Dennis Tuuri

# Spiritual Gifts, Part Six: Examples, Part Two

My wife said she hoped I would say something encouraging today. And after reading and singing that song, I should probably say something encouraging. In our Psalms class today, we talked about the books of the Psalms, the five books of the Psalms and the flow of certain sections of those Psalms. This Psalm comes right after a kind of heightened sense of coming before the presence of God through a succession of Psalms.

And then this comes like cold water in the face. But immediately after this follow two Psalms and those two Psalms talk about God exalting his word above his very name. And so how can we sing our song? Well, God’s word is exalted above his name. His name dwelt in Zion at Jerusalem. And so even in captivity, they have his word. And then secondly, it’s followed by a Psalm that says how God is always with us.

We use that Psalm 139 to make a case against abortion because God is with us in the womb and knows us before we were conceived. But really I think the point of that Psalm directly is to answer this question that we just sang and recited. So where the Scriptures give us true resonance with our difficulties and discouragements, the Scriptures always answer them. And so these Psalms go on to answer them.

It’s important to see how that flows. It’s an excellent example for my Psalm class today of the movement of the Psalter and how important it is to understand there is this progression. Now we come—I thought the song we sang this morning too, even though discouraging—the opening Psalm which will sort of be matched by our song at the end of our service, our commissioning song—is the brokenness of our cities and this is certainly true.

I kept thinking this morning of Bob Dylan’s old song, “Everything is Broken,” and if it was true 15, 20 years ago whenever he came out with it, it’s certainly a lot more true now. Look at politically all kinds of broken relationships. I was watching Jools Holland the other day and a woman sang a song called “Oh the Divorces.” Everything’s broken and it’s very discouraging to watch things breaking around us.

And this—we turn today to a text, and this will be our final sermon on spiritual gifts directly. Next week we’ll talk about heart issues and how our heart is central to all of this, not just what we do. And then on Palm Sunday, we’ll talk about the role of our relationship to the Holy Spirit. And then on Resurrection Sunday, putting off and putting on that dynamic. And then we’ll move into a series of sermons on putting the Gospel in a context when we proclaim it in our cities and our communities to our friends.

So we’ll begin a series of messages on that. And so all of these are a stream of messages intended to take us into our world for Jesus and realize that’s where we’re at, whether we understand it or not, and transform our cities and bring peace. So today we turn to 1 Corinthians 12. I’m going to read from 24b through 31 and we’re just going to touch on this text really today by looking at a couple of gifts in the list of gifts here as example gifts, right?

But I put it in context here, and as we read it, think about everything being broken and how healing, unity, coming together of relationships, marriages, communities, politically—how coming together is accomplished in Jesus. So, please stand for the reading of God’s word. 1 Corinthians 12, beginning at 24b.

But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it. Or if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it. Now you are the body of Christ and members individually. And God has appointed these in the church, first apostles, second prophets, third teachers. After that, miracles, then gifts of healings, helping, administration, varieties of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Are all workers of miracles? Do all have gifts of healings? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? But earnestly desire the best gifts? And yet I show you a more excellent way.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for the coming of Messiah who would take this shattered world, shattered through our sin, and restore it and bring wholeness. And we thank you that he has come to affect the reconciliation of all things. We pray Lord God you would give us comfort, encouragement from today’s text. Help us to see the Gospel in this text and help us to respond in faith and with joy to it. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

So this is a text of great Gospel news as all these texts on spiritual gifts have been. I mean, think about it: what we’re saying is that God sends his Spirit who brings grace to us and gives us all certain common things—our relationship with the Father through Jesus, living by the Spirit, et cetera. But he also distributes these spiritual gifts, so-called these charismata, these grace gifts. And so they’re grace gifts. The root of the word charismatic is this charismata, spiritual gifts. And the root of that is grace. They’re gifts to us of grace. They’re given to us graciously on the basis of Christ’s work. And they’re given to us to minister grace in specific ways, very specific ways, to one another, to build each other up, to encourage one another through the use of these gifts.

And why did all that happen? Do you remember when that happened in fullness? Where do we see the first manifestation of the things we’re talking about here? Well, it’s the day of Pentecost, of course, when they spoke in tongues, different languages that they didn’t understand what they were saying necessarily, but the people that heard did. And so the first manifestation of these charismata, these charismatic gifts, which include all kinds of non-miraculous things, is on the day of Pentecost.

Why is that? Well, because the Spirit is given in fullness when Jesus ascends to the right hand of the Father. So what we have is the good news of the ascension of the Savior King to the throne of God, from whence he shall rule until all his enemies be made his footstool. He is in the process of reconciling all things now, and to that end, he sends his Spirit in fullness now from the right hand of the Father to us. When he ascended on high, he gave gifts to men—quoted directly in Ephesians 4—about the particular men that are listed there as a list of one of the spiritual gifts. So the ascension of Jesus is the basis for the giving of gifts. And that tells us something. It tells us that these gifts, while aimed specifically at the local church or aimed at specifically in the context of the church, will equip that church individually in its normal life outside of the church to do the work that God has called us to do, to change the world, and to bring unification.

I was thinking about that, you know, that horrible cult, the Unification Church. But, you know, it’s not a bad name to remember because that’s what Jesus is doing. He’s unifying. He’s reconciling all things. And he’s doing that. The good news is that he has accomplished our redemption. But more than that, that he’s ascended to the right hand of the Father and he’s given each of us particular grace gifts that he is using to affect the purpose for his resurrection and ascension, which is the reconciliation of all things.

You can’t get there without going through this station of the train, right? So you’re on this train. You want to get to the reconciliation of all things. You want to get to Jesus bringing justice to victory, right? You want to get to wholeness and relationships and marriages and the greater world. You want to get to a place where everything’s not broken, everything is fixed, everything’s healed. But you can’t get there apart from the work of the Holy Spirit. And an important part of that work is what we’ve been talking about for the last five or six weeks. And that is this idea of so-called spiritual gifts or grace gifts—maybe a better way to put it.

So this is tremendous Gospel news to us, right? Tremendous Gospel news. And what we’re trying to do is to hear that news, to be encouraged by it, but also to elicit a response from ourselves in relationship to that Gospel, right? The Gospel comes and we’re supposed to say, “Yahoo! Praise God that Jesus reigns.” And then we’re supposed to respond in particular ways to that particular Gospel message. And what this text reminds us of is that the proper response is understanding our role in all of this, understanding what particular grace gifts God has empowered us with, using them, and encouraging others in the use of them as well.

So we’ve got some wonderful application that’s quite easy to make, although it can be a little confusing, I suppose. But that’s what we’re talking about here. You know, there are kind of two ditches in the church. One ditch is, and we saw it maybe more in the past, but still there are churches—spiritual gifts, spiritual gifts, spiritual gifts. What’s your gift? What’s your gift? Let’s do inventories. Let’s figure out which of these 21 or 24 or whatever the list is are yours. Let’s settle that. Let’s get you going with your spiritual gift, spiritual gift, spiritual gift.

And, you know, that’s a problem in lots of directions. These lists, if you look at them as lists, they’re kind of muddled. They don’t line up with one another. Maybe they do line up, but not in the obvious ways. And there’s no reason to believe they’re comprehensive. So that’s a way to approach this that we’re trying to avoid. That ditch.

But the other ditch is what we more typically would probably fall into, and that is not talking about them. I haven’t preached on spiritual gifts for 30 years. Why is that? I mean, it seems like these gifts are placed in direct relationship to our sanctification and the sanctification of the church and the ability to bring justice to victory, right? I mean, here they are in these key texts, Romans 12 particularly. And so, you know, another ditch we could fall into is “Who cares?” And that ditch would include things like, “Well, I don’t know. Church is okay, but I don’t ever really feel fed by that church or excited or anything. And I just, you know, kind of cruise here, and the cruising doesn’t get me a whole lot.” That’s a ditch of not exercising ministry in the church.

And it’s not going to work because it’s not the model. It’s not what God wants you to do. You won’t be happy cruising without utilizing the grace gift that God has given to you or multiple ones, which is more typical, I think. You will not be happy as an individual and you will not grow much if you just cruise by attending church. Even worse today, of course, is—church—what’s that? We don’t even see church in the names of churches anymore. They’ve self-consciously been blotted out over and over again, right? I mean, you know, instead of “So and So Church,” now it’s, you know, “Prince of Peace,” “River of Life,” “Living Home,” “Hope,” whatever it is. And I understand—I’m not critical of those kind of names—but it is significant that our Christian culture has moved away from church, and it’s at the same time when things seem to be breaking down more.

So, you know, there are two ditches and we want to avoid both. We want to go about doing spiritual gifts or ministries in the right way, and that is the purpose of these talks. Let me just read a brief definition. I’ve tried to do this several times, but here’s a way Tim Keller sort of sums this up. I assume it’s his writing. It’s in Redeemer Presbyterian’s leadership training manual for small groups or community groups. And here’s what it says:

The definition of spiritual gifts: What? An enablement to meet the needs of people. How? Given by the Holy Spirit on the basis of God’s free grace. Why? In such a way that people are brought more under the lordship of Christ, with the result that the body of Christ is built up in quality and quantity.

That’s not bad. That’s pretty good. Pretty simple, straightforward. Hopefully you got that. So we have these grace gifts by God. Every believer has one given to them or more. It’s a particular thing you do. It’s an enablement. It’s a ministry opportunity, whatever it is. It’s something you do specifically in the context of edifying and building up the body of Christ, bringing it to maturity. That’s what a spiritual gift is. It’s a ministry. It’s a job. It’s something you do at the church in the context of the church or maybe in the church’s ministries into the community. But it’s not what you normally do in your vocation. It’s not what you normally do in your home, okay? As important as those things are.

This is something that’s specifically given to build up the body of Christ, both in quantity as well as quality. So evangelism is part of this, but that’s what it is. So those are spiritual gifts, yes. So you know, that’s what we’re called to do and exercise. You know, nature abhors a vacuum, and if you don’t go about exercising the spiritual gifts that God gives us here, it probably doesn’t mean you’re not going to engage in some kind of gifts. Sometimes there are bad gifts.

What do I mean? Well, you know—well, if you’re in a church where people aren’t really ministering and finding fulfillment and engaging in their particular calling, et cetera, there are some other gifts that tend to kind of crop up at times. There’s the gift of—this is one of the miraculous gifts, the wrong gifts. There’s a gift of making people disappear. And there are different ways, different ways to fulfill this gift. One is just being a rude son of a gun and people leave the church. If this church is not an inviting church and not a loving church, we can go out and do all the evangelism we want, but it’s not going to work because when people show up, they’re not going to like it.

But even more so, don’t forget that God is in this endeavor and he’s got people he’s bringing. He’s building the quantity of his church, but he’s going to put those people in churches that will care for them. And I don’t think we’re very good at discipleship. In fact, I know we’re not very good at discipleship. That’s why we’ve started these community groups and made intentional discipleship part of it. We’re no better at it yet. They’re not very good. Well, if God has a brand new believer, he’s probably not going to show up here because we’re not that good at working with them.

Now, I want that to change. I want us to have people here who will say, “Hey, you know, I think that’s something I’m gifted to do—work with one-on-one with people and make them stay and not make them disappear.” There’s another way to make people disappear. That miraculous gift—they don’t really disappear, but you think they have. And you walk around the halls of the church after the service and you go to the agape. You go to social events and some people you just walk past, you don’t look at them. Children do this typically. I don’t know, maybe they’re frightened of the large group. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve seen this over and over again.

We can make people disappear by just not addressing them. Now, in my case, I’ve got a built-in excuse. They’re not really there for me. I can’t see them. But in your case, try to avoid doing that, right? Or if you see people—here’s another gift that some of you exercise, some of us exercise. The gift of superficiality. Well, I have a way of turning inner conversation to something fairly superficial, innocuous, not very personal.

And you know, it’s I sent out a trailer on a thing on shallow small groups that’s produced by Right Now Media. It’s really funny. And you know, we know we don’t unpack things here. They’re packed up for a reason, right? Don’t ask me to unpack it. Well, you know, that is—you can—you might be doing that at this church whenever you have relationships with folks or get-togethers or whatever—it all becomes superficial. The gift of superficiality.

There are other interesting gifts: assuming the worst about people. And so with this gift, you don’t actually go about doing things the right way, going and talking to people about things you’re concerned about. You just sort of—you know, you see something happen, you don’t know if it’s good or bad, but you just assume the worst about it. There’s the gift of gossip. You know, some people are really good at this. They know how to talk about other people in the context of the church or the world or whatever it is. And you know, the Bible says that gossip is like a tender morsel and they know how to cook it good and they know how to make it smell good, wafting out so you’ll be really interested. And some of us are good at that, right? That’s another gift that some of us can actually—these are anti-gifts. This is the spirit of the world at work.

It reminds me of when Martin Luther and the Reformation—when the enthusiasts who were really nuts—it wasn’t the Holy Spirit’s fault, but they were saying, “The Spirit told me to do this, that, or the other thing.” And they were called the enthusiasts. And they came to Martin Luther shouting, “The Spirit, the Spirit.” And he says, “I slap your spirit on the snout.” There is a different spirit at work—the spirit of the world. When that spirit is working in the church, you see these kind of gifts being exercised.

And the end result of that, at best, is a lack of maturation through superficiality. You have the gift of just getting together with people that are like you. Some people—that’s all they do. You know, hospitality. Let me talk about that gift. Some people have a gift of entertaining and they think they have a gift of hospitality. Keller distinguishes these in his manual. I think he’s right. You know, hospitality, that word translated hospitality in the New Testament, it means love of strangers. Doesn’t mean having people from the church over all the time. That’s just entertaining your friends. That’s not hospitality.

Hospitality, you know, in the Old Testament, bringing strangers in that you don’t know, but you trust that God has given them for a reason. And I don’t mean being stupid about it, but it means opening up your house to strangers. If Christians are being persecuted here, there, whatever, they need a place to stay. You put them up. That’s hospitality. And somehow we think we’re exercising hospitality when there are people in this church you won’t have over to your house. I know it. Or maybe I don’t know about “won’t,” but you don’t, because they’re not exactly like you.

Those anti-gifts come from a different spirit. And those anti-gifts evidenced—the church becomes broken and relationships break down or at least a lack of maturity and at worst factions, schisms, division.

The specific setting in 1 Corinthians 12 about these gifts is the right ordering and right use of the body. The body is the metaphor here. I got a bad pancreas. And I don’t know how long I’ve had a bad pancreas, but I know at least for a number of years now—I mean, it’s no good. It doesn’t look much like a pancreas. It’s just atrophied. Probably has something to do with my diabetes because the pancreas produces insulin. It for sure has something to do with my digestion, which is poor. And if I don’t take medication, if that one part of my body—you know, it’s a fairly big organism but organ—but if that one part of my body isn’t working and the rest of the body is working great, I’m toast, okay? I’m toast because I need that part to function properly or I’m not going to be nourished and built up.

Okay, and I can’t—you know, digest food, even if I’m digesting food, which is a problem that I would experience with obvious visible symbols. I mean, every day I feel sick if I can’t digest my food, right? And so, you know, that’s going on. And so if you have people fighting in your pews, you’re throwing punches. That’s kind of like the result of my pancreas not working correctly.

But there’s another part of the pancreas, this thing with the insulin production. And you have no idea what’s going on with that until 20, 30 years go by and pretty soon you’re wearing slippers to the worship service because you can’t have rubbing against your heel because you got a little wound there. Now, that’s a long-term effect of what Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 12, of some of us not doing our parts or doing them poorly or maybe not at all.

And you think, “Well, I’m just this little thing and I don’t see any problem. I’m not doing my gift, but nobody’s fighting and the church seems to be doing okay, right?” But 20 years on, we got real problems here. The whole body hurts when any member—which means anybody doing their particular spiritual gift or calling to ministry opportunity, your grace gift—if you’re not doing it, the whole body suffers.

I know what that’s like. I suffer a lot in my body. It’s a great thing. It’s a great illustration. But that’s what happens to the body, the corpus of Christ, the body of Christ in a particular local church when we don’t do these things. So we should want very badly—you know, some diabetics, you know, they don’t try to control their blood sugar. I do. I still have trouble. But if you don’t even measure it, if you don’t apply some diligence to how that particular part is doing, then you’re going to die by the time you’re my age.

I’m doing pretty good, actually. So, you know, it’s the same thing here. We should do evaluation. What’s my ministry? Am I doing good at my ministry? Am I doing poorly? How can I do better at it? If the goal is maturation, I should mature in the way I do this particular gift, too, right? Or maybe it’s the wrong thing altogether. Maybe I hate it.

So that’s the proper response. They have this wonderful truth that the Gospel is the good news that Jesus has ascended to the right hand of the Father. He’s forgiven us our sins and he sent this Holy Spirit, the third member of the Trinity, to bring him to us so that we can exercise gifts the way Jesus did and that work of Jesus can be carried out. We are the body of Christ on this earth.

Now, the text says—and we’ve talked about this before—but one way to think of these gifts is word and deed, okay? So some of these gifts are word gifts. And it’s interesting in a local church, we tend to give preeminence to those word gifts, don’t we? I mean, if we’re going to recruit you, we need a teacher for the Sunday school or somebody who can do a Bible study or a homily or whatever or go to McLoughlin and speak to the senior citizens. We do a lot of word stuff, particularly I think in reformed circles where, you know, I hope nobody takes offense at this, but the old saying was that a Presbyterian was an educated Baptist and an Episcopalian was a rich Presbyterian who wanted to cut out after 20 minutes of a homily.

Anyway, so you know, we particularly—but what is it? What does it do here? It gives us word gifts and deed gifts. The list we just read—you know, it’s got, you know, the apostles who are the foundation. It’s got prophets, which is a word gift. It’s got teachers, which is a word gift. But then it’s got these, and then it’s got a couple of miraculous foundational gifts. But then it’s got these two gifts: helps and administrations, helping and administrating.

Helping and admin. And you know, it’s kind of vague about it, but those are deed gifts. Those are things you’re doing. And churches typically actually need a lot more helping and administration gifts than they do teaching gifts, or at least as many, and yet we tend to denigrate them.

Jesus, in Luke, it was said of Jesus that he was mighty in word and deed. So Jesus is mighty in word and deed. First Peter 4 tells us that the spiritual gifts are under two headers: you know, word and deed. We saw even last week from Romans 12: word and deed, prophecy and service are the headers for that list of seven gifts in Romans 12. And we see those same things going on here. We got word gifts and deed gifts.

Okay, what does that tell us? It tells us that we’re the body of Jesus Christ corporately, okay? We have individual responsibilities, whether it’s word or deed. And if we don’t engage in it, the work of Jesus suffers in a particular congregation or region. We can’t get to doing justice in Oregon City, which I want to get to, if we’re not operating well as a body and everybody engaged with intentional discipleship and using their gifts, et cetera.

Now, the other thing about Jesus as it relates to this is he’s a Prophet, Priest, and King, right? He’s a prophet. He speaks words and changes the situation, the contemporary situation. He brings God’s word to bear. He’s a priest. He serves God and he serves other people with his deeds. And that’s kind of the word-deed thing: prophet and priest. But he’s also a king. And a king administers things. He rules things. And one of the gifts here, administration, it’s not really, you know, word or deed. It involves both those things. But it’s a kingly sort of thing.

So again, the point is: if we look at these gifts and try to categorize them, what we see is that the categories reflect the person of Jesus Christ himself. And so the Spirit comes so that we are the body of Jesus with word and deed, mighty in word and deed, or exercising properly the gifts of Prophet, Priest, and King, which we all do individually but we do them in the context of the body as an entity as well. We do these things to manifest Jesus to the world in which we live.

Now let’s turn a little bit then on your outline to Romans 12:3 to six and talk a little bit about one way that you might—so, you’re sitting there and saying, “Well, I know my gift or I don’t know my gift, or I know what I’m doing. I got a ministry. I don’t have a ministry.” Well, let’s just kind of think about this a little bit based on Romans 12 and get those of you without a ministry at the church to think about maybe what it should be or maybe some of you that feel misplaced to think about what else you should do.

Anyway, this should help all of us quickly. Here’s the way to discern your grace gift at the church: Look at yourself. So verse three of chapter 12: “I say through the grace given to me, [to everyone] who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith.”

So what he says is: to begin this process, you think about yourself, and you don’t think in a prideful way, but you do think soberly about who you are, what floats your boat, what do you have passion for, what resonates with your desires and ability? You know, God says that as we follow him he’ll give us the desires of our heart, and I think that’s true in ministry. So you got to get to know who you are a little bit and you come up with ideas about the sort of things that you’re passionate about, that are interesting to you, that you have an affinity to.

Now, what that means is, you know, thinking soberly about this means not a flight of fancy. And it’s not just what you want to do. It’s recognizing how God made you at this point in your life and how, not only what you might want to do, but what are you particularly good at doing? What do people tell you’re good at, right? And you can think in terms of these categories: deed, that’s one useful way to think about it. That’s a good dividing point for different gifts, or Prophet, Priest, and King.

You know, are you really good at administering things as a man or a woman or not? And so, you think soberly about yourself, both what you resonate with, but also how God and his Providence, right? I mean, the Providence of God has brought you to the place you are. And so we don’t want to just look at what we think about ourselves or even primarily at that, but what God has done with us. God has brought you particular giftings and abilities. He’s given you these grace gifts. And what are you able to do then?

So the process involves thinking soberly about yourself but in relationship to these gifts that Paul is talking about, right? So you think about it. And then secondly, you move on from there to verse four: “For as we have many members in one body, but all the members do not have the same function, so we being many are one body in Christ and individually members of one another.”

So now we look at how the body works. So you’ve kind of thought about yourself, what you would get excited about or not excited about, what you think you’re able to do in terms of ministry opportunity, what maybe is God calling you to do? And then the second couple of verses say, well, here’s the church and there’s this wide variety and diversity of gifts. So you acquaint yourself with the particular gifts as they’re functioning here at RCC, particularly ministry opportunities, right?

So, and a lot of these would be existing opportunities. You know, we’ve said we need sound people, you know, we need piano players, we need a librarian, we need a C-team coordinator, you know, coordinator. That would be a kind of an administrator person, person that’s good at leading, man or woman. You know, there’s various things we need in our church. So there’s things that are going on here. And even if it’s already being filled, maybe it’s something you’d like to get involved with still and that ministry could develop and mature.

So you get to know what the particular manifestation of things going on, ministry opportunities at the church are. And we’re trying to help you with that. We’re giving lists to the community group leaders, and so we’re trying to help with that. But part of it is you understanding the ministry of the church. And you know, if there’s stuff that might be opportunities at the church, but you think maybe you’re called to do anyway, talk to us about it. Talk to an elder about it. Talk to your community group leader about it. Talk to your friends about it.

I mentioned doing justice a year ago. You know, we had several sermons on justice in society, and that this is a significant aspect of who God is. Jesus has come to bring justice to victory. I’m waiting for the right people to come along to get something moving in that area. Maybe it’s not going to be time for 20 years. I don’t know. But there’s things going on, and then there’s things that maybe should be going on. And your awareness of the church and what’s going on in the context of the church would be really helpful, not only in you figuring out what you could do but also in maturing the body again and getting us to do things.

So, and again, the delineators of word and deed, Prophet, Priest, and King, may be useful to you in terms of thinking through how God has equipped you and what sort of ministries in that particular area is useful for you to be involved with.

And then the third step can be deduced from verse six: “Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, let us use them. If prophecy, [let us prophesy according to our faith]…” You use them. And so in this case, what you would do is you would try out particular things, right? I don’t know if I’m good at sound or not. Maybe I kind of have a liking for sound equipment. I think I can make things sound good. I don’t know if I’m good. No, I’m not. That’s fine. Nobody’s going to make you sign up for a big long commitment. If you want to try something out, and you should be doing this, you younger people—you know, 15 people in my Sunday school class this morning—I don’t know how many of you are doing things at church.

I know some of you are, but if you’re not, you should be thinking about trying out ministries at the church to try to discern what your role is in the body of Christ, right? Even little kids can do a lot of this sort of thing while they’re growing up at RCC. So you try out different things that you seem that might be suited to your particular place that God has brought you, the gifting that the Holy Spirit has given you, to mature yourself, other people, and the corporate body of Christ.

So you use them. You try it out. You think, “Well, maybe I could do this.” And you know, if you do that and you find yourself in a position that you don’t think you’re very good at, talk to, you know, the supervisor of that position and probably you just need to get out of it, you know? We have this kind of duty thing going on here and we think, “Well, if you volunteered, you know, you’re stuck.” And so we’re trying hard to correct some of this stuff in terms of leadership to make it clear that you can try out particular ministries and then maybe look for a six-month or a year commitment or something if you think it’s going well.

So we’re trying to do that sort of thing, but on your part I think this is pretty straightforward. You think soberly about who you are. You think about the diversity of giftings and opportunities in the local church. You think, “Well, if these are my gifts, maybe this is it.” Then God says, “Use the gift. See if you’ve got it or not.” Really pretty straightforward. Use the abilities that God has given to you.

And then finally, seek confirmation of your call through others. Don’t judge shop or jury shop. What I mean by that is, you know, calling is a significant deal. The Belgic Confession warns in terms of ministers, at least, to avoid self-calling—that our calling is witnessed or evidenced or confirmed by other people. And so even though you think you know this is what you want to do and you’re sure that this is your calling, never trust self-calling. I said I didn’t say don’t listen to it. I said don’t trust it ultimately. Seek confirmation from the body of Christ.

Remember, this is not an individual deal you’re doing in isolation from community. Spiritual gifts, ministry opportunities, grace gifts, whatever you want to call them—these things are exercised in community, and community will have some degree of being able to instruct you whether you’re doing good or not, whether this is going to work out for you at all or not.

So you seek confirmation of calling through other people, and you don’t jury shop or judge shop. I mean, some people, and you know who they are, they’re always going to say, “Yeah, yeah, you’re doing great at that.” And they really know you’re not. I’m sorry. Some of us just do that. And so, particularly if they’re friends or whatnot, it’s really good to try to get confirmation of your call from the people directly related to the ministry you’re trying to operate in, in the context of.

So those are some very practical ways to begin to think through either a change of ministry here at Reformation Covenant or what your particular ministry is. Tim Keller lists these questions as kind of a summary of what he tells people. One: Do you have a burden, an interest, a desire to do a certain kind of ministry? So, you know, that’s what’s your affinity, what’s your interest?

Two: Do you have what it takes to meet the need? Thinking of yourself soberly—well, that might be a lot of fun, but are you any good at it? Well, maybe you need to get trained. That’s possible. But you evaluate soberly whether you have what it takes to meet the need.

Three: Are there others who will work with you? So, you know, this is a confirmation of other people in terms of what you do.

And then finally: Upon reflection and research, is there really an open door? And again, that kind of says, well, how can you confirm this or not confirm it?

So those are some steps to take to go about doing this. And then I wanted to just go over briefly—and I already have to a certain extent—but a little bit more the idea of more sample gifts that are given to us here. Let me just say one other thing: When you’re engaged in a ministry that God has called you to, I think that means you have a sense of ownership of that ministry.

You know, if people don’t actually engage in church ministry, they probably aren’t going to feel as bought in to the vision of the church and its accomplishments. So if you feel a little bit—you know, a Twitter here sometimes—and you’re not engaged in a ministry, that may be why. If you get involved in the work of an organization, a family, whatever it is, that tends to build a sense of ownership and commitment to that shared vision, right?

And so that’s what we expect out of people when they actually think they’ve discovered what their grace gift is and opportunity is: ownership of that. Plus, we expect that will be one of the primary mechanisms that develops ownership in the vision of the church as well.

Okay. So these example gifts here that are given to us—this will just take a couple of minutes. And the first is prophecy. Now we went over that in last week’s sermon and so I don’t want to repeat that. Let me just read though what Tim Keller’s book or manual—their definition of prophecy: “The ability to apply the word of God to people’s situations in a way that is clear, direct, and relevant.”

We talked about this last week: that it differs from teaching. Teaching seems to be aimed at content. Prophecy seems to be aimed more at exhortation to a particular situation. Teaching maintains things. Prophecy moves things forward. And so we talked about that last week. Calvin says this about prophecy: “Let us then by prophecy in this passage understand first of all eminent interpreters of Scripture, and further persons who are endowed with no common wisdom and dexterity in taking a right view of the present necessity of the church, that they may speak into that situation.”

So, a little old language, but he’s saying the same thing.

By the way, I skipped apostles, didn’t I? Apostles have a major sense to them. This is referring originally to the 13 apostles. And those are not repeatable. That’s the foundation of the church. Some of these gifts are in that transition period until the canon is completed and the church is established. And “apostle” in its capital-A sense is that. However, apostle used in a lowercase-a sense is simply one who is sent—somebody that’s sent on a particular task, right? So the women on Resurrection Sunday are sent to the disciples, and so I’ve kind of said a little provocatively that the first apostles were women, and that’s true after the Resurrection—that’s true in the lowercase-a sense. And so even though there are no new apostles in the sense of the original ones, there still are people that are sent out to establish churches, found them, oversee them.

And so this can be related to the gift of evangelism and being a missionary as well and providing that kind of oversight.

Prophecy and teacher we talked about in terms of those two relationships and we just referred to that again. By the way, did you notice we lost a couple of gifts yesterday? You may or may not remember this, but earlier in Corinthians, Paul says that if you’re in the single state, that’s a charismata. That’s a gift. It’s a gift to the church because you have particular abilities to minister in particular ways that you won’t once you’re married.

So Scott and Julie, you know, no longer have that gift. It was taken away from them yesterday. But Paul goes right on to say that being married is a gift, too, in different ways. I bring that up to say: single people, particularly, you know, you should recognize what I said several months ago in relationship to this discussion—that your singleness is at the present time and we don’t know if you’re going to stay single or not and you don’t know that. I don’t think it’s celibacy as much as it is singleness. But singleness is a gift to the church that God has empowered you with so that you can engage in ministries in a more wholehearted way in some cases than people who are married.

So we don’t want to rule out single people from doing any of most of this stuff, and in fact we want to encourage single people to step up and apply themselves in terms of a response to this great Gospel of Christ’s spiritual gifts and his reign being exercised through the church.

Okay. So, and I mentioned that the other—so that’s the apostle, and then prophet—we’ve dealt with before, as I said. And the other two gifts I wanted to mention briefly is helping. Well, let me say something first about—so you have apostles, prophets, teachers. After that, miracles. This seems to be actual miracles, works of power. And this was an authentication of the ministry of the local church at its beginning. And so, you know, it’s one of those gifts that’s talked about that are more supernatural oriented.

And remember, in the context here, the Corinthians were quite taken with the abilities themselves, not so much the ministry in the church. They just loved the fact that they could do these cool, powerful things: speaking in tongues without knowing a language you’re speaking it, being able to understand German even though you never heard a word of German before, being able to miraculously heal people—these sorts of things. And so they were quite taken with those abilities. And so Paul addresses that, but he tries to move them away from that to more of what would be the continuing gifts of the church.

But he does mention miracles and gifts of healing. One thing important to mention about some of these things, by the way, is that throughout God’s word, the general is set up with the supernatural, the natural with the supernatural. So in the Old Testament, in the book of Joshua, they conquered Jericho just miraculously. They marched around. They blew the trumpet seven days. It’s done.

AI, the next city they’re going to conquer—because of sin. But regardless, they have to learn battle tactics and they got to do a feint. They send guys up to the north and they come in over here from the south or from the west or whatever it was. And they have to actually engage in battle techniques, right? And so they’re maturing. And when we mature—when you’re kids, you know, you provide everything for your baby. And the older they get, the less you provide, the more you expect them to pick some of that stuff up themselves through natural abilities.

From their perspective, they’re supernaturally aided when they’re a baby. They don’t know, right? But somehow they get fed, they get changed, things happen, they keep warm. And so with God, it seems like that’s what he is pleased to do as well. He begins with the supernatural to set up the natural.

So when we have gifts of healing, you know, I think that—I think there’s several things we could say about that, but you know, two quick things. One is that physical problems are like psychological problems, social problems, political problems. The world is broken and we’re broken in terms of our health. And so physical healing of bodies is supernaturally an evidence, I think, at the beginning of the kingdom of Jesus. Not only that, that authenticates the apostles and who they were. There’s certainly that to it, but it’s a sign of what’s going to happen.

Jesus comes to reconcile all things, including our bodies, to themselves. He comes to heal things and he comes to make us better physically. And so what’s happened there—my pancreas is not—if I would have been born, you know, 100, 200 years ago, I’m dead by now, long before now. It could have been my asthma. It could have been a lot of things. But I’m alive, right? I thought that it would kill me. It didn’t. Why didn’t it? Because Western medicine was built on a foundation of the knowledge of the world made possible by right relationship with God through Jesus Christ, and that produced a culture and a people who had the bravery and courage to look into various directions of scientific endeavor.

God sets up his gifts of healing, which will become more what we would call natural, although they’re still seemingly miraculous, by miraculous deeds of healing at the beginning. So I think interpretation—same thing. He’s going to translate his word not just into Greek as he does with the Old Testament. And he’s going to give people these gifts of healing to show that the division of all the languages will be healed as well. And the Scriptures will be available in all the tongues of the nations. And he sets that up.

Wycliffe—it, Wycliffe’s predecessors were these guys who could speak a language and not know a word of it before they start speaking it. And people that could hear a language and translate it into English supernaturally. God is well able to do that again if he wants to, and I think probably he does occasionally. But generally, humanity has matured over 2,000 years and he doesn’t want us sitting around waiting for the bottle from mom still, for the miraculous. He wants us doing those things that he has set up with the supernatural. He wants us to do those things. So it’s why we haven’t spent a lot of time on the supernatural gifts here.

But the two I wanted to mention just briefly, again—and I already mentioned them—but administration and helps. And you know, the helps thing we don’t really know what it is. These words are used very sporadically, but let me just read a couple of verses where the word help is used.

Acts 20:35: “I have shown you in every way by laboring like this that you must support—same basic word—the weak. And remember the words of the Lord Jesus that he said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”

So there—support is kind of like the mercy ministry listed in Romans 12, but here the word is help. Helping or support. And it seems to be aimed, with the Acts text, at the weak. However, there’s also a verse in 1 Timothy 6:2 that—those who have believing masters this tone to slaves—”let them not despise them because they are brethren, but rather serve them because those who are benefited are believers and beloved serve them is this help them.”

So here—servants or slaves who are Christians and their masters are Christians—say Paul says, “Don’t despise that. Help them.” So here, helping is helping a superior, right, by doing menial tasks for them so that they can do other things. And so—good, men—some have said, “Well, helping is helping the poor.” Others have said, “Helping is helping ministers or people that have gifts that could be distracted.” So helping is sort of like being a deacon, right?

I mean, in Acts, the deacons are given so that the apostles, the elders, and the apostles can devote themselves to prayer and the word. And so the helping that the deacons do, the serving, helps the dedication to study and development of liturgy and prayer and all that stuff that the apostles and elders are doing. And both those things are probably true.

It’s interesting that the only other occurrence of this word—helping—is in Luke chapter 1, at the end of the Magnificat, where Mary says, “He has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy.” So again, with these gifts, God is a helper. God. Jesus is a servant. Jesus is mighty in word and deed. And Jesus sees fit to help his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy. And we, when we serve other people, when we help them—whether it’s helping people who won’t be distracted from their ministry or when we’re helping poor people—if we’re just helping out at the church and we’re known as somebody that can just come in and help in a particular situation, we are occupying the Jesus role.

They use kind of modern terminology. We’re doing what Jesus says needs to be done for a church and the body of Jesus Christ to function and to have that victory that’s talked about in Romans 12, to have that love and community that’s talked about in 1 Corinthians 12, right? To have that maturation to a full knowledge of Jesus that Ephesians 4 talks about, and to bring glory to God that 1 Peter 4 talks about.

All those things are accomplished by people who all they do at the church is help out in little ways, because they’re reflecting the Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit’s empowerment of them.

Now, assigned with this helps is this word: administration. Administration. So what does this word mean? Well, it means a pilot of a ship who would steer a ship through dangerous waters. So it’s the pilot. And so an administrator is somebody that can take an organization or a group of people and steer them through waters to get to a particular end. Sounds a lot like the leader that is in Romans 12.

And I remember in Romans 12, it’s a different word. It’s one who stands in front of other people or who moves them speedily toward a particular goal. Leader’s got to have vision. He’s got to be able to encourage people, and he’s got to fix problems. And this helmsman is not really the leader, but he’s a guy who can get him through difficult waters to assist in reaching the goal that the captain of the ship has assigned to him, okay?

So it could be two different things, but in a way, helps and administrators is kind of again like deacons and elders. The overseers of the church cast a vision. They get the people to move toward a particular goal. They help steer them through the difficult waters. They make course corrections along the way. And they fix problems that are coming up. And to assist all of that, the deacons and people that have deed sort of gifts are doing these sorts of things that they can to help people to minister grace to the extended body, but also so that the helmsman and the guy, the captain, can do their job.

And so really, these lists are not all that dissimilar. And what they’re telling us is they’re really describing, you know, really what they’re describing is various functions of one person. That person is the Lord Jesus Christ. And so sometimes you can think of him in terms of a helmsman and sometimes you can think of him as a captain and sometimes you can think of him as a helper of, you know, people that need grace, and sometimes you can think of him as a liberal giver of all things to us.

They all manifest Jesus. And so what your job is here in response to the great Gospel that Jesus is reconciling all things is to take up your task in the local church. Not looking for through these lists for what you can do, but understanding the nature of how they present to us the work of Jesus Christ and how you’re to be involved in that particular work here at this particular church.

I hope that makes sense, because the great message of this text is that we are declared to be the body of Christ. We’re declared to be the body of Christ and individually members of it. That’s good news. That’s great news. That means that in the midst of brokenness, we’ve got the very thing that’s going to fix it all. Now, it’s going to be a long-term thing. We’re going to apply ourselves to our relationships, to our marriages, to our community, to Oregon City, eventually helping other churches work together to accomplish that.

But the encouraging word is: we are united now as the body of Christ. And each one of us, whether you’re a pancreas or a skin cell or whatever it is, have a particular role to play to the glory of God. That’s how Peter ends his message. That’s how we’ll end ours.

You know, Paul in this text compares the physical body and the spiritual body, and he says God has appointed these different members of the spiritual body. Then he says—or the physical body—then he says God has put them in the body in these various ways. And then what he says here, in the verse before us, is: “You are the body of Christ and members individually of it.” God has appointed these in the church three times—two in terms of the physical body and their arrangement and gifts, and once in relationship to the body of Christ. The preeminence is that God has done this.

Your response to the Gospel is not ultimately doing what you’d like to do or what I think you might be good at doing, but it’s discovering what God has equipped you to do. Now, I can think of no greater motivation than to please the God who sent his Son to die for our sins, to bring him glory by recognizing what he has called us to. And I can think of no more important exhortation to duty than to tell you: there is something God has appointed you to do. He has appointed you to be in this body for this reason. And when you don’t do it, we all suffer. And when you don’t do it, you’re not fulfilling who you are. You’re not fulfilling your identity in Jesus Christ by adding that particular ministry to what we do here.

Praise God that he has given us the high privilege of being the body of Jesus Christ corporately and individually, every one of us members of that body.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for these texts and we do pray that you would help us to respond to the wonderful Gospel of our Savior, reconciling all things, by doing little tiny things that are so important in the work of your kingdom. Help us to believe, Lord God, what you’ve told us in this text. Help us to realize that you have appointed these tasks in the church. And may we joyfully enter into them with wisdom. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.