Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro & Recap

Exegetical Point: Jesus’ saved body is equipped with varying gifts for varying service.

Application point: Find your gifts and use them!

Kids, What do you think is your most important body part?

Eyes?

Ears?

Legs?

Let me tell you a story...

Liv.

2.32 - Paraphrase

Menenius Agrippa from about 500 BC tells this story something like this:

The members of a human body were hanging about one day, and they got into a bit of a stir.

The hands were complaining, “All we do is work work work to provide food for the stomach.

The stomach doesn't have to do anything, it just sits there and enjoys the food that we had to work hard to make.

They got various other body members on their side, and they hatched a plan: “We’re sick of the stomach not pulling his weight, we’re gonna stop feeding Stomach.

Mouth, don’t open when it’s time to eat.

Teeth - go on strike and don’t chew.

Us hands won’t even lift the food to the mouth.

That’ll teach stomach a lesson!

We’ll starve him!

So, the plan gets underway - Hands keep working, moth keeps talking but they provide no food to Stomach.

Stomach pleads for food, but it falls on deaf ears.

All the body part turn against stomach, and he starts to waste away.

But then something unexpected starts to happen: Hands start finding it hard to work.

Feet are having trouble walking.

Eyes can’t see clearly.

The body stated to waste away.

Exhausted and weak.

You see, the stomach was not just idly eating all the fruits of labour.

It wasn’t just resting on other to provide for it, it was in turn playing the crucial role to nourish the body.

The work that the rest of the body put in to give stomach food, resulted in an equal benefit to the body in strengthening it.

In our passage today, Paul the Apostle riffs on this same story, or a variation of it.

He points out the same basic premise - that all the parts of a body rely on each other.

All the parts of the Church have different jobs to do - some more prestigious than others - but all are participating with their God given gifts for the good of the whole.

To isolate one form the rest, or to stubbornly complain that “that that guy over there has a better job, I wish i could have his job” is to effectively starve the body of it’s nourishment and undermine the design.

Last year I preached on the idea of the Church in the Trench, and this message is an extension of that idea.

The Church in the Trench is the Church of Jesus that is still here on earth, in the battle grounds of God’s advancing Kingdom.

Flooding Creek is a Church in the Trench, on the front lines.

The Church in the Trench is an Outpost of Heaven - It’s a little bit like heaven, it’s like home, but this is not our permanent home.

It’s a refuge, but we’re still in the battlefield - we need to stay on guard and protect the holy space - the church - from sin and rebellion while Christ advances his kingdom through a suffering church.

In a future week we will look at how God has not left his Church in the trench leaderless - but he has provided Commissioned Officers on the front line: After the Apostles laid the foundation of the church on Jesus the cornerstone - he gave Elders to oversee and pastor the flock, as well as Deacons to lead many of the practical concerns of the church.

But, this week - We need to talk about how we operate together as this church in the trench.

The individuals who make up the church, what part do we play as individuals in this Outpost of Heaven under our Commissioned Officers?

Well, as the name of this sermon would indicate, we are Spec Ops soldiers - Special Operations.

This is the metaphor we’ll play on today.

All of us are people who have a special job to do that contributes to the whole body.

Spec Ops, is that division that many defense forces around the world have, short for Special Operations: "military activities conducted by specially designated, organized, trained, and equipped forces, manned with selected personnel, using unconventional tactics, techniques, and modes of employment".

Some of of the most well known Spec Ops groups are the SAS in the UK, and SASR in Australia and Spetsnaz in Russia.

Spec Ops soldiers are highly trained and dedicated to specific tasks.

Each of them have an all-round proficiency, but they also have specializations.

A job that is especially their own, that they are really good at.

In a squad you might have a leader, and a sharpshooter, an explosives expert and a medic.

Each of them has a base set of skill that they share, but each has their own important job, that contributes to the whole.

If you take one of them away your squad would suffer as a result.

Just like spec ops need different types of people with different jobs to make the whole work, well, God has designed the church in a similar way: we need different types of people with different jobs to make the whole work.

We all share alot of similarities, but we also have specialized gifts that God has given us to use in His Spiritual war.

We need to know what is our specialized area of operations.

How has God gifted you by his Spirit?

Do you know?

Is it as a front line evangelist?

Is it as a chef who cooks up nourishing spiritual meals for the believers?

Are you in comms, buried in prayer for Christ’s church?

Are you the morale officer who encourages your brothers & sisters to keep persevering?

Are you leadership material, that should be set aside to oversee the platoon?

This message this morning isn’t going to be a crash course on individual spiritual gifts, in fact we’re kinda going to gloss over the details of the individual gifts mentioned in this passage, but we are going to talk about how Jesus has equipped His church with all the different parts to make it work together.

We all have a special job to do.

I’ll happily chat about the specific gifts after the service, but right here, lets look at 1 Cor 12 to see what it says about the idea of spiritual gifts.

and get you thinking about:

What special role do you have in this church?

Lets consider 4 things that 1 Cor 12 tells us about these spiritual gifts

1. Gifts are from God & Glorify Jesus (12:1-6)

The first thing you’ll notice in chapter 12 is that the spiritual gifts in the church are from God, and they Glorify Jesus.

You can see from the opening lines, that gifts are characterized by the way they lead toward praising Jesus.

Paul instructs the Corinthian church:

If you try hard enough for long enough, you can whip just about anyone up into an ecstatic state.

It was not uncommon in those ancient pagan religions near Corinth to have people in trances or given over to a religious fervor.

This could be people under the influence of heightened emotion, drugs, or even demonic influence.

Many of the Corinthians had been sucked into this false worship before they were Christians.

So Paul writes to the church about how to distinguish between a true and a false spiritual gifts.

What’s a deceptive lie and what’s genuine spirituality?

Well, he says for a start, “If someone in your church claiming to be acting in the Holy Spirit, starts saying things like “Jesus is accursed”, that's a pretty good sign it’s fake”

For example, I heard a story during the week of a worship leader and musician up on stage who declared during a church service that God had spoken to them and that they were each going to leave their respective spouses to be together.

The church was applauding!

They held up sin as a gift and command of God, despite it directly going against what God had said!

That might seem plain to us, but if you’ve come out of a background of weird “prophetic” utterances, pseudo spiritual emotional manipulation or just plain demonic influence, then you might have a hard time sorting through these things if it showed up on a Sunday morning.

For the Corinthians, and for us, we have to start on the same footing - spiritual gifts glorify Jesus, not tearing him down.

If anyone seems to be doing something in the name of God, but it undermines the Gospel of Jesus Christ - that’s a dead give away - this is a fake spiritual gift.

How can we tell fake spiritual gifts?

Paul Goes on to mention that there are a bunch of different gifts, but they’re all from the same source:

So, the gifts have to glorify Jesus, “Jesus is Lord”, and they come from God himself.

We’ll talk more about the variety of gifts in a bit, but lets just dwell on this for a moment - It is God himself who empowers the gifts in every one: “ it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone” 1 Co 12:6.

The special operations that each Christian is called to, are empowered by God himself through the Spirit.

Distributed according to his good purposes.

It’s not just us out here trying to put on a spiritual facade to fit in, no, we are empowered by God himself to the job he has ahead of us!

Paul says something similar in Philippians:

Now if God is working in us by his Spirit, the same Spirit that rose Jesus Christ from the dead, what will we be able to do?

What limitations are there on what God can do through his Church with divine resurrection power?

You and I can look at the world around us and grumble at the hopeless estate of mankind -

the political structures are crumbling...

the moral fabric of society is dissolving...