Spiritual gifts then and now
1 Corinthians 13:8-13 · Randy Peterman · Feb 26, 2017
Acts (2017-18), No. 08
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926549212461

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Well, good morning. A couple of weeks ago, it was around Valentine's Day, my dad said, hey, we're moving, would you mind subbing for me? So I said yes. But that was good. That was good. But then last weekend, I got this weird, crazy rash and I was all swollen, so it was not good. So you can see I had good company though from Hollywood. But the doctor gave me some oral steroids and unfortunately it didn't bulk me up, but I'm doing better this week, so that's good.

So we can get started. We've been going through acts, right? So everybody is here and we're going to take a little side trip And we're actually going to look at 1 Corinthians 13, verses 8 through 13. We want to consider this idea that love is going to outlast the inauguration of the church. That's how I would put this idea that...

What? Don't move so much. The oral steroids they gave me for the rash made it hard to sit down and I had to go to work and sit still. It's something I don't take for granted that I have that much energy, so apologies for moving. So anyways, taking a look at 1 Corinthians here, we're going to take a side trip out of Acts to take a look at why we see this massive influx in Acts chapter 2 in the recording of the history of the church, of spiritual gifts, miraculous things, and then why today we might not expect to see those in the church.

We've moved past the inauguration of the church. Paul has written about the past, the time of his writing this letter, the present for us, the time after Paul's writing for the church, and also the future. He's going to be focusing on that which comes after the stewardship that we've been given. So we'll take a look briefly also at dwelling with Christ in eternity.

The big picture context for 1 Corinthians chapter 13, in chapter 12, Paul is telling the body, hey, you guys need to love one another, you need to come together, you need to be intimate. And just in case they missed it, he gives them chapter 13 where he articulates love. In verses 4-7, everybody knows when you fall into a romantic relationship, you've got to read 1 Corinthians 13 verses 4-7. Except for that the reality is that those verses were given for the body, for one another. It's not just a romantic sort of a passage. Those are the verses that are the context.

Leading up into 14, he continues with some of the theme of gifts that were in chapter 12, and he articulates how those should be operating in the body, and how those gifts should be viewed both for the edification of the saints and for evangelism. So when we take a look at 13, it's sandwiched between those two concepts. So before we dig into this idea of inauguration in the New Testament from Acts and then how Paul is treating that in 1 Corinthians 13, we want to take a look at the inauguration in the Old Testament.

Is there an established order that God has put in place? In the Old Testament, when God created Adam and created things, He inaugurated and started a stewardship. Now imagine, if you will, let's go back and add falsely, okay, this is not good theology, and add in an idea.

What happens if God continues to create new animals after the sixth day? That would be the expectation that these things are continuing on. It's not just an inauguration, but instead God actually uses the sixth day in creating Adam, and he starts things miraculously.

He speaks the universe into existence. And then he has Adam name all the animals. Why does he have him name all the animals? So he can show Adam that there's not a suitable partner. And then he does this really awesome miraculous thing where he makes Adam's wife Eve I had an awesome conversation this week with a co-worker telling her how awesome I thought it was that I was married to my wife. After 18 plus years, it's still really cool. But God doesn't make more wives. He doesn't make more animals. There's this inauguration. There's a start. And then what does he do with that start?

He gives Adam a stewardship. He says, you've got dominion. Take care of the garden. Of course, Adam screws that up. But let's move forward. God is tired of the screw-ups of humanity, and he sends Noah on the ark, and Noah comes off the ark. And God establishes a stewardship with Noah. Be fruitful and multiply. All these things that are supposed to go on. And Noah's descendants kind of screwed that up.

But that's okay, because we get to Moses. And God inaugurates things amazingly with Moses. We see the miraculous. He parts the sea. That's pretty cool. That's when I was a kid in Sunday school. Those were my favorite stories. It was a powerful inauguration.

But when we get to Deuteronomy, and God's making his covenant with the nation of Israel, God doesn't say, I'm going to do all sorts of miraculous things perpetually. He uses the miraculous to establish his work in Moses, and then he leaves a stewardship. So Paul is going to carry on that same idea when we get into 1 Corinthians. This is not an absurd idea in the Scriptures.

It's something that we have already seen in the Old Testament. When we get to the New Testament, where we've just gotten into one of my favorite, my dad's on the cusp, one of my favorite parts of Acts chapter 2, 42 through 47. But the thing that I want to point out is if we look at Acts chapter 2, we see this inauguration, we see that the Holy Spirit is poured out, and we see that God is establishing the church, but when we get to to chapter 10, important things take place. In chapter 10, Peter is on the roof praying and God tells him he can eat bacon.

That's always important. At least for me. God tells Peter, don't call unholy what I have called holy. And then Peter goes, and he preaches the gospel to the Gentiles. And they respond, and they start speaking in tongues. Supernatural, spiritual gifts, big things going on. And when Peter goes to explain what happened, some of the circumcised, some of the Jewish believers are all upset. You hung out with the Gentiles! Because at that point in time, a lot of the church, basically, their opinion was, a cool bunch of Jews.

But God has ordained that the church would be unification of the Jews and the Gentiles, and so Peter in Acts 11.15 says the Holy Spirit fell on them just as he did upon us at the beginning.

What was the beginning? It wasn't Genesis. The beginning was Acts chapter 2. So there's this thing that God is using. He's doing the supernatural to show, I'm behind this. And so in Acts chapter 11, everybody calmed down and quieted down because it was okay. They knew it was of God. Supernatural things. God's thumbprint, if you will, is on this. His seal is on it.

So when would the spiritual gift cease to operate on a daily basis? Paul is going to explain that to us here, and we're going to take a look at that in 1 Corinthians 13. I want to, just before we go into this, I know this is the longest introduction, but before we go into this, in 1 Corinthians 12.28, and if you have your Bibles, I encourage you to skip back a little bit and take a look at that with me.

1228 says, and God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, administration, various kinds of tongues. And so we have here this idea that apostleship is actually a special gift to the church.

It's a supernatural idea. And so I want to emphasize the fact that apostleship was a supernatural spiritual gift given to the church to inaugurate and establish the church. Now, one of the things that we went over here in the Book of Acts, my dad went over a few weeks ago, was the idea that to be an apostle you had to have seen Christ, right? And then they drew lots. My favorite gambling in the Bible, right?

And so, what we have is a unique thing. Paul saw Christ on the road to Damascus, and that was part of what made it possible for him to actually claim apostleship. Apostleship is not an ongoing thing. We don't see apostleship repeated. Can you imagine? This is how radical Paul's seeing Christ on the road would be, can you imagine the traffic on I-25 if believers started seeing Jesus on the road? There'd be accidents everywhere! But we don't have new apostles coming online all the time that are taking these things on where they're having to see Christ and he's revealing himself on the roadway, which is good even on the side streets, you know, not just I-25.

So we have this idea with the inauguration that the apostolic gifts are grouped together because apostleship and the miraculous things were there to establish the church along with the title and role of apostle. Now I want to say something important, and my dad has said this before and I've heard it before, and that is that about the miraculous today Just because we're going to talk about the miraculous spiritual gifts ceasing in a normative way in the body does not mean that we don't believe the miraculous take place today. It's important to recognize that God does the supernatural as he sustains the universe, like Colossians tells us.

But it's just not normative, despite what Benny Hinn tells you. I used to live in Texas, and there were folks there that really loved Benny Hannon. They're just always waiting for the miracle to happen. Strangely, people fall over on a stage, but I never actually saw miracles as an outcome. No confirmed medical reports.

We just want to emphasize that the miraculous can and do happen, just not through the known specific agency of the gifts to the church. to establish doctrine and expose needed truth to the church's leadership. We're not getting new words from the Lord where the elders come in and they say, hey, God gave me a new word, and we just add to the Bible. Will you please turn to 1st Bern, chapter 4.

When I was younger, it felt like when he was parenting me that He kept quoting the Bible and he never quoted himself, so that was probably good. So let's talk about love in whole and the gifts in part. So Paul writes here about the idea that love is important and love never fails. But with love in whole and gifts in part, we're not going to talk about math. So that's the good news. Some of the kids, some of the high school students were worried that we're going to get no math today.

But Paul has the ingredients for a pie, so to speak, and he's talking about those things. And even though the ingredients of a pie might be delicious in component, in part, Paul is talking about what's going to happen when it's completed, when it's put together. Paul is gluing together the doctrine of the body of Christ, which included at that time the miraculous gifts being manifested with the doctrine of the body for the whole length of the stewardship of the church. So we're part of that stewardship. We're part of that longer part. So let's dig in. Finally, after the longest introduction ever at Holly Hills, love never fails.

And when we look at this, we think, oh, man, somebody, you know, there's a story I heard that the divisions in the verses in the Bible were kind of put together by people who were riding along the road on horseback, and every time the horse took a gallop, they just put a little line number in there. And I don't know if that's true or not. I suspect that it might not be.

But this love never fails part feels like, oh, that should have been part of seven. And 8 should have been starting off with just right after Love Never Fails. But the reality is that Love Never Fails is actually an important and critical part of Paul establishing an eternal perspective on the stewardship and the involvement of the Holy Spirit in the Church. Love Never Fails.

When I think about carnal examples of love, a lot of those have to do with feelings, or a hormonal release. Oh, it's just a hormonal influx. Or maybe it's a duty or a responsibility. I work with a lot of folks from India, and their culture for marriage is just like, you have an arranged marriage, you come together, and love is a duty. and there's no sense of feeling or hormone, right?

But, in contrast to that, we have biblical love, and that's what Paul was going on in verses four through seven that we can take a look at, and we can see here that this is not just a simple earthly human thing. This is something that is defined, and it's working in God. Abiding love through the energizing of the Holy Spirit never fails. It is the gift of the Holy Spirit that is for believers every second we're on this planet. Like we said, verses four through seven are about the body. It's not the romantic love. That's agape love manifested by the Holy Spirit in the life of the body.

Love never in all of time fails. the Greek word there where it says never is a compound word that means not in all of time. Love never fails. So we get that tiny little snippet because maybe the horse took a step at the right time, right? Love never fails.

And then Paul says to us, but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away. Now, prophecy is the speaking or writing out of the truth of God by the inspiration of God. The reason we have the books of the Old Testament about what would take place, for example, when we read Isaiah chapter 53, that's one of my favorite Old Testament chapters. It describes the Messiah and who he's going to be. And if you can read that and not cry, read it again. It's a rich, rich chapter. The prophets were giving those things and they were telling forth God's truth by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

And Peter attests to that in the New Testament in 2 Peter 1.21.

So prophecy, Paul says here, prophecy or prophecies they will be done away with. Okay, so this idea of being done away with here, the Greek mood and tense for this is indicative and passive. So it's not something that we do of our own volition. The Holy Spirit is taking those things away. It's passive. And it's indicative. It's truth. It's not subjunctive. That's the other tense where it could happen.

Paul is certain it will happen. The Lord has revealed to him that it will happen. The prophet, because Paul is prophesying, is prophesying that prophecy will cease. The result of that is that the believers in Corinth could expect that those gifts would dwindle away.

Now, let's talk about tongues. Right? Tongues. That's always my favorite one because it means language, really. It's really how the Greeks would use it in part, was that it was tongues, was language. The translation of tongues comes from the King James. That's 1611. That made good sense. But today we might more modern translations say language. I've had brothers and sisters in Christ pray for me to have tongues. It didn't work. That's anecdotal. But I, try as I might, never really got the gift of tongues. I wanted it bad, but it didn't happen.

But tongues was a known language. If we look at 1 Corinthians and We looked at 28 in verse 28, but we can also look at verse 10, and he says, "...and to another the effecting of miracles, and to another prophecy, and to another the distinguishing of spirits, and to another various kinds of tongues, and to another the interpretation of tongues."

How many of you, and you can raise your hand, this is as much involvement as you need to practice that. How many of you have heard that tongues is just a prayer language? Now it's just a prayer language and you're just praying and then only God understands. Well, why would it be various kinds of tongues?

If it's just a prayer language, God's like, all right, I want you to use dialect A to answer for this prayer and dialect B for this one. No, they were known languages. That's why when we looked in Acts chapter 2, we saw the tongues of fire come down, and it is the same word, the tongues of fire come down, and people from around heard the gospel in their own language. Now, I've got some cross-references there, so if you want to take a look at tongues in the New Testament, when you look at it, it's a known language.

It's not a prayer language. And Paul tells his readers that this too is going to cease. and it's indicative and it's middle, and the idea of the middle voice is that the Holy Spirit is going to stop doing it from within you as well, and he'll bring it about himself, and the speakers will be silenced from these new languages. So after talking about languages and tongues, Paul says to them, if there is knowledge, it will be done away. And oh, excuse me, my phone is on vibrate. Hello? Yes. Okay, so I was gone. He's got a word for you. No, so the that's a gag. My phone is on vibrate, but I didn't get a phone call.

So the idea of the gift of knowledge, not only is the gift of knowledge one that I think people have maybe heard of less, but the gift of knowledge is this idea that the Holy Spirit reveals truth about people or circumstances, and the outcome of that is going to be for either conviction or edification of the saints. Now, in my tenure as a believer, One time I saw this gift used, and when I say I saw this gift used, I mean abused and not used. It was not a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. There was a preacher in Missouri, and he was supposed to be on vacation, and he was not. He surprised the guy who was his substitute, and he showed up, and he said, work the gifts of the Spirit. And he did one of the most abusive things I've ever seen in a church. And he walked up to a woman in the church and he put his hand on her forehead, which is always a good sign that the Holy Spirit's moving. And he put his hand on her forehead and he said, God wants me to tell you.

And of course, after that, you know it's going to be true. It's like anything you read on the Internet, you got to believe it. And he said, God wants me to tell you that you need to have more faith. And she burst into tears and was, I know, I know, I know, I'm so sorry. And that was really terrible. One of the most abusive things I've ever seen. God wants me to tell you that you need to have more faith. In front of the whole congregation, just mortifying this gal. And it doesn't mean anything. It wasn't knowledge.

There's whole sections of stage performance that are dedicated to this sort of thing. It's called mentalism, and there's techniques that you can use when people go to see somebody who's going to read their horoscope or read the crystal ball. All of those things use the same mentalism techniques, and they're open-ended statements that you can believe and answer for yourself in your own special way. This, however, what Paul is talking about is not mentalism. It's the Holy Spirit giving specific understanding about circumstances in people's lives in a way that it is only knowledge God could have that he gives to edify the saints and bring them together.

But Paul says this, too, will cease. This, too, is going to stop. I'm hoping my phone doesn't ring again. I'm just kidding. So after this idea of knowledge ceasing, Paul continues on here and he says, for we know... Oh, wait, I should cover this next slide.

Many of the people I've talked to today who say that they are operating with the miraculous spiritual gifts have done so by redefining what they are. I've had people say, I am a prophet. And I ask them, will you please tell me what you mean by that? Because if that's the case, I got to see it. This is going to be cool. And they redefine it by saying, I'm going to a prophet is one who tells forth the word of God. And so they read the scripture out loud, and they're being a prophet. which I'm going to tell you is not how that was defined in the Old or New Testament. Don't buy it. Okay, when it comes to tongues, that's redefined as prayer language, right? This is a prayer language. Don't buy it. It's not a prayer language.

There were known languages that needed to be used to present the gospel, and there were some who'd be able to interpret because it's possible that you'd have someone come in your midst who didn't speak your language. Let's come up with a modern example, because I speak English, and my Spanish is really sketchy. I can ask to go to the bathroom, and past that, I'm in trouble. If someone were to come in here, and they only spoke Spanish, and I began to present the gospel to them in Spanish, I couldn't tell you what I was saying in Spanish. But let's, just for example, let's just say that someone had the gift of interpreting the tongues, they would be able to tell me in English what I'd said in Spanish. I suspect some of you already speak Spanish. We wouldn't even need an interpreter.

It wouldn't be a spiritual gift of interpretation. So tongues is not a prayer language. And word of knowledge is not mentalism. So don't let these things be redefined. People will do that sometimes in conversation. And the consequence of that is basically not good theology. I will refrain from saying it's heresy, but let's be honest, it's not good theology.

So, then Paul tells us about in part and the whole, when the perfect comes, when the complete comes. And again, I said no math, so don't anybody get worried about that. This is the part-time work of the Spirit, right? It's the part. So he says that we know in part and we prophesy in part. When they are knowing in part, what do they have? How many letters do they have from Paul? Maybe they might have a couple. Maybe they've got James. Maybe.

But the whole of the New Testament has not been written, and all of what has been revealed to the Apostles has not been written down and copied around, and they don't have the full canon of the Scripture. And I think it's worth noting that the idea that the Holy Spirit is revealing Scripture over time, there's a theological term for that, it's called progressive revelation. The idea that God reveals truth over time. And so it's okay that they know in part. because they're actually actively part of the church as the New Testament is being written. But I want to point out something, that the Holy Spirit is moving in the lives of the believers, and he's moving in the lives of the apostles, and they're writing the New Testament. If God is writing the New Testament, he's doing it for a purpose that is different than the purpose of the law. as has been emphasized here many, many times, if you're in the law, there are restrictions.

There's technological restrictions. My parents used to live in an apartment complex where on the Sabbath, the elevator would just stop at every floor, which was really confusing for the kids because at every floor was at random. There was one of them where it was random. Yeah, it was every floor. My kids hated that because actually that was the fastest elevator I've ever been in. It was just so fast except for when it stopped on every floor. It wasn't very fast.

But the idea there is that the law is rigid, but the Spirit is dynamic. So what the New Testament carries with it, when God is writing the New Testament, there is this idea of flexibility or a dynamic nature of abiding in the Holy Spirit that is different. And so the doctrine that's coming as this revelation, this progressive revelation is taking place, is going to restrict legalism. It's going to do away with legalism, and it's going to rely on us having a moment-by-moment relationship with the Holy Spirit.

So then Paul says, when the perfect comes, alright? And this right here, he says, but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away. And there have been many arguments about what the perfect is. One of the most common arguments from people who disagree with the idea of spiritual gifts going away is that the perfect is the coming of Christ.

And I'm going to tell you right now that there are some really compelling arguments against that. The first of which is, if you would join me in turning back to 1 Corinthians 4, I'm sorry, chapter 4, verse 5. And Paul's going to do something really awesome here, and if you follow this with me, it's going to be mind-blowing. 1 Corinthians 4, 5.

He says, therefore do not go on passing judgment before the time but wait until the Lord comes who will both bring to light the things hidden in the darkness and disclose the motives of men's heart and then each man's praise will come to him from God.

Did you catch that? What did Paul do? He said actually when the Lord comes. He didn't say when the perfect comes. He said, when the Lord comes, he's got this. He knows how to write the Greek sentence structure that says when the Lord comes, but he didn't do it here in first Corinthians 13. He also, because he's kind of a wild and crazy guy, did the same thing in chapter 11, verse 26. So Paul knows in this book how to say when the Lord comes, but that's not what he's saying here. He says when the perfect comes. And the Greek word there could also be translated the mature or the complete.

But the idea of it is that the scriptures are completed, and the revelation is completed, and so there is a time when those spiritual gifts that are miraculous are not needed to inaugurate or establish the Church. So I'd argue, I think reasonably well, that the perfect is not the coming of the Lord. We can talk about that more But I'm pretty well convinced that Paul knew how to say when Jesus comes versus when the perfect comes. So I think the perfect probably does not reflect Christ based on Paul's use of the Greek grammar elsewhere.

I have to also cover the fact that he says, the partial will be done away with. What did he say the partial were? The partial were the miraculous gifts that he was talking about. So when the complete comes, when the thing is the completion of the canon, the idea that the doctrine that God wanted to reveal to the New Testament Church is completed, then the partial will be done away with. And just in case that's not a compelling enough argument that it's not Jesus coming, Paul gives us several other illustrations that are compelling and also don't allow for that to be the interpretation. So he talks about maturing in the mirror. So Paul says, When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child, and when I became a man, I did away with childish things.

There are several words for child in the Greek. One is technon, and that means child by descent. This is my descendant. But Paul doesn't use that word here. The word he used here actually has with it the idea of being an infant or a toddler or a young child.

I happen to remember when I was a lot younger trying to reason through getting out of trouble. My mom's smiling because she's wondering which story I'm going to tell. But the idea of being a child and having this immaturity in thinking... I remember I had done something and it was an accident. And I had told my mom it was an accident and I didn't get in trouble. And that was phenomenal. That was like a get-out-of-jail-for-free card on Monopoly. It was the best thing ever. And then I remember I did something else. Well, not just one thing.

Many things, stupidly. And my go-to answer for a long time was it was an accident. Because my reasoning, my reasoning as a child was pretty terrible. Even into my teens I was dumb with that garbage. I won't tell more stories because we could be here for a really long time. The dumb things that Randy did when he was younger. It's not a really good Bible lesson. It's just that's what the flesh does. But just an observation.

Physiologically, the human brain is actually developing until 23 or somewhere in your mid-20s. So your ability to reason and your ability to think and understand things is actually progressing all the way up into young adulthood. The government says you're an adult at 18, but physiologically it could be a couple of years later, right? But Paul says, I used to think those ways, I used to reason those ways, and I used to do that, but instead what happened? We had maturity. And maturity comes and we have, for the church, this idea that the doctrine is clear.

We still have some rough things. I'm sure if you think about it, you can think of some other places in the scripture where there's some interesting bits. I still don't feel really super awesome about baptism of the dead, for example, right? That's a weird one still. I mean, we can sort of explain it, but it's weird.

But there's a lot of clear doctrines about salvation. Go ahead. Think about how certain your salvation is. That's a clear doctrine, and we have great confidence of those things. But all of that is coming to this reasoning, and Paul is a very logical reasoner.

When I was first learning how to program, I thought it'd be brilliant if I could take the book of Romans and turn it into software code. And I tried, and it was a bad idea. But I learned how to reason through that. I reasoned that I shouldn't. But the idea is that we're able to think God's thoughts after him with the result of our minds being renewed, like Romans 12.2 speaks of.

And we look at Romans 12, 8, where we're being matured. And as believers, all of these things come as a result of the New Testament doctrine being taught. And next week, my dad's going to talk about Acts 2, 42. And I'm excited about that. One of the things that Paul says is that they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching. And we can do that, too. We can do that when we look at the New Testament. We have the apostles' teaching. If that's not enough, he then says that they were seeing in a mirror dimly. In verse 12, from now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.

So, I think it was last year or the year before, the Museum of Nature and Science actually had an exhibit that was traveling around and it was from artifacts from Pompeii, where of course the volcano went off and they found people covered in ash and they were frozen in place and it was really cool and creepy all at the same time. But what's interesting there is they had some examples of the ancient mirrors. and they were pretty well polished. They were actually encased with gases so that they could stop the oxidization, which of course make metal really get hard to see through, and even a freshly polished covered in gas so that it stays inert and doesn't oxidize. The mirrors were pretty fuzzy.

Now, the less hair I have, the easier it is for me to comb it with a foggy mirror. But if you've ever looked in a foggy mirror to try to do hair or makeup, you probably understand the idea of seeing in the mirror dimly or poorly. And the idea there is that when there's immaturity, it's foggy. It's a fuzzy image.

But when there's maturity, it's as though you were seeing face to face. And that works out really well. the face-to-face thing versus the foggy. I think if Paul were to write this today, he'd say, when you're on FaceTime and you're getting serious lag, and it's all jittery and all the video is buffering and streaming, versus when you're face-to-face. Some of you don't know what I just said, and I apologize for that. But in technological terms, that's a modern idea there. But the idea of face-to-face is this contrast.

But just in case the first two illustrations aren't good enough, he's going to give us a third one, the idea of knowing and being known. He says, Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I also have been fully known. When we think about being fully known by God, Is that something that we think about in God's finite capabilities of knowing us? Or is it something we think about in God's infinite capabilities of knowing us? He can fully know us. I'm still learning about my wife. We've been married for 18 years. We've been dating as of February 16th, 22 years. That's a long time. I'm still learning about her. It's pretty awesome. I like it. But God knows me fully. even the gnarly parts. So Paul says, hey, this is not just a little bit of knowledge, it's an overarching epigonosco knowledge, and even beyond that, when this time comes, it's going to be like God's perfectly knowing us.

But to cap all that off, beyond having been fully known, in verse 13 he says, but now faith, hope, love, and that ties back into verse 8, abide, these three. But the greatest of these is love. Now, that word abide is there. The partial is going to be done away with. The abiding principle is that these are not going to be done away with in the lifetime of the church. But the greatest of these is love.

Now I want to emphasize something. When Christ returns, if we're going to again argue against the idea that the complete or perfect means that Christ is returning, how much of our faith will we be walking in after he returns? We'll be present with him. We won't be walking in faith. We'll be walking with him.

And how about hope? I've got a lot of cross-references for hope there because it's one of my favorite New Testament doctrines. But with hope, we don't have to hope anymore, because we'll be with Christ. But Paul says our hope is in Christ, and we're looking forward. Our faith applied forward, if we want to define hope that way, will be fulfilled, and we know that's going to take place.

If you've got your Bibles with me, please turn to Ephesians chapter 1, and let's read verses 9 through 12. And we're almost done. I know some of you are probably thinking, I wish it was potluck Sunday, because I'm hungry. Ephesians 1 verses 9 through 12.

He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him, with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth, In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose, who works all things after the counsel of His will, to the end that we who are the first to hope in Christ would be the praise to His glory." Our hope is in Christ, and all of those things are wrapped up in hoping in Christ. But the greatest of these things, by comparison, is love. God is love. Love is eternally manifested. Love gets its definition in God.

When we go to be in the heavenlies, Christ will be our groom. We'll be with him. I've never been a bride before, but I can't wait. We're going to be with Christ, and we're not going to have faith that is separated from the personhood of Christ. It's going to be a belief in the one with whom we're betrothed. And we're not going to have future hope anymore because we're going to be walking with the one our hope was in here today in our condition. But love will remain.

I'm going to skip back one more slide. There we go. Alright, so in conclusion, as a body we should be focusing on our Lord. That was true of the Corinthians. It's true of us today. We should be focusing on the Lord. We should be abiding and beholding Him as we're conformed into His image. The Holy Spirit is still going to use us. He's still going to work through us.

If you're not sure about that, I encourage you to read Ephesians 2.10, where it says the works He has prepared before us are there for us to walk in. All we have to do is abide, and we'll do those works.

And then, just because God has a great sense of humor, 1 Corinthians 3.14 tells us that God is going to reward us for those works.

So, does the miraculous still happen? Yes. Is it through spiritual giftedness? No. But the Spirit still works through us. He still uses us. We still have a moment-by-moment relationship with Him. That doctrine was never taught to me when I was in elementary school. That the Holy Spirit was moving in us.

So in junior high and high school, I got really wrapped around the axle in a charismatic church. And I didn't know who the Holy Spirit was and what he's doing, and I really wanted all these spiritual gift things to happen. I wanted the tongues, I wanted the healing. Kind of wanted the knowledge, as long as nobody had knowledge about me, because I had my hidden sins. But I didn't understand about abiding.

That came when I was 19. My dad took me through some discipleship material and taught me about abiding. And I was like, this is so much better. So even if the miraculous spiritual gifts cease to operate, the body is still tightly knit like chapter 12 said. And that love from verses 4 through 7, we get to do that today together. Sound okay to everybody? You alright with that? Alright. Well, let's close in prayer, and then we'll sing the last song.

Heavenly Father, we come before you, and we're so grateful for the truth of your word. We're thankful that your Holy Spirit moves in us powerfully, that we can do good works that you've prepared beforehand. We thank you that we can love one another by abiding in you. And we thank you so much that we have this stewardship as a body for one another and for your truth. We thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.