignorant. And if God feels that way they’re important.
But I’ll tell you another way I know they’re important: I can’t believe how busy Satan is counterfeiting them. And if they are that much of a problem to him then they must be important.
Have you heard the saying, “People don’t counterfeit what isn’t valuable.”
You don’t ever hear about counterfeit brown paper, and nobody counterfeits sticks.
People counterfeit money. People counterfeit diamonds. People counterfeit what’s valuable because that’s the only point in it. And if Satan is as busy as he is today, counterfeiting spiritual gifts, then let me tell you something people, they must really be important. You understand that? And if they are important for the life of the church, in order that we might be built up to be like Jesus Christ, then we better get it on and find out how we can use ours. Don’t you think?
God has given the church gifted men, and that we have a tremendous high calling, and it’s a sobering thing. God has given us a tremendous responsibility. And it is my responsibility to teach you, that you might come to maturity, to love you, that you might have a context in which to hear my teaching and believe it, to set an example for you, that you might have a pattern. That’s my responsibility. And your responsibility, in response, is to see those gifts developing as the Spirit of God wants to use you and the minister.
I see pastor, for example, those who haven’t got the first idea about what it is to teach the Word of God, who don’t understand what it is to mature the saints, who have never discipled anybody in their entire life. And so they can’t function as they should, and the people can’t respond as they should, and the body can’t be built up. And so when Satan comes rolling into town with his bandwagon of counterfeit gifts, off they all go, and pretty soon you’ve got chaos.
Do You recognize the Authority of Jesus Christ?
Are You willing to Submit to Jesus Christ?
It behooves us, as a people and as a pastor, to be sure that we’re committed to teach the Word of God, and you to learn the Word of God, and submit to the Word of God, and obey the Word of God. And know the difference between the true and the false, in order that the Body of Christ might be built for His Glory. Amen?