Sermon Tone Analysis

Most of you know that my mother has been gone for the past couple of weeks to visit her sister.

She is due back on Tuesday, and that means that Annette and I (mostly Annette, to be honest) spent much of yesterday cleaning house.

It’s not as if we don’t clean the house when Mom’s home, but Annette always wants to make sure the place is spic and span whenever Mom gets back from one of her trips.

So, a couple of times a year, we go through a major cleanup effort, inside and out.

Annette weeded her garden and rearranged her planters.

I vacuumed the house.

She cleaned the bathrooms and picked up my clutter.

I vacuumed the house.

She washed off the outdoor tables and put up the umbrella.

Did I mention that I vacuumed the house?

Well, she did most of the work, and nobody who knows us at all will be surprised by that.

But there was something she did that surprised me.

She put her new food processor and blender on the kitchen counter.

Now, these two appliances are new in the sense that they’ve never been used — the first time they’d been out of their boxes was this week.

But they’re not really new.

She received them for Christmas and has never used them.

You see, there’s been too much stuff on the kitchen counters for them to have the space they need.

So, she had to figure out how to make space for them before she could use them.

Now, she’s going to think I threw her under the bus by telling you all this, so let me try to mitigate the damage I’ve done by saying that there’s a little car vacuum cleaner by my easy chair that I also haven’t opened since I got it for Christmas.

Whenever I’m finally ready to pull out the bucket and sponges and soap and everything else I need to wash the car, I’ll open the vacuum up and proceed to do the whole thing up right.

I’m just not quite ready to do that.

One day soon, perhaps.

I tell you all this to make a point: It’s nice to receive gifts, but they don’t really serve their intended purpose until you take them out of the box and use them.

And today, as we continue our series, “The Church — Revealed,” we’re going to take a look at how the spiritual gifts every follower of Jesus receives from the Holy Spirit are intended for a purpose.

And that purpose can only be realized if we take them out of their boxes and use them for what they were intended to do — to build up the body of Christ.

We’re going to be in 1 Corinthians, chapter 12, today, so please go ahead and find that passage in your Bibles.

While you’re turning there, as always, let me give you some context.

The first letter that we have from the Apostle Paul to the church in Corinth has some of the strongest language of any of his letters.

That’s because this church had some serious problems that he was addressing.

Indeed, though that church may not have experienced a church split in the sense that we might understand it, it was experiencing divisions on a number of issues.

They were divided over teachers.

Some claimed to be followers of Paul, and others claimed to be followers of Apollos.

But Paul set them straight.

He had planted the seeds, and Apollos had watered them, but it was God — not Paul or Apollos — who caused the growth.

They were divided over whether they could eat certain foods.

So Paul said, essentially, eat what you want.

Just don’t cause another believer to stumble in his faith.

They were divided over the Lord’s Supper.

Some were eating their fill of the bread and wine, leaving nothing of this sacred meal for others.

And some were even becoming drunk on the wine.

So Paul said, “when you come together to eat, wait for one another.”

And don’t be selfish idiots — that’s from the Spears translation.

And it seems that they were also divided on the matter of spiritual gifts, with those who had the gift of speaking in tongues considering themselves to be more spiritual than those who did not.

So, in chapter 12, Paul talks about some of the gifts of the Holy Spirit and how they relate to the body of Christ, the Church.

And as we consider today this image of the Church as the body under Jesus, its head, we’re going to see what Paul had to say in chapter 12 about these gifts.

But before we do, I want to tell you Paul’s answer to the problems of the Corinthian church.

The answer was love.

Skip ahead to chapter 13, the famous love chapter.

We sometimes hear this chapter read during weddings, but the true application of it is for the church.

Love was the answer to the divisions in the church at Corinth.

It’s the same answer to the problems of the church today.

It’s the thing that has made such a tangible difference in our church during the past few years.

And what Paul is saying here is that whatever spiritual gift you might have, it accomplishes nothing for the Kingdom of God if it isn’t manifested in love.

As one commentator puts it, we are to earnestly desire the gifts of the Holy Spirit in order that others in the Church may be edified.

“Thus it is not ‘love versus gifts’ that Paul has in mind, but ‘love as the only context for gifts.’”

[Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), 1 Co 12:31, quoting Fee.]

You see, without love, the gifts aren’t really of any use at all.

The problem of the church in Corinth was that the people there were selfish.

They were concerned for themselves, so they ate and drank without thought of the others who were in line behind them.

And they formed themselves into factions that set the teachings of Paul against those of Apollos.

In doing so, they brought division into a body that should have been experiencing unity.

But what’s really interesting about the call to unity in this letter is the part that diversity plays in it.

And that’s what we’ll see in chapter 12.

There are many different spiritual gifts.

Some will be listed in the coming verses.

Others appear elsewhere in the New Testament.

In fact, since we know that all good things come from God, it’s not a stretch for us to conclude that every gift or talent you may have can be a spiritual gift.

Since there are multiple lists of spiritual gifts in Scripture, and since each of those lists is different in some regards, it seems reasonable to conclude that these are examples of spiritual gifts, rather than an exhaustive catalog of them.

And so, there are varieties of gifts.

But they all come from the same Holy Spirit.

There are also varieties of ministries to which those gifts may be applied.

Perhaps your spiritual gift is teaching.

There are many different places where this gift can be applied.

Perhaps it’s an adult Sunday school class, or in children’s church, or in a small-group setting.

Or maybe you have the gift of helps.

Your ministry of helping could be applied in lots of different places within the church.

There are many ways your gift of helping can minister to the church.

So, there are varieties of ministries for your spiritual gifts.

But those ministries all come from the same Lord.

And there are varieties of effects.

In other words, there are many different ways the ministries in which you use your spiritual gifts will change lives.

Perhaps your ministry will plant seeds in the hearts of unbelievers.

Perhaps your ministry will water the seeds planted by someone else.

Both of these effects are important.

But who brings the growth?

“The same God who works all things in all persons.”

It is God who brings the increase.

In fact, what we see in these verses is that it’s God the Holy Spirit who gives the gifts.

It’s God the Son who gives the ministries.

And it’s God the Father who makes ministries effectual.

This should be an encouragement to you.

I know it has been an encouragement to me.

That’s because I have come to realize one very important thing about my own ministry.

God will not measure success for me as a pastor by numbers.

He won’t even measure my success by comparing the faithfulness of believers in this church from when I started ministering here to whenever He takes me from here.

The measurement of my success will be one thing: my faithfulness to what He has called me to do.

And the same thing is true for you.

If you apply whatever spiritual gift you have been given to some ministry in the church and you faithfully do that work as to the Lord, then in God’s eyes, you will have been a success in your calling.

Now, I’ve tipped my hand a bit, but let me ask the question, anyway.

For what purpose have you been given spiritual gifts?