Sermon Tone Analysis

Announcements

Bible Study & Prayer every Wednesday at 7pm.

We’ll be working through Psalm 24 this week, it’s a great time of reflection and study before spending an extended amount of time in prayer each week.

Surprisingly, Wednesday evening’s have also been a popular time for visitors of the church as well.

We’ve had a couple from Morrisdale join us almost every week for the past month and this past Wednesday, we actually had six visitors.

So, we’d love to have more people join us as we pray together and study God’s Word—Wednesdays at 7pm.

This Saturday, May 28th at 10:30am, we’ll have a community outreach event in Chester Hill as we seek to essentially do two things (1) spread the word of the church to the local communities and (2) show that specific neighborhood that we care for them.

We could definitely use some help.

We’ll meet at the park in Chester Hill, it doesn’t have a name, but it’s next to the boro building across the street from Fuel On.

Next week, on June 4th at 10:30am, we’ll have a work day, here in the church building.

A lot of the work is simply just spring cleaning related work—we want to scrub down everything in the building from floor-to-ceiling.

We also want to clean up the outside of the building a bit both in the alley out back and the front.

We do need to touch-up some paint and hopefully get a few other projects done as well.

The more people that we have here to help, the better.

So, if you’re free, please plan to serve in this capacity.

One last announcement concerning our new series.

I normally don’t put a schedule for upcoming sermons in the worship guides, but since we aren’t going through one entire book during this series, I thought some of you might want the upcoming sermons and their texts so that you could read ahead a bit.

If that’s the case, you can find them in the worship guides—if you just open them and look at the bottom right, you’ll see them.

Let me remind you to continue worshiping the LORD through your giving.

To help you with your giving, we have three ways for you to do so: (1) in-person giving can be done at the offering box at the front of the room—if you give cash and you’d like a receipt for your gift, please place it in an envelope with your name on it; if you give a check, please write it to Grace & Peace.

If you’d prefer to give with a debit or credit card or through ACH transfers, you can do that either by (2) texting 84321 with your $[amount] and following the text prompts or (3) by visiting us online at www.gapb.church

and selecting giving in the menu bar.

Everything that you give goes to the building up of our local church and the spread of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Prayer of Repentance and Adoration

Call to Worship (Ps 51:1-6)

Our Call to Worship this morning is from Psalm 51, but because of the length of the psalm, we’re going to work through it over the next three weeks.

Psalm 51 is a psalm of David written shortly after David sins against Uriah.

What this psalm primarily is, is a psalm of repentance; and we can relate to this psalm because we’ve all sinned and have needed to seek forgiveness from the Lord in a similar manner.

Please stand and read with me Psalm 51:1-6, I’ll read the odd-numbered verses, please join me in reading the even-numbered verses.

Congregational Singing

Brethren, We Have Met to Worship 334

All the Way My Savior Leads Me 172

Holy Spirit, Living Breath of God 318

Scripture Reading (1 Pet 4:1-11)

Our Scripture Reading this morning is 1 Peter 4:1-11, which is a call from Peter to put aside sin and to be self-controlled, sober-minded while loving one another earnestly.

Peter calls us each to utilize our gifts to serve one another “as good stewards of God’s varied grace” for the glory of God.

Of course, this fits with our new series because our first summer series is focused on spiritual gifts—their purpose, the need for them, and what we are to use them for.

And just like Peter’s encouragement to the diaspora to use their spiritual gifts, the exhortation is the same for us—figure out your spiritual gifts and use it to serve one another.

Stacey can you read 1 Peter 4:1-11 for us.

Sermon

Introduction

This morning, we’re starting a new series that will last about eight weeks.

It isn’t like many of our other series in the sense that usually we work line-by-line through whole books at a time—this series is different because we’ll be working on multiple different passages over the next few months to develop what could be considered a systematic theology of spiritual gifts.

Or in other words, while this series is still expositional, in that we’ll be working through specific texts, instead of going verse-by-verse through one whole book, we’ll be looking at different passages throughout multiple books with the purpose of understanding all that the New Testament says about spiritual gifts.

Now, I will give a brief head’s up that this is not going to be comprehensive, in the sense that spiritual gifts are referred to in the Old Testament but we won’t necessarily be looking at those texts over the next two months.

Or in other words, we’ll get a solid understanding of what the New Testament teaches concerning spiritual gifts for the church, but we won’t be digging too far into what the Old Testament says about spiritual gifts.

The whole point in this series is for us to understand what the Bible says about spiritual gifts, to learn what the purpose of those gifts are, and for us to be compelled to serve the local church with our spiritual gifts.

To help us get started in this series, we’re going to look at a passage that while it isn’t the first time spiritual gifts are mentioned in the Bible, it is significant for our understanding of these gifts.

If you have your Bible please turn it to 1 Corinthians 12:1-11.

We’re actually going to be in 1 Corinthians 12 the next few weeks because chs.

12-14 is all about spiritual gifts, so let me give you a bit of background information.

1 Corinthians is a letter written by the Apostle Paul to the church in Corinth.

Corinth was a city located on the isthmus between the Peloponnesian peninsula and the mainland of Greece.

Because of its location, it was an extraordinarily wealthy city of approximately 90,000 residents.

That wealth was built because anything that needed to be sent to Peloponnese and Greece had to pass through Corinth and because the Roman empire would utilize the Isthmus of Corinth for trade to Asia Minor.

They would send their goods by ship through the Ionian Sea, it would dock on one side of the Isthmus of Corinth; and during biblical times, they would utilize carts and animals to pull the goods to the other side of the isthmus where it would be loaded on another ship to cross the Aegean Sea to Asia and vice versa.

From there it would go to Asia Minor, Israel, and various other places on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea.

It doesn’t take a business expert to know that the merchants that were in charge of getting the goods from one side of the isthmus to the next made a significant amount of money doing it.

It also doesn’t take a business expert to know that in a time when wage disparity was a significant issue in society, that those who physically did the work, weren’t nearly as wealthy.

That divide between the overtly wealth and the poor workers wasn’t just an issue in society for Corinth, it was an issue within the church.

In addition, because Corinth was a large metropolitan city with thousands of people from all sorts of different places, Corinth was a city proliferated with false religious beliefs—there was pagan worship throughout the city—worship of the Roman gods and their Greek iterations, worship of the emperor, and spiritualistic worship were common issues.

And these issues found their way into the church.

Not to mention that the very culture of Corinth was that of sin.

Think of the mindset that people have of going to Las Vegas today—to party, to indulge, and to sin; and apply that to the first-century Corinth and you’ll have an idea of the licentiousness that proliferated the city, even into the church.

I say all this, not to give you a history lesson, but to show you what caused tremendous issues within the church of Corinth.

There was disparity amongst the rich and poor in the church, there were pagan beliefs infiltrating the church, and there were very real sin problems happening within the church.

Paul is confronting all these issues in his first letter to Corinth and by the time he gets to 1 Corinthians 12, he’s actually confronted quite a few of those issues before getting to the business of spiritual gifts in the church, but even as he speaks of spiritual gifts, he spends a bit of time still confronting those issues.

Let’s start this morning by reading 1 Corinthians 12:1-11.

As we study this passage together, we’re going to break it into two parts: (1) Proper Worship and Spiritual Gifts (1-3) and (2) The Variety of Gifts are for the Common Good (4-11).

Both sections answer two very important questions for us as Paul confronts an issue within the Corinthian church.

We see these two questions being answered: (1) what are spiritual gifts and (2) what is their purpose?

It gives us a foundation for the concept of spiritual gifts that should answer several questions before we get into the bulk of our study of spiritual gifts through the next two months.

It should cause us to consider our own spiritual gifts and it should cause us to ask if we’re utilizing our spiritual gifts for the proper reason or not.

Prayer for Illumination

Proper Worship and Spiritual Gifts (1-3)

Our passage starts off by starting the letter to the Corinthians with a new topic.

Just prior to this point, Paul was talking about properly partaking in the Lord’s Supper, so I think it’s fairly clear that this is a new topic, but I would suggest that there’s a common theme throughout both sections.

Throughout the whole text of 1 Corinthians, there’s a reoccurring theme concerning the need for unity within the church.

As you read through 1 Corinthians, you see Paul confronting a lack of unity concerning who they claim to follow as teachers.

In 1 Corinthians 1, we see Paul confronting these divisions by simply asking whether these human teachers were who they were to follow. 1 Corinthians 1:13 “13 Has Christ been divided?

Paul was not crucified for you, was he?

Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?”

The obvious answer is no, so why would they divide themselves between teachers who taught the biblical truth?

He speaks again of divisions within the church in 1 Corinthians 3 and he brings up that issue again in which the people were dividing themselves amongst people who were properly teaching Scripture—and let me be clear, the divisions at hand were because they were dividing themselves amongst people who were genuinely teaching the truth—this isn’t an issue of whether some of those teachers were false or not.

Again, Paul calls them back to unity despite who their preferred preachers or teachers are.

Now, even though there is a reoccurring theme concerning unity, Paul is blunt about when unity shouldn’t exist.

He confronts them about them not dealing with sin within the body of Christ multiple times and he makes it abundantly clear that they need to reject unity with someone who claims to believe and lives in unrepentant sin (1 Corinthians 5-6).

In 1 Corinthians 7-8 Paul focuses a little more intently at some specific issues within the church in Corinth and he doesn’t focus too much on the issue of unity again until 1 Corinthians 11, in which he confronts the disunity and sin occurring when they’re supposed to be focused on the Lord’s Supper.

And he hints at that unity all the way up until ch.

12, when he starts this discourse concerning spiritual gifts, which goes all the way through ch.

14.

That idea of unity is woven throughout the text concerning spiritual gifts and the overarching idea is the regardless of what your spiritual gifts are, there still ought to be unity within the church.

I want us to keep that in mind as we work through 1 Corinthians 12 this morning.

The Bible starts by confronting the way that the believers in Corinth used to think.

In v. 1, “Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be uninformed.

You know that when you were pagans you were led astray to mute idols, however you were led.”

Prior to salvation, Paul makes it clear that they thought like pagan unbelievers, which makes sense, given the context of Corinth—that most people in Corinth were pagans—they worshiped false gods and idols.

This means that they had a tendency to pull in pagan ideas and practices into the church thinking that this was an acceptable idea, when it really wasn’t acceptable to do so whatsoever.

And despite the fact that there are plenty of so-called churches that do this today—like the large church in South Carolina who opened an Easter Sunday service by performing AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” or like the many churches that have started utilizing practices of New Agism and Eastern mythicism into their programs, the reality is, as it’s clear in Paul’s statements here, that it’s completely unacceptable to wed Christianity with pagan or unbiblical ideas and practices.

Paul writes concerning their previous beliefs and ideas and states that he wants them to understand that there’s a difference between the worship of pagan deities and in the one true God.

Since the Corinthians have a tendency to bring in pagan ideology into their worship of Yahweh, Paul starts at the most basic concept in v. 3, “Understand that no one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says ‘Jesus is accursed!’