The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit Lesson 26

Jumping into lesson 26. What's that? I told them. You told them? In 26, they said, well, we've got to do the last thing at 25. I thought we had the last question. No, we don't. I kind of wrapped it up. Sometimes I do a little wrap up. Hi, Cheryl. Hi. I think I got 26.

Well, if you don't have the lesson handout, you can turn your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 12, verse four. We're gonna read through 11. We're not gonna read the Ephesians passage mentioned, we'll refer to it here, but the question is, what is the difference in the gifts in 1 Corinthians 12, four through 11? So just while you're turning there, just to give a little bit of a background, what are we studying?

Person and the work of the Holy Spirit. Okay, that's the class. Sometimes we get wrapped up into these individual lessons and so kind of consumed on a single topic that we sometimes forget the context of what we're looking at. This study's been huge for me. Like we often say as teachers, We choose lessons for areas that we want to challenge ourselves and continue to grow in. I think that this is definitely one of those areas.

And in looking at this study so far, we've talked about the Holy Spirit in different times, different household managements that God is using His Spirit the person of the Spirit in order to build about his plan on this earth but on into eternity. So we looked at the Holy Spirit in dispensations and said it's really important to understand the Holy Spirit's role in our lives and in the will of the Father during the times that he is administering humanity. the human race.

And so we looked at the Holy Spirit in the different dispensations, and we recall that those are different. The Holy Spirit functions differently, and we enjoy the full benefit of the Holy Spirit regenerating, indwelling, baptizing us, and sealing us. And so unlike those that were recipients of Jesus' words on the Sermon on the Mount, we have the very Holy Spirit. What we're gonna see is that that Holy Spirit distributes gifts to us, and we enjoy those gifts for the purposes of something within the church. So that's distinct, and we're gonna get back to that today, but we looked at those dispensations.

The other thing that we looked at is the Holy Spirit in salvation. What's the role of the person of the Holy Spirit throughout salvation? We talked about that, and we also compared that to sanctification. knowing that there's a positional truth in salvation, but there's also those wonderful identification truths that we enjoy in sanctification as well. And so we looked at that, and now we're studying, currently, the Holy Spirit in the church.

And specifically today, we're looking at the gifts of the Spirit. So in 1 Corinthians, chapter 12, four through 11, we see this subject that we have to be quite careful with. Has any of us run into issues with regards to understanding about the gifts of the spirit during the church age? Has it ever been a topic of interest, maybe?

I remember when I first started walking with the Lord, I came into contact with the charismatic perspective very quickly. And you know what I found is that I really connected with a lot of the personalities within the charismatic church. And I still do. Not to say that I'm attracted to emotion, but the kindness and the love was definitely a quality that stood out to me as I started to kind of explore the denominations, which is kind of how you have to do it if you don't have a really solid conviction on where to start sometimes. You start to do the, I'll try this restaurant. Let's see if I like the food or not. And it's the same mentality for looking at churches.

And I think that the spirit of uh... this the gifts of the spirit become a really uh... attractive thing to get carried away with within certain uh... sexist sect sectarianism we talked about last week we're talking about the way that the church has divided itself and one of the things that the charismatic movement has done is centered us around these gifts of the spirit and specifically uh... sign gifts, and we're going to talk about that today. So my point being is that we have to be careful with this subject because it can produce a wrong focus. When we start to focus on the very gifts that we have, we get enamored with ourselves, right? We start to focus on what is God doing through me that's unique and special, and how does that identify with some of these gifts that I see here in 1 Corinthians? But this is where context makes all the sense to consider, because you can't take these gifts out of the context of what Paul was saying.

We're gonna look at that today. So in 1 Corinthians chapter 12, verses four through 11, I'm going to read, you read along with me, but I'm gonna read Least's Expanded, because I like the expanded way that he, goodness, explaining and expanding, you're getting a little confusing and tongue-tied for me. I like the way that he expands on the words so as the repetition can be seen a little bit more clearly. So it'll be roughly the same as what you have in the Bible there.

So verse four, chapter 12, verse four, now there are different, and he uses the word distributions, your translation may say varieties, but now there are different distributions of spiritual gifts. These gifts being diverse from one another, but there is the same spirit. And there are different distributions of various kinds of ministries, but the same Lord. And there are different distributions of divine energy motivating these gifts in their operation, but the same Lord, same God rather, who by his divine energy operates them all in their sphere.

That's an interesting thing. It's an interesting word that he uses to get out of the grief. terminology there, operates them all in their sphere. But to each one, there is constantly being given the clearly seen operations of the spirit with a view to the profit of all. You might say the benefit, to the benefit.

So what do we see in here? Put on your Bible study hat for a moment. And what's interesting about these verses? What's the repetition? What's the comparison going on here? One thing, before you answer that, and I know that you're working on that answer, each and every one of you. Brian, I see you smiling over there. You got it. Ready to go. What happened in verse three? Go back and read verse three.

Somebody read that one for me. Therefore I make it known to you that no one speaking by the Spirit of God says, quote, Jesus is accursed. And no one can say, quote, Jesus is Lord, except by the Holy Spirit. So Paul referred to the three persons of the Trinity, God, the Spirit, and the Lord Jesus. And so, but he does it in reverse order in verses four through 11.

And so the issue here is that Paul is taking the fact that the Trinity was involved in the giving of these gifts, and then he's breaking it down and explaining that the fact that though each person of the Godhead is unique in terms of the role of administering these gifts, these different gifts and distributing according to the will of the triune God, each person plays a specific role in this gift giving. Right? So the Holy Spirit gives a diversity of gifts so that individuals can serve the Lord and his body, the church in various ways, all empowered by God and exercise under his care. Right?

So there's different kinds. How many times do we see different or words that are, that help us explain the contrasts of those gifts? We see it a number of times. We see different distributions in terms of weasts, translation there, but they're different, they're diverse, they're various.

Do we all have the same gifts? Who has the gift of tongues? That's the question, and that sounds maybe a little bit strange in our context, but who has the gift of healing? If we all have the gifts and they're all distributed in various kinds, who has those gifts?

We know that they're there, but where do they play a role in today's household management of what God's doing in history? His story. Those are questions that come up to mind there. And so, though there are different kinds of gifts, service and working and so forth, the same spirit and the same Lord and the same God are involved in all of it.

So, are these different gifts distributed to their own end? Or are they being administered, distributed rather, and energized, that word energized does come out in the Greek, are they energized by God with the same message? The same source. Different gifts, same source. And it's interesting, it doesn't just say the Holy Spirit is the source.

It means all three persons of the Trinity are involved in giving you a gift for a purpose. And that's where we start to ask the questions of what are the gifts for in terms of the purpose of God. Paul tells us, Paul goes into this. So the remainder of 1 Corinthians chapter 12, and particularly those last verses, It's quite helpful to us. We have a similar mention of these same gifts in Ephesians 4.

I'm not going to go through that all, but I will refer to the fact that these gifts start off in, by Paul in Ephesians, as those gifts from the Lord on high. So he's talking about what? Is he talking about the gift or is he talking about the source? Who's the gift giver?

And he quotes the Old Testament there in Ephesians 4, and he's referring to the fact that The God of Israel, God of Jacob, God of Moses, the God of the disciples, the God of this founding and establishing, this ecclesia, the church, this fellowship of believers who are designed to have unity in the spirit, all of this is from that Lord, that God.

Because remember, the Corinthians were dealing with some issues here. They were getting carried away with how, not only were they getting carried away with who they're gonna follow, I'm a Paul, I'm of Apollos, I'm of Cephas or Peter. So they were not only diversifying themselves by way of who, what brand, maybe, brand of teaching that they were attracted to, but they also were diversifying these gifts in such a way that they were not seeing the sameness. Paul made it a point to say, this is not only the God of Israel, this is the God of the church, and it's the same God, the God most high, from on high.

So just to paraphrase, it says, he ascended on high and gave gifts unto men, some as apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists, and some as pastor-teachers, pastors and teachers. So they're bestowed and operated through the Spirit And it's the Lord being the executive upon the earth, that through his spirit, he is managing the household of the church by the distribution and giving of these gifts. And I'll stop there for a second. Are we following? Are we tracking any questions, thoughts? Yes, it's really good, JD.

The Wii translation there with the, how did he put it there, where it says effects, he has that as, what was the word? Yeah, the... You're talking about the divine energy motivating these gifts in their operation? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it reminded me right away of Galatians 3, 5. which I replaced the word miracles there with the powerful, like produces power.

It's just the word dunamis or whatever. But if you look at that, it says, so then does he, God, who provides you with the spirit and works powerfully in you, do it by works of the Lord by hearing with faith. And I realized that's the same, it's the same concept coming across there. It's he, God, the father provides us with the spirit and does the work powerfully within us by the spirit. It just kind of made a bit of a connection there, but thought that was... Yeah, and I think what's interesting there in that verse is that word dunamis, and we know that this is connected to the power of God to do what? The dunamis, raise Christ from the dead, same word.

And yet here it's being used in the context of this, the very power through the very gifts that he's given each of us, for the purposes of establishing his will during the church age. We're gonna talk more about that. So I'm gonna leave a little bit of a finger there. But you also mentioned hearing by faith.

That's an interesting portion of Galatians 3.15 as well. I think that's gonna play on as we continue to see that there is the work of the spirit during the time of the law. But the same triune God, through his dunamis, his power, his power that is unique to him, the same power that rose Christ from the dead, the same power that was spoken and created all that we see in the first six days of creation, is a result of the dunamis, the power of God, and yet it's involved in our gifting. It's involved in the gifting that produces a ministry.

You have a ministry. We'll talk about that a little bit more later. Question number two. Well, before I do that, I wanted to say this about Ephesians. Let me stop for a second. So we see that the Spirit is the Lord's executive upon earth, and specifically during the church age, that there are those works in Ephesians that are brought out, like you mentioned there, that are, we call them special gifts, sign gifts, right?

Healing, palms. And we see that there are those other gifts that have more of a permanency, right? So in 1 Corinthians, we see some of the, more of the miraculous gifting. And in Ephesians, we see more of what we might call ordinary. Maybe I should have chosen a different word. But they're more common during this age, right? They're more operational gifts.

And so we see that those are necessary throughout the entire portion of the church age. But yet, we have these miraculous gifts that were done away with, that were ceased. We're gonna talk about that in a minute. And so what we're seeing is that this permanent value of the gifts that are being talked about that are not ceased have a necessity for the purpose of edifying the church. Go ahead, Mike.

I think it's interesting in Ephesians that rather than a specific gift, there are gifted men given to the body of Christ. The body of Christ is really important to God because it is the body of the Lord Jesus. And so there's so many characteristics of the body of Christ that pertain particularly to God and the relationship between the body of Christ, the church, and the Lord Jesus himself. So what God does is that he equips this group, which is the best way is described as the body of Christ. He equips them with gifted men and with gifts in particular to men that are in the body because the entity of the church is the most important thing to him which exists now both in heaven and on the earth. So I guess my point is to realize the importance of being in the body of Christ.

When you study in the Old Testament about the nation of Israel, he didn't gift them like this. They had some gifts, they had patriarchs, they had people that led them, and they were gifted, temporarily gifted to build a temple and do some other things. but not like us, that these are permanent. Some are permanent, and some are designed to create, build, and maintain the body of Christ. Why? Why is that so necessary for Paul to the Ephesians at that particular point in time? Why was it necessary to give gifts that would build up and edify and establish, and that's a really key word during this time, Why would he give these gifts?

And that's what I want to look at. I want to move forward into another passage in 1 Corinthians just as prior to, sorry, just after, rather, sorry, just after what we read. So question number two says, what was the purpose of all the sign gifts along with the gift of tongues specifically for? We kind of already answered that a little bit, but can we prove that? Can you prove the fact that these gifts were meant to edify the church?

Because I can tell you the first conversation you'll have with those that are persuaded by charismatic theology is you're wrong. That's not the case. Tongues do edify the church. Now, when we say tongues, we're talking about the ability to speak in foreign languages, and it's in language that's not known naturally to you. You didn't grow up with it, you didn't learn it, you didn't know it. And so we're talking about that ability to interpret and speak, and those are complimentary gifts, during an age when what was going on, what was being established? the church.

So let's look at, because the question number three rolls right into this, and we're going to answer two and three together. Let's look at 1 Corinthians 3, I'm sorry, 1 Corinthians 13, 8 through 13. This is a key passage for us because it's going to answer, do we need them today? And it'll also answer question number two, what is the purpose of these signed gifts?

Go ahead. I think the purpose starts In John 3, when Nicodemus comes to see the Lord at night, not quite sure who he is, but his whole reason for being there is the fact that he knows that he's special because of the things he could do. Sign gifts. Sign gifts?

He told him, he said, if you weren't from God, you couldn't do the things that you're doing. strangling people, you know, and I think it demonstrates the importance, even way back in the Old Testament, when for prophets and stuff, if they prophesied, they better perform. There better be a visible sign that what they had prophesied was real, because if it wasn't, then they were considered a false prophet. And so God verified ministries by the use of signs. Right. And who needed the signs the most? The Jews. The Jews. So let's read, I think you're spot on. We'll roll that into this set of verses here.

1 Corinthians 13.8. powerful beginning and ending to this passage.

So love never fails, but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away. If there are tongues, they will cease. If there is knowledge, it will be done away. For we know in part that and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away.

When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child. When I became a man, I did away with childish things. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then, face to face, now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I also have been fully known. But, and this is the end of this reading, but now faith, hope, and love abide these three, but the greatest of gifts of these is love. So what are the bookends? Love. Starts off with love, and guess what? Never fails. It's eternal.

OK, so I don't know if I could do this. Do we have even have a, I don't. I'm going to use my hands to explain things. It's over here? Oh. What are you looking for? Just a dry erase marker. Well, it's not there. That's OK. OK. My good old buddy, the dry erase marker's gone. Is it behind the curtain? It might be. No, we won't worry about it. I'll end up messing this whole screen up. It'll flash into the remote. You can see that happening to me.

So we've got love, it never fails. Just remember the permanence of love. Let's continue down the passage. So Paul's addressing the fulfillment, the ceasing. I'm sorry, Paul addresses the fulfillment, ceasing, or end of faith, hope, tongues, prophecy, and knowledge. So we're looking at those gifts, and it begins with love as our focal point, right? So in verse eight, the Greek word translated fails, it doesn't mean success.

It's not like I lost a game. You know, it's not a lost column, right? The idea of fails here, and it never fails, is it never falls off. It never ends. Never fails in the sense that the total volume of love that God provides doesn't run out. It never falls off, right? So we want to make sure that we understand that fails is not loses. It's a lost column. It means it never runs out.

And verse 13 actually underscores that right now, faith, hope, and love abide. And what does abide mean? It remains, absolutely. So we see that love never fails, and faith, hope, and love abide. They remain. Do faith and hope never fail? Only love does. That's what Paul's saying. Only love never fails.

Faith and hope Remain, okay? We're gonna see how that works because he also talks about us being face-to-face with the Lord. Are faith and hope necessary in that instance? We'll leave that question for us as we go. So verse 13, and I'm looking at verse eight being the beginning, love never fails. Verse 13, it remains. Okay? So going back to verse eight, we have prophecy and knowledge. What are these? What is prophecy? The ability to, the gift that, I'm not gonna do that right now. I'll say foretells. Foretells? Okay, it speaks of what will come, but it's based on the source.

So, much like an ambassador, it's not the message of the ambassador, it's his role to deliver the message. Prophets wrote down what yet they were delivered, right? And that delivery, that source, is always the same. And the mechanism by which that is recorded is always the same, being the Holy Spirit, God being the source, right? And Jesus being the very word himself. So we have prophecy, we also have knowledge.

What is knowledge, the gift of knowledge? Who's got that one? Who knows they have that one? No one would dare raise their hand. Knowledge in what? Knowledge in God's Word. Knowledge in God's Word. Is the rest of knowledge necessary? Is it necessary? What about knowledge in in science, chemistry, the dreaded chemistry course. Does God have anything to do with knowledge there?

Well, it's interesting because, just as a side note, all knowledge is founded in God himself. There's nothing that God doesn't have a direct creator relationship to. He's the creator. He's the creator-owner. Does chemistry not include God, does not presuppose God, the God of the scripture? It absolutely does.

Because, or algebra, can you solve for x if you don't know what y is? If you don't have a constant, can you solve for an unknown? Or are we just dealing with unknowns? Evolution would say we are dealing with unknowns. Everything's chaos, right? All of our knowledge, even if it's not in the sphere of God's word, is presupposing God's world. and the fact that it is constant. A one is a one today, just like it will be tomorrow. And if it's not, then God's not constant. There's no constant to math.

So that being a little bit of a soapbox, and I enjoy going into that because it, oftentimes, the question is, even from the kids sometimes, what does God have to do with this? And they may not say it outright like that, but what does God have to do with this bit of knowledge? And it's God's world. This is the world that he created.

So as we begin to understand it, We learn certain things about God, but is it enough? Is it enough for our salvation? He says in Romans 1 that he reveals himself through his divine nature and his attributes, and that no man is without excuse. But is it enough? It's enough for no excuse. But is it enough for you to be face-to-face with the Lord Jesus when you're no longer with this fleshly body? It's not enough, so there's more knowledge. And where is that knowledge found? in the word of God. Go ahead. I'm thinking, too, that a person with, say, a word of knowledge, which is more than just a weighing out of the objective facts.

One of the things you see with the writers of the script, especially the New Testament, there's a special intimacy with God that they portray. We as scholars get all twisted around in the Greek meanings and that kind of thing, and we forget that really what God is really all about is that we would know him. So when we read the scriptures, read the Bible, sometimes we are there just to learn a bunch of facts so that when you ask a question of the class, we have an answer. There's another reason, and the reason is to know intimately God himself, who is the Lord Jesus Christ.

And I think that that was part of what that gift was really all about. Do you guys agree? Was the gift of knowledge all about knowing a person, or knowing about a person? It was actually knowing him. Everything about God's word, who is the word? We know that it's the Lord Jesus, but every bit of prophecy and knowledge that was inspired divinely by those apostles during the time of the church age, specifically that's what we're talking about, that body of truth, all of that was for the purposes of you knowing him personally, not knowing about him. Okay, so knowledge has a role. And if we're learning to know him during the point in time where we're not face-to-face, that's important. That's our lifeline, is knowing him to the point that we are face-to-face with him.

So we're also told in verse eight that prophecy and knowledge are both done away with. Why would knowledge be done away with? And done away is this idea of rendered inactive. It's no longer active. Doesn't mean that the knowledge that's needed isn't still there. There's just no need, there's no active need for this same body of knowledge.

You ever think about, are we gonna be flipping back in First Corinthians in heaven? God's gonna say, welcome, we're face to face. What's your favorite verse? You think we're gonna be doing that? No? Well, it's interesting because that knowledge is said of Paul that it's done away with in this context. And this done away with, it's a future passive indicative, meaning it's something that's going to be happening in the future to you, and it is absolutely going to happen, right? So there will be this future point where knowledge and prophecy are done away with. Then we get to verse nine and 10.

It says, when the perfect comes, the in part gifts will cease. What were the in part gifts? Love never fails, faith and hope fall off, right? They abide. but they fall off. Prophecy and knowledge are done away with, and then we have tongues that we're gonna look at in a minute. So you have love existing constantly in eternity, past, on into eternity, future. But faith and hope, they fall off. Prophecy and knowledge is done away with even before that, and then you have tongues. I'll draw it out a little bit more as we go. But we see that prophecy and knowledge are done away with, and so when the perfect comes, the in part gifs, gifs, gifs, gifs, when the perfect comes, the in part gifs will cease.

The perfect, what is the perfect? Read it a little bit more in the context there. What is the perfect? Word of God? Okay, that's this big. It's the word of God, now what? Zone it in. Jesus. This is talking about the completion of the New Testament, right? Well, the perfect is the completed New Testament. Now, in verse 12, and this is from the timeframe of Paul's writing, it's about 56 AD. Okay, so when only part of the New Testament, at that particular point in time, only part of the New Testament had been written.

And he goes on to say, about this perfect completion, he goes on to say, we see it as in a mirror. And that's a key word for us. Because the Corinthians knew about their mirrors. It was a big deal. And these were big metal, flattened, polished metal spheres that were used to see as in a mirror, but the seeing was based on the quality of the polish. And the Corinthians took a lot of pride in their mirrors, we know that.

And in James it also talks about the mirror, but it uses the word mirror as an analogy of what? What's consistent? And we see this not only in James 1.23, we see it in 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians too.

The mirror plays a role here. What is it always doing? What is it functioning as? He's trying to show them. Reflecting. Reflecting. That when you look into the mirror, it's dim, it's blurred. And he's comparing it to the incomplete and imperfect. But he's talking about that old vanishing way, isn't he? You're absolutely right. So the mirror is used as, in James, the Word of God. The Word of God reflects something back to you.

And the quality of that reflection is going to determine what you understand about yourself. Is that true? If it's a really unpolished mirror, are you going to understand what you look like? No. If it's well polished, are you going to have a more accurate understanding of who you are in terms of how you look?

There's only one problem with it. One problem. When you get old, you look in the mirror and you think, who the hell is that? So we might say that Mike would benefit from looking in a mirror dimly. Well, these Corinthians were looking at a mirror dimly as well, not because of their age. We will not go there completely at this particular point in time, maybe next week. But looking at a mirror dimly. So since mirrors in those days, they were that polished metal, and what he's saying is that this unpolished mirror represents the incomplete Word of God.

It's not done yet. But when it's polished and done and complete, meaning all that is needed to be said for the administration and edification of the body of Christ, until that's done, the perfect is not yet complete. Is it complete for us? Yes. It is complete.

We see clearly in the word of God. We're told to behold it. We're told to behold Him as if in a mirror. So we know that during this time, they saw dimly. And so that's why it said that when the perfect is complete, so this purpose of prophecy and knowledge being done away with had to do with the completion of the New Testament. So we see it falling off. So Paul used the same word illustration, like I said, in Corinthians. And since the church was born about 25 years before Paul's writing, The church was rightly exhibiting these gifts that were needed to establish the church. Did they need signs? To authenticate. To authenticate. Okay, unpack that for us a little bit. Why were the sign gifts used to authenticate and what were they used to authenticate? The children, they really were. It was God's way.

In the same way that Nicodemus, that's right, in the same way that Nicodemus was able to experience and understand validation of whom the Messiah was, we are given these sign gifts during this age in the Corinthian church in order to edify, but more importantly, establish and authenticate the fact that Paul and the other apostles were delivering the message from the Messiah about how the church is gifted. One thing, too, is at Pentecost, they were initially to announce the arrival of the Holy Spirit into the church. And that was verified later with additional fine gifts by the apostles and what they were doing, illustrating that the Holy Spirit was in them. Absolutely. Yeah, the Pentecost starts a whole new chapter in God's household management, doesn't it? And we're still talking about the unity of the Spirit and specifically the role of the spiritual gifts. Gifts of the Spirit. So the maturing of the church, including, I'm gonna wrap up in this last statement. So the maturing of the church, including growing away from its Jewish roots, was that part of their maturity?

Did they need to grow away from, I mean, that's what they knew. That's how they were raised, that's all that they understood, up into the point where Paul and these others were starting to give them information about the Messiah that had to do with spiritual gifts and the body of Christ. Like what, there's a lot going on here. So there was a lot of maturing that needed to happen. And so the completion of the New Testament was not something that they enjoyed like we do. And so gifts of tongues, interpretation of that message in order to have the knowledge of it was important. Miracles and healing and so forth were all a part of authenticating the messengers.

Right? And so tongues do cease. They completely cease, and that's a different verb than falling away, or rendered inactive, done away with, or the perfect becoming complete. So we have this word cease, and we're gonna pick up with this word cease next week, and then we'll kind of wrap up these last couple, or these middle two questions, questions two and three. So let me kind of run through that a little bit longer.

I apologize. Father Howie, thank you for your gifts of the Spirit, and the purpose is a personal understanding of what you're doing. You've given us the playbook, and not only do we understand the larger purpose of the church in this age and how you established it, but now how we edify it together in the unity of the spirit as we continue to behold you through your word. And so I'm so thankful, Lord, that we get the privilege of looking at all that you're doing, both in the church as a larger organism, but individually for each of us in terms of how you've been gifted us for the purpose of ministry, to share your life with others, both in salvation, and in identification and who we are positionally. And so we thank you for that. It's your name we pray, amen.