This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

(upbeat music) - Welcome to 1 Corinthians chapter 12. This is our first day of
looking through this great chapter of the scripture. It's a chapter that's all
about gifts.

If you think about gifts in your life, presents that you're given, if you're
given this beautiful present that's wrapped perfectly, you love the way the bow
looks, or you like the package and the way it looks, or it looks just right for
you, would you take that kind of a gift, as pretty as it might look, or as
awesome as it might look when you looked at the package, would you take that
gift and just sit it on a shelf somewhere and not let it be opened? No, you
would not just admire an unopened gift all year long after your birthday or
after Christmas or something. As beautiful as a present might be, no one leaves
it unwrapped.

No one leaves it wrapped. They always unwrap it because gifts are not for
decoration. Gifts are for opening.

Well, we're going to talk about spiritual gifts these next couple of days together.
1 Corinthians 12 talks to us about God-given gifts, spiritual gifts. The word
for gift, by the way, in the Greek is the word charis, which is the same as the
word for grace.

These are grace gifts. These are gifts that are freely given to us by God. But
what do we do with them?

You can hear in this week's study one of two ways to act. One is to take a look
at the gifts and appreciate them, but that would be like taking a present and
just leaving it on the shelf wrapped. But instead, what we're supposed to do is
take this gift and figure out how can I open it?

How can I use it? How can God's glory be seen through me and through His church
through this gift? As we walk through this week of looking at 1 Corinthians
chapter 12, I don't want to just look at how beautiful the gifts are or just what
the descriptions of the gifts might be.

I want us to look at how to open these gifts, how to experience in our lives
what is inside. Maybe you've never thought of that. Maybe you've been looking at
this for years.

Wherever you are in that journey, this is a chapter for you. How did these gifts
make their way into my life and into the life of His church? Now, as you look at
1 Corinthians 12, it's actually divided into two distinct sections.

Verses one to 11 are about gifts for the body, and verses 12 to 31 are about a
body for the gifts. First, he talks about the gifts that are given to the body,
but then he says these gifts are given so that they work within a body. There is
a body for these gifts.

And we're going to begin with verses one to 11 looking at gifts for the body, and
specifically, we're going to be looking at what these verses have to tell us about
how to open these gifts. And it begins in chapter 12, verse one. That verse
says, "Now, about spiritual gifts, brothers, "I do not want you to be ignorant.

" There's our first clue, there's our first teaching about how to bring these
gifts into our lives as individuals and into the life of the church. First of
all, you can't be ignorant. In order to use these gifts, to begin with, you have
to educate yourself.

Now, don't look so offended when I use the word ignorant. The truth is, we're
all ignorant when it comes to spiritual gifts. We're not born with the knowledge
of spiritual gifts like we're born maybe with the knowledge of physical gifts.

They're all in use around us. The knowledge of these gifts is not automatic. It
must be educated, and that education, because they're spiritual gifts, have to
come through his spirit.

Now, in Peter Wagner's book on spiritual gifts, he talks about three important
steps in this education project, information, experimentation, and evaluation.
Information is you explore the possibilities, you find out what the gifts are,
you know what's available, and God has kindly provided for us an entire list of
possibilities, a list, much of which is in this very chapter we're going to look
at, information, and then experimentation, you try it out. You find out, is this
my gift?

Let me ask you, do you know whether or not you have a gift for skydiving? Now,
you may not want to know whether you have that gift, but do you know? The only way
you would know is if you actually jumped out of a plane with that parachute on.

You'd have to try it out. You'd never know, really, unless you try. Now,
skydiving can be something you choose to do or not to do.

We've got options with that. But when it comes to God's gifts, he says, this is
not optional. I want you to try these out because these gifts are going to make a
difference in the world.

You experiment, and one of the great ways to experiment is by looking for needs
that you see that you feel like you could meet, needs in the body of Christ,
needs in people's lives. That's a great place to start out. Information,
experimentation, and then evaluation.

You begin to evaluate, is God using this? And one of the evaluations is you have
this eureka feeling, this feeling of, aha, this is what I would rather do for
God than anything else in the world. That's an indication of giftedness.

Or it may not come through you. You may not have a lot of feeling about the use
of that gift, but there's a response from others. And the response from others
is something like, it blesses me when you use that gift, when you do that thing.

God brings results. God brings fruit. God brings an impact in this world through
your use of that gift.

That's how we evaluate. So information, experimentation, evaluation. That's
where it starts to educate yourself.

That's in verse one. But then under verse two, there's a second thing that we
have to do. Not only have to educate yourself, number two, you have to realize
your desperate need for God's Spirit.

Listen to these verses, verses two to six. You know that when you were pagans,
somehow or other, you were influenced and led astray to mute idols. Therefore, I
tell you that no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says, "Jesus, be
cursed.

" And no one can say, "Jesus is Lord," except by the Holy Spirit. There are
different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are different kinds of
service, but the same Lord.

There are different kinds of working, but the same God who works in all of them.
You have to realize your need for God's Spirit in order to enjoy and to use
spiritual gifts. These are spiritual gifts.

So they require God's Spirit. Paul begins talking about this in verse three. He
says you can't curse God with the Spirit.

You can't praise God apart from the Spirit. We need him. He talks about it in
verse two.

Before you had the Spirit in your life, you were led astray, but now with the
Spirit, you're led to use these gifts. And the work of God's Spirit-- well, here
we're told that the work of God's Spirit is to say that Jesus is Lord. That's
the work of the gifts, by the way.

Through his body, we show the world that Jesus is Lord. The Spirit's work is to
declare that Jesus is Lord in our lives and then through our lives, through his
church. And gifts, the gifts that he gives, they are means for declaring the
lordship of Christ through the church into the world.

If a so-called gift is a self-declaring gift or is a gift that somehow says
something against Christ, it's not a spiritual gift. Spiritual gifts show the
lordship of Christ. So you've got to realize your need for God's Spirit.

You've got to educate yourself. But it's not just a matter of education. It's
also a matter of connection with God's Spirit.

And then there's a third thing that Paul talks about and indicates in these
first verses about how these spiritual gifts work. Third thing you have to
realize is you have to realize your need for variety, our need for variety
within unity, diversity in unity. Notice in these verses the comparison, the
variety and the unity.

There are varieties of gifts, he says, but we've got the same abilities from
God. There are varieties of ministry, varieties of areas of service. There are
varieties of effects, he says.

So these varieties of gifts and ministries and effects, these are the different
things that we do to glorify God. But under that, he says in verses four to six,
but there is the same Spirit, there is the same Lord, there is the same God. So
there you have Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the same Trinity.

You realize that in the unity of the Trinity, we are united, but in the
creativity of creator God, we are given these different gifts and we have
diversity within unity. We have variety within unity. That's how God works.

God created this world with both diversity and unity, variety and unity. He
created a world in which one part depends on the other throughout all of nature,
but what variety he created in that world. We live in this world of elephants
and mosquitoes, of cherries and pineapples, of summer and winter, all this
variety, but somehow it's all unified in the way that God has made it to work.

God is certainly not boring. That's the variety of how he works. He uses variety
to add depth, to add wisdom, to add scope to his creation.

And he also does it with his church, with his people. He's created a variety of
people and he's given a variety of gifts, a variety of ministries, a variety of
effects, of impact that comes out of those ministries. So the challenge in my
life, in your life, is to live out this variety within unity, to realize that
God is not seeking to rubber stamp you with some Christian mold.

He's got a special purpose, custom designed for you that fits with his body.
That means that God needs us all and that means that God needs you. When you
refuse to allow him to use you, you think, hey, he's got it covered, or I got
hurt once, I'm not going to get involved in that again, or they don't really need
me, I don't have that much to offer.

When you refuse to allow him to use you, there's something missing in the body
that no one else can replace. Now, the body might adjust and move on. It's not
limited to you, but it can be limited by you in some way because God has given
the gift that he's put into your life, as noticeable it might be to you or as
unnoticeable, to make a difference that no one else can make in the body.

As we pray today, I want to pray for you and for me that we'll, this week, as we
study through this, have a deepening sense of the gifts that God has given us
and how he wants to use them in our lives. Lord, show us this week. Make this a
wonderful week, not just of self-discovery about the gifts, but also of
affirmation from you, from your spirit, of those gifts that I'm already using,
that I should keep using them for your glory or some gifts that I have not yet
discovered and how I can start to use them for your glory.

Make this, Lord, together a wonderful week of seeing who you are and how you
want to be at work through our lives. In your name we pray, amen. Tomorrow, we're
going to be looking together at the power of unselfishness in the use of your
gifts.