Dennis Tuuri

Well, we didn’t finish the psalm. We sang the verses about the suffering of our savior, but didn’t get to the verses about his glorious resurrection. One reason for that is we’re in the season of Lent. And Lent is a contemplation of the suffering of Christ. And that is the basis—his suffering and then his resurrection—for the tremendous grace that we all meditated upon as we saw the baptism of Vern this morning and that we all have come to be moved so deeply by and respond to God about. And really, when we talk about spiritual gifts—probably a misnomer—but about the gifts that God gives to his body, we’re turning today to Romans 12 and we see once more that one of the big emphases in this text and in all these texts is the grace of God.

So today’s sermon text will be from Romans 12. We’ll be reading, we’ll be focusing on verses 6 to 8, but I’ll be reading verses 1 to 13. This is where we started our first of what is now five messages on spiritual gifts. And we return now to Romans. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Romans 12, we’ll be reading verses 1 to 13.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me, I say to everyone among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another, having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us.

Let us use them. If prophecy, in proportion to faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness. Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil. Hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor.

Do not be slothful in zeal, but fervent in spirit. Serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope. Be patient in tribulation. Be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints. And seek to show hospitality. Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for your great grace and mercy to us. We thank you for a meditation each time of year of the springtime—the sufferings and the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ who died on the cross that we might live. We thank you, Father, for the grace. He didn’t die because we are lovely. He died to make us lovely. And we thank you for the depths of that grace that we shall never plumb. And yet we give you thanks for it. Bless us now, Lord God, with the understanding of this text, that the grace you have given and showered upon us with such liberality, we may indeed make manifest in our service to the body of Jesus. In his name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

So great grace. Grace is the key note of any discussion of spiritual gifts. We’ve gone through the four chapters in the New Testament as an overview of each of those chapters: Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, Ephesians 4, and 1 Peter 4. I would encourage you to memorize those addresses in the scriptures. What we see here in Romans is, and we’ve talked about this before, that as soon as Paul gets done expositing the grace of God through Christ—the doctrinal portion of the book—he moves to this application section in 12, essential to your identity, who you are and what you’re here to do.

Essential to your mission that God now has put you on for the Lord Jesus Christ in this world is this chapter and the truths contained in it. We then looked at 1 Corinthians 12, and 1 Corinthians 12 is a corrective, right? They were all focusing on the spirit, the spirit, the spirit. And he said, “Well, now wait a minute. It’s a trinitarian thing.” And what you call spiritual gifts, I’m going to refer to as the same term that’s used in Romans, charismata.

You know, the basis for the charismatic movement was a renewed emphasis on the charisma and the charis, which is the root of that. Charis means grace. And this charisma is the incarnation—we could say it is the putting into practice and effect this grace that God has showered upon us. And so spiritual gifts, really, to even use that term is to accept the Corinthians’ term which Paul is seeking to correct in 1 Corinthians 12.

But it’s okay. It’s what everybody knows and we can use the term. It’s not horrible. But remember, and you can remember if you go back to Romans 12 on a regular basis: What is my sanctification about? How do I become individuated as a person? Not conformed like a cookie cutter image to this world, but transformed and fully individual with all the giftings that God has given to me. And a big part of that answer is the charismata sense in which every one of us in the body of Christ are charismatics.

We all—the text has just told us—have been given grace and that grace finds its express expression in some practical ministry we do in the body of Christ specifically. So that’s what spiritual gifts are. They’re the outworking of the grace that God has shed on us so richly, and it’s giving that grace. It’s acting in gracious ways toward one another. And it is also by way of implication receiving those gifts as well.

And you know, for a lot of us, receiving stuff’s a lot harder than the giving stuff, isn’t it? You know why that is? Because giving—well, I’m, you know, I’ve got something. I can give you something. It’s sort of self-aggrandizing, or it can be. But receiving a gift from someone else, you know, no matter if it’s a material gift or encouragement or a teaching, whatever it is, receiving a gift, that means I have a need.

Calvin, in his explanation of these texts, keeps hammering this home. By the way. And he focuses on the thing that grace is the core of this. And in addition to that, we have needs. We need what the rest of the body will gift us with in terms of those graces. And Calvin just hammers this over and over again: God is knocking down our pride. And that knocking down of our pride, it really takes its expression more in receiving than it does in giving.

Right? I think most of us are like that. It’s harder to receive a gift graciously than it is to give a gift. But okay, so what we want to do now for the next couple of weeks—today and next Sunday—is to look at some of the specific manifestations of grace that Paul articulates in first Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12. I watched a video. There’s a new service we’ll be sending out an email to RCC this week. It’s really an exciting thing I think that we’re about ready to do. We’re going to use something called Right Now Media, and you’ll be able to use streaming videos with lesson plans, etc. for personal Bible study, for group studies, neighborhood studies, whatever it is. There’s some stuff on there for kids, and there’s also some training sections on there—two training sections, one kind of shorter lessons, one longer—that we’re going to use as part of our leadership training over the next year in various areas of the church.

It’s a great resource, but I was kind of, you know, tooling around the site this week and I saw Right Now actually puts on conferences once a year. And so I watched a Francis Chan video from the conference, and he said, you know, we Christians, we can be kind of funny about the Bible. And you know, if you know Chan at all, his whole deal is, man, a lot of times we’re just not living what the Bible says we should be doing. We’re just not really, you know, doing what God says we should do. And he said, what we tend to do is: You know, as committed Christians, you know, what we tend to do is we take something and we study it or we memorize it, that part of scripture, or we try to understand the Greek behind it and we get together and talk about it. But what Chan says we’re supposed to do is we’re supposed to do it. Do it.

And the illustration he uses is great because he’s got a daughter. He says if he tells his daughter to go off and clean her bedroom and he comes back an hour later and she comes out and says, “Dad, you know, I’ve meditated on what you said about cleaning my room, and in fact, I’ve memorized your command to me.” I mean, her room hasn’t been cleaned, but she’s memorized the command. Or she’ll say, “Well, I even did some study, and I found out what it is in the Greek, the command you gave me, right? But the room’s not clean.” Or she’ll say, “Yeah, I’m going to have some friends over this afternoon to study what it would look like to clean a room.”

That’d be great. You know, and so what does the text say here? It says we’ve received these gifts and the basic command of the text is do them, use them, do something about it. This is not intellectual curiosity that he’s putting in front of us. This is life in the body of Christ. This is about how to be a legitimate true charismatic demonstrating the grace of God in your life. This comes with the territory. There are no Christians—it’s part of the body of Christ—that haven’t been extended grace and who haven’t been given some form of ability to minister that grace in the body of Christ. Everybody, it’s in every believer. Ministry that’s being described in these texts.

So what we want to do in these last couple of sermons on spiritual gifts, I want to exhort you: Where are you serving? And more specifically, who are you serving? And I don’t just want to, you know, put that out there and make you feel guilty. In fact, I don’t want to do that at all. I want to equip you. And I think one way we can equip each other for this is to think a little bit about how this looked at the number of churches that were addressed as one church in Rome. How did it look there? And then we’ll look at Corinthians and how did it look there? What things were going on?

So to help you, this isn’t just like, “Isn’t this interesting? These are the gifts they did.” No, this is like: these are some areas of the gifts that you can look at and think about. And they’re not necessarily what you know—it’s not a comprehensive list of things going on. It just shows a spirit-filled church doing certain things. But those things, if we understand them, will help us. I think, the goal at least is they’ll help us to think about what we can do, what I can do, to serve other people. Or maybe what I shouldn’t be doing.

I was at a community group this last week and this month’s community groups we were trying to ask all our RCC, “What’s your ministry? What are you doing here at the church at Loving RCC, whatever it is?” And it was really interesting to hear all the stuff that’s going on through this congregation. But in that discussion, one of the individuals said they were doing X. And then later in the discussion, they said, “I just hate doing that thing, man. I just hate doing it.” Well, I probably shouldn’t be doing it, you know.

So our goal is not to guilt you into doing something that you don’t have affinity with and abilities for. A lot of times you’re not going to know if you got affinity and abilities till you try it out. But if you try it out and you’ve given it the good old college try for six months and you hate it, we probably don’t want you doing that. And it was funny because this particular ministry is a very public one, so it would have a big effect. Anyway, so that’s what we want to do. We just want to look at these specific seven items here and as a way to stimulate you to think about what your ministry is.

How can you be a steward of it? Using it and improving it? Or maybe other things you might think you might be called to do in other directions. And as I said, at the beginning of this, is grace. R.J. Rushdoony, in his article called “The Community of the King,” in his commentary on Romans and Galatians, he says this: because Paul’s emphasis is on predestination, on God’s sovereign and electing grace, he speaks not of our abilities but our gifts. You see, he calls them gifts here. It isn’t a focus on our abilities but gifts. We have, he says in verse six, gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us.

Paul, said Calvin—and here’s more of this Calvin stuff—intended to beat down the pride which he knew to be innate in man. Moreover, these society of the godly cannot exist except when each one is content with his own measure and imparts to others the gifts which he first received and allows himself by exercise of his will to be assisted by the gifts of others.

And then Rushdoony, he goes on to say: the word gifts is charismata. The word grace is charis. And this meaning is basic to the idea of gifts, or we would say, to spiritual gifts. Our usual approach to the meaning of spiritual gifts emphasizes what is received. Paul’s emphasis first and foremost is on the giver. It is first and foremost a free gift by God to us to minister in the body. And so the emphasis isn’t really, you know, humanistic. It’s on the grace of God giving us these things.

Now it works itself out in what we do. But it’s so important before we get into the list to recognize that this is a statement of how the grace of God works in our lives and specifically the way he knits us together as a community through his grace, his unmerited favor, given to us in what we meditate on this time of year through the death and then resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So a church is a charismatic community in its truest sense of the term. It has charismata going on that are result of the charis, the grace that God ministers to us through the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. A couple of comments by another commentator on this relationship between charis and charismata:

Particularly evident here is the character of charisma as the embodiment, the concrete manifestation, in word or action, of charis. So it actualizes it—we could say, well, not actualizes because it’s actual as we receive it—but it puts it in visible demonstration. The essential balance between the two words is maintained if we see charis (grace) as the resource which comes to particular expression in charisma. Charis is the fountain head from which the particular draft or more regular stream is drawn.

So the fountain head of spiritual gifts, of gifts to one another and the ministries we’ll look at here in a minute, the fountain head is the grace of God through the gospel of Jesus. And then the way it flows out into these individual streams or flows, that is the charisma, the demonstration and putting into practice of that grace. The concreteness of charisma in relation to charis is lost when charisma is defined as the potential or ability to serve. And you know, this is a big discussion: what exactly does it mean? Is it some ability we have which we can turn on or off? Is it a ministry we have? Or in some cases people think it’s an office in the church? And I would say that’s not true in the text today. But those are some things that people meditate about.

And what he’s saying here is: well, it’s not a potential because the whole point of it, if we understand the connection of the words, is that it puts into practice toward other people the grace that we’ve received from God. So freely we’ve received. Freely we then minister in very specific ways and individual ways to the body of Christ and to the world beyond because evangelism is on that list as an example.

So I think it’s very important as we talk about the specifics that these specifics are manifestations of the gospel of Jesus, the grace of God, God toward us in Jesus dying for our sins. Okay, let’s see. So let’s go through these seven.

And first of all, the list itself is interesting. If you just have your scriptures open right to Romans 12, verse 6. And it’s interesting the way this is laid out. So if you read it: “If prophecy, in proportion to faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.”

So you’ve got seven items here, but they’re differentiated, right? The first two are set apart. They’re nouns, right? And they don’t say “the one who does this.” They actually address it. “Here’s prophecy, right? Here’s service as an entity of itself, so to speak.” So those two are set apart. There’s other linguistic ways, by the way, they’re set apart—which I won’t get into—but the point is they’re headers.

Now, do you remember what we saw in 1 Peter 4? What were the two headers? Well, it was word and deed, right? It was gifts of speaking and gifts of, you know, using your hands or money or whatever it is, resources for other people. And what we posited last week from 1 Peter 4 is those are general headers for all gifts. So now we’re not saying we got a list of all the gifts that are available, but I do think based on 1 Peter 4 and repeated in Romans 12, we absolutely have some headers by which we can think about how we’re to serve other people.

Are you better at serving people with your tongue, with your words? Or are you better at serving them with your hands, with your resources? And you know, you gotta know what is God, and what you’re trying to discern is how God—what grace has God given you to minister to other people. Is it a speaking thing or is it a serving thing? So these two are headers and then what follows is a couple of speaking gifts to the church and then three service gifts.

So the first two are the headers and the last five fall under those headers. And the way it’s written is beautiful. There’s a lots of linguistic stuff and literary structure we could get into, but believe me, it’s beautiful. You know, when God writes, he writes great. And he writes in a way that increases our comprehension of what he’s communicating. And so it’s important that you see at least that part of this, the header and then the articulation of the points.

By the way, if you think of those headers from 1 Peter 4 and from Romans 12, and we’re talking about the church, you get that modeled all the time, don’t you? Here in a few minutes we’re going to take communion and you’re going to have elders up here and you’re going to have deacons up here and that’s what they are. The elders are primarily ministers of words who use their words, and the deacons are primarily ministers of service.

In fact, this very word here for service, the second gift here, is the root that becomes deacon. It’s diakonos. It’s servant. And so you see that modeled. And so if you wanted to, for a while here, every time you come to the table, you know, you see guys with speaking gifts and guys with service gifts, and you can ask yourself, I wonder what I am. Maybe you’re doing teaching already in some way. Maybe you’re doing serving, but maybe you’re misplaced. Or maybe you would be even better at a different kind of thing, and you know it.

And that’s important for discerning. Remember, you know, Jesus says, “Don’t be the foolish man. He hears the word, he turns away and doesn’t do it.” And destruction comes upon him. The wise man builds his life on the rock that is Jesus and obedience to his word. So if you’re seeking to understand your spiritual gift, your manifestation of grace for the service of others, those two headers are quite useful. Quite useful.

And remember too that Romans is the normative text of all the ones we’re looking at. Romans is about—this is what happens. This is how you live out your Christian life. Corinthians is corrective of some abuses. Ephesians is a list of men that essentially establish the church, and they’re you know, those have continuing relevance to the church, but it’s kind of like the establishment of churches. And then 1 Peter just gives us those two headings.

So this Roman list, I think, is significant and is somewhat normative for the kind of things that go on in the church and that’s interesting to think about. So in order to have a church you need people gifted at speaking and you need people gifted at serving. Okay.

So now let’s go through one other comment before we get to the specific gifts, and that is I read through verse 13 because what happens is he does these seven charismata, then he talks about love and then he lists, and again, love is a header. It’s set apart the same way that teaching and serving is, or prophesying and serving is. And then after love, there’s a list of 12 specific commands. And so you’ve got this wonderful seven and 12 thing going on. And so we’ve got these seven charismata and then you have basically a list of character that’s supposed to inform every use of every one of those.

And that’s why I say Romans 12, you know, remember that address because that’s one you should return to regularly in your Christian walk to think about gifts and to think about how they’re to be applied and what is that header love? What does that look like practically? And there’s 12 specific statements ending up in the end of verse 13. Okay.

So let’s talk now about the specific items themselves. And so the first one is prophecy. “If prophecy in proportion to our faith.” Now, couple of things here, you know. So what’s a prophet? Well, I think that you know, people think that a prophet was an Old Testament deal and he was a predictor of the future. That’s not really what the essence of prophesying was about. I mean, it did happen. But if you look at, for instance, the canonical prophets, they are announcing the future that they discerned and were given direct revelation to understand of what was happening in their culture and society.

They were saying the northern kingdom will be destroyed and then they were saying the southern kingdom will be destroyed. But you know, God is going to bring us back to this land in a resurrection, and all of this they said points to Jesus who’s going to die for our sins and be raised back up. Now that’s the message of the canonical prophets. What they were doing, inspired as they were, but they were not saying things that, to some degree, other people really couldn’t discern to some effect, some small ways. They were speaking the word of God like a teacher would do, teaching the word of God, but they were specifically applying that word to the particular situation of what was happening first in the northern kingdom, then the southern kingdom, then the captivity, then the return from captivity.

All pointing to the situation that would happen when Messiah came—the true Israel, the true lion of Judah—to die for our sins, go into that exile or captivity of death, and then to be raised for our justification. So a prophet is somebody that takes the word of God—which means they have to have a really good knowledge of it—and then they specifically teach it or proclaim it in a way where it is relevant to that particular person’s life. Okay, or that culture’s life or what’s going on in society.

I think that’s what the idea of prophecy, or prophet, here is. And there are texts we could turn to where you know Paul says he wishes everybody were prophets, and there’s some sense in which in the book of Acts it says we’re all supposed to be prophets. All these gifts that we’ll look at today, all seven of them, we’re all supposed to be kind of doing them. They’re all general characteristics of the Christian life, but some people are particularly gifted at speaking and at knowing the word of God and specifically understanding how the word of God is impacting the culture in which they exist.

You know, so they’re driving home to you. So when I preach, there are elements of teaching here. I’ll teach you what the text means. I’ll teach you what proportion to faith means. But then if I just leave it there, that’s teaching. That’s a gift. But if I try to drive it home to you, or when I speak of cultural significance of that truth to us today and where we’re at, that becomes prophecy. You see, that’s what’s being talked about here.

And so churches have to have people—or a city church has to have men, probably a few of them—that can speak prophetically in ways that really drive the nail home to the particular people and that speak to the culture. And there’s a sense in which as they speak about the relevance of God’s words to the culture, and you know, I can’t get into this a lot, but there’s a sense in which the prophet brings to pass what’s going to happen. He creates a new reality.

Now, it’s not some kind of mystical magical, you know, wizard thing, but the word of God is being spoken into a context, correcting, interpreting that context, and calling for particular action on the part of individuals in society. And when that’s done in the power of the Spirit, God is pleased to develop then the culture in a different way based on what the prophetic message has been. Make sense? So they are, you know, small c, you know, creators of the future, so to speak. But of course it isn’t them. It’s the grace of God flowing through them through their study of the scriptures, through the application of that scripture to individuals’ lives, congregations’ lives, cities’ lives, and cultures’ lives generally speaking.

So that’s a prophet. Now what does it mean here? “If prophecy,” so he says use your gift. That’s number one. And if your gift is prophecy, use that gift in proportion to, and then the ESV says “our faith.” Well, the word “our” isn’t there. Okay. So what it says is use prophecy in proportion to faith. And proportion isn’t really quite the right idea. The Greek word is the basis for our word analogy. And so the Greek word is saying, “According to the analogy of faith prophesy.” And I don’t think the idea here is it’s talking about your subjective faith. That’s what we always—we look at this: oh, however strong you are in your faith, to that degree prophesy. I don’t think that’s it at all because he’s not saying, “If you’re a prophet, do it in proportion to your faith.” He says, “If prophecy, your prophecy,” he’s not talking about you as a prophet. He’s talking about your prophecy. It is supposed to be according to the analogy of faith.

Now, several places in the scriptures the faith is the faith once delivered. The faith is the word of God that contains how he has communicated to us. That is the basis for faith, our faith. And so I think what’s happening here is I think what he’s saying is in your teaching gifts generally, you’ve got to know the Bible and you have to be normed by the Bible. You don’t go outside of the Bible. You make new and different applications of the Bible to situations. But whatever you say in all your teaching gifts generally, but specifically with the prophet with his particular call to talk about the relevance of God’s word to a particular culture or setting, he is to be normed by the scriptures, the analogy of faith.

Okay? And so I think that’s what’s going on here. It’s my best understanding of it. You know, good men disagree on either side, but I think the best men who know their Greek and are the best exegetical commentaries I can find are pretty much agreed that this is what’s going on, particularly in Protestant circles. In Protestant circles, this is generally the case.

So I think that it’s setting up a whole category of speaking gifts. The head one is prophecy. And with all of those speaking gifts, so it doesn’t just apply to prophecy. If I’m going to teach portions of the Bible in a Sunday school class, do it according to the analogy of faith, doing it, being normed explicitly by the Bible. Paul is warning against false prophecy. And false prophecy are words that are spoken that are not consistent with the meaning of God’s word.

And if you’re going to be, you know, an exhorter sort of person using your tongue to exhort folks and encourage them—that’s talked about here—again, that means that your exhortations and encouragements, part of the general speaking gifts of the church, are to be normed by the Bible. You got to know the word and you got to know enough of the word to understand its relevance to what you think you’re going to be telling somebody, a group, an individual, a culture, whatever it is.

The significance of God’s word in the speaking gifts of the church cannot be overestimated. Let me say that again. The significance of a knowledge of God’s word in making men gifted or not for the speaking ministries of the church cannot be overestimated. That rule of faith, the scriptures, the norm, the standard. It is the controlling factor, I believe, for all teaching gifts.

And you know, it—we’re in we’re living in a day when, you know, knowledge of the word is on the decline. And we’re tempted to sort of think, well, it’s not all that important. It is. In fact, at the very head list here, the top gift that’s listed and the one that Paul says he wishes everybody had in Corinthians—I mean, it’s a big deal—this prophesying. It’s the header for all teaching gifts. The first thing he says about it is the specific way you’re supposed to do it is in the analogy of faith, in proportionality, in relationship to the norm of God’s scriptures. Okay?

So, you know, we can spend more time on that. Maybe Reformation Sunday we can talk about that. But the word of God is central to the speaking gifts of the church. Okay.

So that’s the first gift and that’s the first instruction that Paul gives for how this grace is manifested.

Secondly, “If service,” okay, so use your gift. “If service in our serving,” so service is a noun, a general characteristic, and the way you’re supposed to go about service is serving. So it’s kind of, you know, this is not rocket science. He’s got the norm for prophecy. But here, “If you’re going to serve, serve.” And you use your gift in the serving that God has called you to do. This word serve, as I said, is the root word for deacon, diakonos, and it’s used in a wide variety of senses. Some people say, well, it’s ministry, so it’s talking about ministers, pastors. No, no, no, no. It’s a generalized term for all kinds of acts of service that are not word-oriented gifts. They’re deed gifts. Okay? Deed activities. And he says, “If service is what you’re called to do, gifted to do, then do it. You’re serving. Keep at it. Don’t just do it occasionally. Do it as much as you can. Have a heart ready looking for opportunities to serve other people.”

And so the gift is service. The grace is service. And the way it’s to be used is in that serving itself. Okay, let’s see. So the gift is to see and meet temporal needs in various ways, and the demonstration is to do it in those particular matters. Okay, let’s see another quote. Lenski says this about this: “Is it ministry? What’s your gift? Is it ministry, service for which we have talents in a field, ability and opportunity? Then in that very ministry, let us all exercise our talent.”

So, how do you exercise your talent, you know, talent? Remember, we said that’s a word that’s related to spiritual gifts. You’re supposed to steward your talent. It means you don’t bury it. It means you use it to multiply. And so you use your talent in serving.

Third, “The one who teaches in his teaching.” Okay? So now we’ve gone beyond the general characteristics, the general headers, and now we’ve got a more specific word gift, and that word gift is teaching. And Keller, in his community group manual, says that teaching is the ability to communicate truth to others in such a clear and orderly way that people learn and retain that knowledge.

So teaching here is more the impartation of content. And again, it’s normed by the scriptures. So you know, a teacher is somebody that can take the scriptures and teach them to you. Now he’s not necessarily driving home to you application. That’s what the prophet will typically do more of. And if you’re a pastor-teacher or prophet-teacher, you’re going to do both things. But a teacher specifically has this gift to make an orderly presentation of any subject material, all being normed by the scriptures. And specifically, I suppose, teaching the scriptures themselves is a high priority—not the only thing—teaching all kinds of things.

But he’s doing that in a way that is the impartation of knowledge. So if we look at prophecy and teaching together, teaching kind of maintains what we are and know—the tradition of the Christian church and community. It’s teaching the basic doctrine of the church in terms of its use now in the church. It’s teaching the basic stuff, right? And it’s making it clear to you in a way that you can understand and also retain.

And then prophecy, on the other hand, it’s not so much about maintaining the status quo. It’s about creating a new reality by driving home the lessons of that teaching in an individual’s life, a marriage’s life, community, neighborhood, church, whatever. So they’re kind of, you know, one is kind of maintenance teaching, one is kind of development prophecy, and they work together. Of course, the development is based upon the content of God’s word, but teaching is this separate gift. It’s a word gift. Are you good at teaching?

And some people just are. I mean, you know, these kind of people—God has given them the gift of teaching, making things clear and orderly, helping people to maintain knowledge. So that’s the first in the list of two teaching gifts, or rather, prophesying word gifts. Here is specifically teaching. And if you’re a teacher, then minister, use that gift. “If it’s teaching in teaching, do it.” It’s that simple. Do it. That’s what he’s saying here.

Fourth, “The one who exhorts in his exhortation.” Now this word exhort—let me read from one of the commentators. Both the main word exhort and the secondary word exhortation have a wide range of meanings: urge, exhort, request, entreat, comfort, cheer up, possibly also console or correlate.

So exhortation is the idea of coming—effectively, literally, in the Greek, it means to call alongside of oneself. So you know, you’re not like here and that person’s there, and you’re exhorting them. It’s like you come alongside of them and you urge them to particular action. Usually what that means is you’re dealing with people in a troubled situation, right? They’re grieving, maybe they’re in rebellion, maybe they’ve lost hope, maybe they just have kind of burned out. There’s all kinds of situations. And the exhorter, the one who is an encourager, comes alongside of that person, literally, and becomes their coach, their encourager.

And again, the beginning norm of the whole section is based on the scriptures. You know, a guy who is—who has this gift, if he’s going to do it vocationally, he’d be a counselor, right? That’s what a counselor does. He comes alongside, he coaches, and he exhorts people in the way they should be going. And significantly, is this idea of doing it together, right? So it’s a—it’s a coming. It’s a grace that happens as you come alongside of people in need and bring them messages from the scripture or general hope to keep them in going in a good direction.

So it’s interesting because what we have in these two teaching gifts is we got words that instruct and words that encourage. And it’s interesting to me—we all can see where a church needs a prophet and a church needs a teacher. We can see that, right? And later on we know that the church needs people that are going to give money and we know the church needs people that are going to minister grace to God and grace and mercy to other people. That’s the last of these. We know the church needs leaders, and that’s another one of these seven gifts here that are given, right? And a church needs deacons. They’re all sort of evident.

This one though isn’t as evident, is it? It isn’t to me, that a church needs encouragers or exhorters. But it does. But it does. It is absolutely—it is, I think, very significant that on this list of seven normative gifts that are found in the Roman church at least, and I think probably are normative for all churches, along with a great deal of other ministries, that in that normative list, under teaching ministry, are people that simply encourage other people with their mouth, with their words.

Isn’t that great? We need—and what does it tell us? It tells us that we need encouragement. You know, maybe not every day, but maybe every day. But we get ourselves in a world of trouble. We walk away from seeing things through faith, and we start to doubt things. We may doubt the very gospel itself. We lose hope for our jobs, for our vocations, for our marriages, for our friendships, for the church itself. We lose hope easily. That’s who we are. And the Lord God has gifted us with people in the community who are supposed to be coming alongside of us and encouraging us.

To hey, it’s okay. Chan, in that video I watched about you know, Bible studies instead of doing things, he also talked a little bit about this verse and I just loved what he had to say. 1 Peter 4:12: “Beloved, do not think it strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though something strange had happened to you. But rejoice to the extent that you partake of Christ’s sufferings, that when his glory is revealed, you may also be glad with exceeding joy.”

Now, remember, this is right after this text. This is right after the doxology in 1 Peter 4 that concludes his section where he’s talking about spiritual gifts. Okay. So remember, we said the book’s discussion of spiritual gifts in 1 Peter 4 is—difficult times, trials and tribulations, and suffering, and bad things happening—are in our lives. These things come along, right? Now, because I’m a pastor here, you know, I know a lot more about the fiery trials that some of you are going through right now than a lot of you do. But believe me, at any particular given time, there are a significant number of people going through various kinds of fiery trials.

And an encourager comes up to somebody who’s going through a fiery trial and he says, “Hey, don’t be surprised. Don’t think it’s strange that you’re going through this.” Isn’t that an odd thing for God to say? But what he’s telling us is fiery trials and difficulties are part of what our life is about—not the whole thing, but it happens, right? And it doesn’t just happen, it’s God’s intention. What does he say when we go through these things? We share in the sufferings of Jesus. You know, Jesus, like the rest of us or different than the rest of us—but he’s there’s a lot of aspects to knowing Jesus, right? And one aspect of knowing Jesus is knowing the sufferings that he went through for us.

There’s a fellowship with Christ. You know, there’s lots of fellowship with Christ in joy and instruction and all that stuff, but one fellowship with Jesus that is unique is this fellowship with his sufferings. And so you don’t embrace suffering because it’s just what God says is going to happen, get used to it. It is an opportunity which you will either make use of or not. Tried and tested—great song by Bruce Cockburn. “Tried and tested.” I think of this all the time. After I go through something, how did I do during that test? Not very good. You’re going to have a test. And the purpose of that test in God’s mind for you is to bring you into the fellow—a deeper fellowship with Jesus by knowing his sufferings and by developing your unity with Jesus through the Holy Spirit in suffering.

Now, folks, you just can’t get that without suffering. And I don’t think it’s strange. We just got finished with the book of Job in Sunday school class. How do you get from being a great king, Job, at the beginning of the book, to being a really great king at the end of the book? Suffering. Suffering. And in Job’s case, he was vindicated. It wasn’t suffering for sin. Okay? A lot of times our suffering is—the point is we need people in the church who understand my particular gift is a word gift. And it’s a word gift that I can go to people that I know are going through difficulties, and I can encourage them. Sometimes just by being alongside of them and sitting there. Sometimes by turning them to texts like the one we just looked at. Sometimes just by saying I’m so sorry. It doesn’t make a lot of difference, a lot of times.

I used to, you know, when I first started going to hospital ministries, I didn’t know what I was doing. And I learned fairly quickly that it doesn’t make any difference what you do. I mean, if you’re an idiot, that would make a difference. People would get mad at you. But all they want is your presence there as an encouragement that people are thinking about them and that a representative of Jesus is there with them. That’s all they want, right?

So, you know, maybe you don’t know what gift you’re supposed to be doing. Maybe you’re not sure how you serve others. This is a tremendous area of potential ministry in the context of the church. And I think we’re pretty good at encouraging people that are like us in our groups, income levels, you know, interests, whatever it is. You know, that’s the way it normally works in a culture. We got a lot of people that are quite different than us. And can you be the sort of person that will come along those people in their trials and tribulations and difficulties and be an encouragement?

Well, okay, we’re running out of time, but I wanted to really stress that one because I think it’s unusual that it’s in this list, that it’s instructive to us, and it’s particularly instructive to us right now in the life of this church where we’re trying to encourage everyone to make use of the gift that God has given you to serve other people and to receive the gifts of others, to receive encouragement.

All right.

Fifth, “The one who contributes in generosity.” This pretty straightforward, but again, it’s a little odd to have in the list, and I’ve never really seen a lot of it, but I understand what it is. What it means is this isn’t talking about tithing. We’re all supposed to do that. This is talking about people that give money. It’s what it’s talking about, specifically, and not for the poor necessarily. The emphasis is on giving, right? It’s on giving money. Who contributes, and that word usually means money, and they’re to do it in generosity. Well, another translation would be in simplicity.

Well, how do they get to generous from being simple? Well, the simplicity means having a simplicity of your heart to serve Jesus and minister to his kingdom. That’s the deal. That’s the whole deal for who you are. And if you’ve got that simplicity of mind, that’s what you use to write big checks. Okay? Because you’re here to serve the kingdom. Okay? So this is one of the gifts: to contribute, to give money. Now I believe it’s a gift. You know, Spurgeon said that people need two conversions—one for their soul and one for their pocketbook.

But you know, it’s difficult. Why is it difficult? Because money represents security, right? And in a situation like our church is in, it’s really difficult, or our culture is in. It’s difficult to let go of some of that security. But God says this is a gift. This is a charisma of contributing and to contribute with generosity, and to look for opportunities of causes you can help.

You know, I don’t want to get into a big same-sex marriage thing, but I was at a meeting this week and you know why that thing lost in Washington state? Didn’t lose by much. Because the people who are advocating same-sex marriage spent $12 million in the advertising campaign and the other side could only raise two million. They were outspent six to one. Because the world frequently are better contributors, givers, with you know, simplicity and generosity, than conservatives and Christians are many times.

You know, I think it was the guy who was head of Amazon gave one and a half million, his rights, the check, right? So, you know, it’s significant, and it—it is—it’s one of the listed gifts here, and it’s important for us not to back off from these gifts. If this is what God says should be going on, then there should be giving that’s liberally that arises out of—as one commentator said—and expresses the simplicity and single-mindedness of the person of faith with all your heart. Maybe another way to put this thing: with simplicity, singleness of mind.

Sixth, “The one who leads with zeal.” Now, this is where Calvin gets his ruling elders, folks. Calvin thought that all the elder passages in the New Testament—they were all pastors. But Calvin had ministers, or teaching elders, and then ruling elders, who are never called elders in the New Testament. Why did he do that? Because he said some men are gifted. And he understood the foundational nature of Romans 12 and it’s kind of the norm and all this stuff. And he understood the churches have to have leaders.

And if they have to have leaders, and if you’re thinking ecclesiastically, which is what Calvin did with this text, he turned it into a bunch of offices. Then you’re going to come up with an office of leader. The word means to stand in front of, right? To lead, to be able to explain, to cast a vision and then move men toward that area, to discern where he’s going. Again, the controlling factor is God’s word, but to discern a goal and then be able to motivate men and women to achieve that goal. That’s leader. That’s what this guy is.

And Calvin, seeing these in terms of ecclesiastical offices, this is the basis for the ruling elder that we still talk about in Reformed circles to this day. And its basis in Calvin is this particular gift. So, you know, I don’t agree with that with his interpretation of it, but it is certainly true, and our church has recognized this: we’re not doing a great job of developing leaders. Yeah, these are gifts by God, but they can be trained and developed and put into place. So we’re looking for a few good men and women, right? These gifts, you know, leader doesn’t have to be a man. Can be a woman in particular callings as well.

But the idea is this is a gift. Don’t feel bad if you think you should be leading something. And don’t have some kind of false humility that causes you to bury your talent waiting for somebody to ask you. No. Call me up. “Hey, Dennis. I think I’m a leader. I can get things done and I think this is the area I’d like to help the church develop more.” Great. You know, our response to such things is you bet. Let’s get at it. Let’s do it. Now we’ll want to talk with you and make sure that the word is the norming thing for it and all that stuff. And now we’re developing tools to develop leaders even more.

But the church has to have leaders. And what does it say? How do you lead, or what’s the one condition that’s attached to it? With zeal, zestiness, vitality. Okay. Okay. Energetic leaders are not laid-back. They engage the thing, right? They say, “Let’s go take that hill. Let’s go.” They cast that vision and they move people forward. So leadership exercised in the church is to be done in the sense of vitality or energy level, or you know, not being slothful, pulling back from a task, but getting at that task. Okay. So the world—the Christian world suffers from lack of leaders all too often.

Seven, “The one who does acts of mercy with cheerfulness.” And this is really cool because this is the only place in all of Paul’s writings where this word alios, mercy, is used in reference to people. Every other occurrence that Paul uses of it, he’s talking about God. “God is merciful to us.” Remember how we started this? God’s grace. And God is merciful. And we have the tremendous ability to be agents of the Holy Spirit and the Father and the Son to extend mercy to other people. So here the focus is on disadvantaged people. Here you should think of these baskets as you come up—benevolence of the church. But don’t think of it as just an activity that the deacons do because that’s not what this says.

It says there are people here in this church who are called and gifted or in the church in Oregon City particularly—to minister to shut-ins, sick people, people, you know, who are on hard times, whatever it is. And to, with cheerfulness, what does the guy need? He’s sick, suffering, he shut-in. Louis didn’t need somebody to come to his house and be dour with them. He needed cheering up, right? So this gift is exercised in cheerfulness. The guy that’s going to get some sustenance money from the church—this is different from the liberality—but it can be the ministration of money, of course. He doesn’t want to have to walk around with hat in hand and feel bad about the whole thing because you’re giving them some of your money, but you’re sort of gruff about it.

You’re supposed to be cheerful. Actually, the word could be translated hilarious, “hilar” with hilarity. It’s that’s the Greek word hilarios. It’s the basis for our word hilarity. And so God wants us to extend grace and mercy to people that are disadvantaged for whatever reason. And he wants us to do it with hilarity. We’re looking for opport—it’s fun to this person, man. They love extending God’s mercy to people. Okay.

So there are seven things. There are seven things that maybe you’re called to do, or there’s seven areas under which you could carve out a particular ministry, right? Maybe you say, “Well, yeah, I want to, for the next year, I want to make sure if there’s guys like Louis around, they get more contact from us. They get cards. They get visitation,” whatever it is, right? I mean, so you can carve out a piece of all these seven, but these are some areas that you should think through. And we’re going to try to encourage you through the community groups to think through, what’s my gift? How can I make grace flow in the church? It’s flown to me. It’s come to me through the grace of Jesus. How can I make it flow out to others?

You can. God says every one of you has a grace that’s to flow into the lives of others. And meditation on these seven, and next week we’ll look at some from 1 Corinthians 12. Meditation on that can be a good way for you to think about how you can do it. You know, basically affinity, ability, opportunity. Know the ministries of the church. We’re starting to put out a list of things that are available in the church. Don’t limit yourself to that. Think outside of the box in terms of what you want to do. But maybe some of those things are things you’d like to try to see if you have affinity and ability to do this, that, or the other thing.

You know, don’t rely on self-calling. You want other people confirming that. But the only way to get there is to, as the text says, do it. Amen.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for the grace that flows to us and then can flow from each of us to others in the context of the body of Christ. Help us be those people who simply do the ministries that you’ve called and gifted us for. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.