Psalm 139:14 “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”
In a previous post I wrote about the need to use the gifts God has given us and given to the church – that we need to awaken the sleeping giant that is the church by valueing all people the way God made them, by understanding that God has given each Christian gifts for ministry – not just skills but gifts that are for the benefit of the church, for building the kingdom and proclaiming the gospel. Just as the human body is made up of many parts that do different jobs but are equally necessary and valuable so too the church is made up of many parts and we each have a ministry that we have been prepared by God to exercise – and God has prepared a place in church for us that we might exercise those gifts for the benefit of the church.
So… keeping on that same track…
What’s love got to do with it?!?!? Well… I’m going to say that love has everything to do with it!
What is Love?
One of the fun parts of wedding interviews is asking the prospective couple to explain why they want to get married… without using the word “love”.
You should try it… explain your love for someone without using the word.
I love you!
Think about it! What do we mean? What does every wedding couple say? We know what we mean but we don’t know how to say it? Which is strange because everyone wants it, pretty much no one can live without it – but we can’t explain it. Love is… all around us… hard to find, easy to loose – you can’t buy love… tell that to jewellers before Valentine’s Day.
The Bible tells us God defines love – God is love.
Do we know what love isn’t?
- Love is not killing your kids when they’ve done the same stupid thing for the 50th time.
- Love is not killing your parents when they’ve treated you unfairly yet again.
- Love is not getting revenge.
- Love is not lust.
- Love is not envious, proud or dangerous.
Remember the song in the 70’s – “love hurts”? Frankly, that’s rubbish. When you can’t have your own way and you feel love for someone who doesn’t return your feelings then yes that hurts you personally. But real love gives strength and courage, not damage. Real love defends, protects, cares and heals. Love provides, serves, guards, is selfless. Real love provides a foundation to build on – and love is the foundation of spiritual gifts.
It’s all about…
1 Corinthians 12-14 is often held up as THE most significant passages in the Bible about Spiritual gifts. All the gifts courses include this list of gifts, and you spend your time reading these passages and trying to work out what your specific gifts may be. The problem is – 1 Corinthians 12-14 is not about spiritual gifts. Listen!
1 Corinthians 12:4-7 “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.”
1 Corinthians 12:31 – 13:3 “And I will show you a still more excellent way. If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
1 Corinthians 14:1 “Pursue love, and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts…”
1 Corinthians 14:12 “…since you are eager for manifestations of the Spirit, strive to excel in building up the church.”
The emphasis is not spiritual gifts. If we use our grammar skills – the subject of these verses is not ‘spiritual gifts’ but rather… love. The unity that comes from being loved by one God, love that should be the daily expression of God’s people, building up each other because of God’s love – if you’re going to excel in anything make sure it’s in gifts that build others up. That is the focus – not the gifts but the building each other up in love. This is vital in our understanding of spiritual gifts.
Imagine a child – beautiful, cute strong – infectious smile. Our aim for a child – is growth, is maturity. We want them to develop into a young person with skills, gifts, education, experiences and particularly faith in Jesus. But if they never know love, they can be the most gifted and educated person on the planet and they’ll be twisted and deformed.
Is it important to discover their gifts, teach them to speak in tongues or even preach the gospel – or is it important to give them love, to express God’s love to them, to teach by example what it means to love one another? Without discounting gifts for even a moment – I want the first to be true first…!
Without Love…?
1 Corinthians 13:1-3 “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.”
As much as spiritual gifts are important, to focus on them is to miss the point. That may well be the situation Paul was writing to – the Corinthian Christians were people who’d come out of a spiritualist, pagan background, who were used to apparent spiritual activity in their pagan worship practices – and now seeing the Holy Spirit as a source of spiritual power and going ballistic in their efforts to gain spiritual powers, to be seen as “spiritual beings”.
We can be the most righteous, most selfless, poorest martyr able to explain the words of God with clarity and knowledge, able to speak in wild tongues – but without love it’s empty and meaningless. Same with preaching! I reckon one of the questions many preachers need to answer is not whether they can preach, or whether they know the scriptures. I don’t want to downplay those – they are vital – but maybe even more important is… “do they love their congregation(s)?” Because without love their preaching is meaningless.
Let’s see how it works in Jesus life. Jesus came to this earth because of love.
John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
Jesus was uniquely qualified and gifted. He alone could defeat sin. He alone could defeat death. He alone could pay for the sins of the whole human race and come out the other end unscathed. If anyone is powerful it’s Jesus. But Jesus didn’t first set out to discover his gifts and then seek out those he could use his gift with. He didn’t do a gift inventory or a training program – seven steps to becoming the saviour of the universe.
He came to the world God loves, to express God’s love – to be God’s love to us.
We can’t begin to imagine what it would be like if God did not love his world – certainly he wouldn’t have sent Jesus just because he could fix the problems. Imagine if John 3:16 said “For Jesus God’s Son was so gifted that God decided to sacrifice him for the planet he despised…” There is no way God would have sent Jesus – except that he loves us.
If I make spiritual gifts the central issue then I become the focus. It comes down to my gifts, how God has made me, what ministry is there for me to do, what place do I have?
When love for God and for others is the issue then we start to reflect God’s priorities instead. What can I do to serve you? What can I do to serve God? How can I be God’s love towards others? How can I express Christ’s love to my brothers and sisters? Who is the focus – if love is the issue then loving God and loving my neighbour is the focus – obedient service. If the gift is the issue then the danger I am in is that I become the focus.
The Thing About Love?
Love is an incredible thing – if you know that someone loves you… you become one of the most powerful people on the planet. Love empowers and strengthens. Think about weddings – what passage do people want read at weddings? So often it’s this!
1 Corinthians 12:4-8a “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”
Is it true? Look at the marriages where that was the passage used at the wedding – is it true of that marriage? What about 5 or 10 or 20 years down the track? How many divorces happened in marriages where this passage was held up as the standard that the marriage was going to attain to?
The reason love is so hard to describe is that its complex – but it’s also simple. Love is about others! Not self-seeking but looking for the good of others. It’s hard for me to get really angry at my wife – not because I’m good at keeping my cool but because we love each other and we know that getting angry will just make it harder – which is not to say we don’t get angry at each other. If you love someone then you will choose to go slowly on the road to anger – there are so many other ways to help the person you love. Real love forgets the wrongs of the past – because otherwise it will fail spectacularly.
Real love protects, trusts, hopes, perseveres – actually real love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres – if you love your husband or wife then you will do anything it takes to protect them, to help them trust you, to give them real hope, and strength and courage – and the same for your kids, and your friends, and your brothers and sisters.
The Corinthians had found that Spiritual Gifts could be a battlefield where the strong walked all over the weak. It was a competition; who had the most gifts, the higher gifts, who looked “spiritual”. There was no place for love – no place for others and their needs. And they were honouring certain gifts very highly and not others – giving importance to things that were spectacular for their own sake rather than to things that proclaimed Jesus’ name and God’s love. If you didn’t have certain gifts – the spectacular gifts of tongues and healing – then you weren’t much chop as a Christian – bit second rate. As soon as I say it that way we can see just how foolish and wrong it was and how right Paul is to call them back to what matters.
The Day is Approaching
What matters is what lasts. Jesus himself tells us to invest our time and energy, who we are as people into the things that will last – into eternal things rather than the things of this planet.
Matthew 6:20 “…store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.”
Paul is saying the same thing – not to invest in gifts but in what lasts.
1 Corinthians 12:8-12 “But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.”
We live in an imperfect world – hard to believe I know. And God has given us a taste of life in the kingdom, life at peace with God. We have the word of God spoken and written – the prophecies, we have knowledge of God – imperfect and faint but real – we know in part, we can tell others in part, we can share with each other the glimpses we have from God. But the day is approaching when all the imperfect things will pass away. At the moment we are children…
1 Corinthians 13:11-12 “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”
The day is coming when our childhood will be over – the old world will pass in favour of God’s kingdom – and many things that we value highly now will go too. What we see poorly now – the face of God, what we hear poorly now – the voice of God – what we know now in a limited way – the person and character of God – we will see and hear and understand perfectly in heaven. We won’t need prophecies, or preaching, or healing or miracles, we won’t need tongues or gifts of knowledge – we will be perfect in a perfect place. But three things will remain in heaven.
1 Corinthians 13:13 “…faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
What should we spend our energies on – that which will last! As we seek to be God’s people and to be obedient, and as we seek to build his kingdom and our church let’s make sure that we focus on that which matters. If you don’t know what your gifts are that’s ok – in the end what matters is that we love and serve others based on that love. Whatever your gift or gifts we must focus on sharing God’s love and serving others – the foundation of the gifts of God’s Spirit is love.
1 Peter 1:22-25 “Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God; for “All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever. And this word is the good news that was preached to you.”
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