Ministry of Spiritual Gifts, Part 2
Romans 12:6‑7
We're going to talk about spiritual gifts tonight. And certainly the spiritual gifts of exhortation and encouragement come through music so very, very often. Very grateful for that.
So many people say, "Well, we're so anxious to get involved. We're so anxious to minister. We're so anxious to be ministered to. We really want to get into the life of the church." You know, the church is so very dependent on that kind of mutual ministry, that kind of sharing of life, the tremendous enrichment that comes when the saints minister to each other. That's what we want to talk about tonight. So, open your Bible to Romans chapter 12.
I was reading this week, I read every week, come to think of it, I read every day, come to think of it. And I keep buying these cheap glasses to magnify the print...do you have that problem? SavOn Drug store, you know. But I was reading about a man up in Suskatchewan(?) in Canada, some small prairie town who has made it the objective of his life to collect great violins. And this particular thing that I was reading said that he now has twenty‑five of the world's most rare and valuable violins that he stores in his house up in this prairie town in Suskatchewan(?).
Well, the sad thing about that is it's highly unlikely that anybody's ever going to play those violins. And wouldn't it be marvelous if 25 great violinists got a hold of those 25 violins sitting somewhere in that guy's house? And I'm afraid that many churches are like that. There sort of a collection of gifted Christians but none of them are making any music. They're all just sort of piled up there waiting to be played. Some of them have been enhanced with Bible‑school training, some of them have had experience in college, some of them have ministered other places but for now they're just there. I suppose the church has its own museum pieces, doesn't it? It's a tragic thing to think about. You see, we need each other so much.
Steven Franklin remarked, quote: "Whereas American mothers preserve often in bronze their children's first shoes, celebrating freedom and independence, Japanese mothers carefully preserve a small part of the child's umbilical cord celebrating dependence and loyalty." Oh I like that. Dependence and loyalty, two great words...boy, those are great words. They describe God's design for His redeemed family. We are dependent on each other and we must be loyal to each other.
I'm disturbed sometimes when I hear people say this is John MacArthur's church. That isn't so. That is not so. I'll be gone some day, somehow some way I'll be gone. It may be that we all go together in the Rapture, it may be gone...it may be that I'll be gone before you go should the Lord take me home, whatever's in His plan. And this will be the church of Jesus Christ, whether I'm around or not. This is not my church, this is your church, this is His church. And this is a church where there must be dependence and loyalty. And the body of Christ needs to focus in on these things.
It isn't easy in our society. We really know that. It's a self‑absorbed society. Our society is very into pampering its ego, isn't it? Very into pampering its body, its psyche, its lusts, its desires. And anxious to make sure nobody gets in the way of that pampering. And, frankly, it's little wonder that our society has such tremendous problem with mental illness because selfish people generally are the kind who are mentally ill. In fact, William Kirkpatrick...Kilpatrick, I'm sorry, William Kilpatrick, professor of educational psychology at Boston College and a graduate of Harvard has written in a rather new book entitled "Psychological Seduction" the failure of modern psychology this statement, "Extreme forms of mental illness are always extreme cases of self‑absorption. The distinctive quality, the thing that literally sets paranoid people apart is hyper‑self‑consciousness," end quote.
You become absorbed with yourself and it leads to paranoia. Christian theologians through history, long before psychology had anything to say, have dealt with the devastating effects of self‑ love, of self‑absorption, of being content to pacify yourself, fulfill your own desires, meet your own needs. As early, for example, as St. Augustine, the church was having to deal with this problem. St. Augustine wrote, "Two cities have been formed by two loves. The earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God. The heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former in a word glorifies itself, the latter glorifies the Lord."
So, as far back as that, that problem was manifest in the church. John Calvin said, "For so blindly do we all rush in the direction of self‑love that everyone thinks he has a good reason for exalting himself and despising all others in comparison." And he then offered a cure for that problem in the church, quote: "There is no other remedy than to pluck up by the roots those most noxious pests, self‑love and love of victory. This the doctrine of Scripture does. For it teaches us to remember that the endowments which God has bestowed upon us are not our own but His free gifts and that those who plume themselves upon them betray their ingratitude," end quote.
And the writer of Hebrews facing the same problem in the community to which he wrote said that we must come to the place where we stimulate one another to love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together. That is the call like all those other ones for a selfless ministry.
And that takes us right into Romans 12. And it all begins when you present your body a living sacrifice. When you present your mind to be renewed, your will to be God's will, that's where it all starts. Then out of that flows the response of the right use of spiritual gifts beginning in verses 3 and going down to verse 8. And that's our starting point.
Now what did we learn in our last lesson? That if we are to use what God has given us, if we are to really exercise our dependence and loyalty, if we are to be selfless and sacrificial, if we are to live out the living sacrifice approach to the Christian life which is God's only approach, if we are to do that, we must focus on the right use of our spiritual gifts. And the first thing we saw is the proper attitude in verse 3. Let's look back at it a moment. "I say through the grace given unto me to every man that is among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think but to think wisely or soberly according as God has dealt to every man the measure of faith."
The first thing is the proper attitude, don't think too highly of yourself but think rightly about yourself. This we said is the proper attitude of humility. And humility is a proper self evaluation and a grateful heart that knows the source of that is God. The proper attitude of humility is a right estimate of one's own giftedness so that in understanding our gifts we do not over extend ourselves, over exaggerate our function nor do we underestimate and undervalue our function. God has designed each of us uniquely and we must understand that. And when people understand who they are, understand what they're gifts are and humbly and thankfully appreciate them and have a heart of gratitude and move out to minister those things, then the body will be healthy.
An article published some years ago in the Springfield Oregon Public School Newsletter makes the point very well. It said this, "Once upon a time the animals decided they should do something meaningful to meet the problems of the New World. So they organized a school. They adopted an activity curriculum of running, climbing, swimming and flying. To make it easier to administer the curriculum, all the animals took all the subjects. The duck was excellent in swimming. In fact, better than his instructor. But he made only passing grades in flying and was very poor in running. Since he was slow in running, he had to drop swimming and stay after school to practice running. This caused his web feet to be badly worn so that he was only average in swimming. But average was quite acceptable so nobody worried about that except the duck.
"The rabbit started at the top of his class in running but developed a nervous twitch in his leg muscles because of so much make‑up work in swimming. The squirrel was excellent in climbing but he encountered constant frustration in flying class. The reason was his teacher made him start from the ground up instead of from the treetop down. He developed charley‑horses from overexertion and only got a "c" in climbing and a "d" in running.
"The eagle was a problem child and was severely disciplined for being a non‑conformist. In climbing class he beat all the others to the top of the tree but insisted on using his own way to get there."
Now the obvious moral of the story is simple. Every creature has his own set of capabilities in which it will succeed unless it is expected or forced to fill a mold that it doesn't fit. When that happens, frustration, discouragement, even guilt produce overall mediocrity and ultimately defeat. A duck is a duck and only a duck. It is built to swim, not to run or fly and certainly not to climb. And a squirrel is a squirrel, and on and on we go.
And what is true of these creatures is in a real sense true of Christians in the family of God. God never made us all the same. He made us to be exactly what we are. He planned and designed our differences and He wants us to function in unique design within the body of Christ. If we don't do that, we miss the whole purpose of what we are. And if we get diverted into something else and don't rightly evaluate what we are gifted to do, we will frustrate ourselves and we will produce less than what we were intended to produce. So we must rightly ascertain and rightly understand our gifts.
Now please remember. First, we present ourselves a living sacrifice. Then we rightly evaluate, humbly evaluate, thankfully evaluate the gifts that God has graciously given to us. That's the proper attitude.
Secondly, we saw the proper relationship in verse 4, 5 and the beginning of verse 6, notice it. As we have many members in one body, he's talking about our physical body, we have many members in our physical body, and yet all members have not the same office, every one of them is different, so we being many are one body in Christ, that is the church, and every one members one of another having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us.
So, as the body is one and yet many members, so the church is one and yet many members. And we have, says verse 6, gifts, charismata from the word charis, grace, grace gifts. God‑given channels in the believer sovereignly designed for every Christian through which the Holy Spirit ministers to the building up of the church. They're channels in us through which the Spirit of God can minister. They are for the common good. My gifts are for the church. Your gifts are for the church. They're not for me...mine are not for me, yours are not for you. Mine are for you and yours are for me. That's the way it goes.
The manifestation of the Spirit, 1 Corinthians 12:7, is given to every man to profit, for benefit. For whose benefit? For the benefit of the body, for the instruction of the body, for the encouragement of the body, for the building up of the body, for the edifying of the church, 1 Corinthians 14:12 says, the building up of the church. So every one of us is designed by God in a special way. We ought to understand that. We ought to present ourselves a living sacrifice. We ought to look honestly at ourselves, not overevaluating nor under evaluating, but thinking wisely about what it is God has given us to do. And if we honestly seek that, as we saw some ways to do that last week, I believe God will show us very clearly what it is He desires we do.
Now as we begin then to pick up where we left off, we come into verse 6. And we notice now the proper service...the proper service. The proper relationship is that we are a body. And a body is dependent. We are not disconnected, we are intimately connected to each other. We are absolutely dependent on the interchange that occurs between us as a body is on the interchange of its own vital members. And so in verse 6, he begins then to give examples of the gifts...the proper service: prophecy, ministry, teaching, exhortation, giving, ruling and showing mercy.
Now let me just say before we look at those, that in general in the New Testament, there are three categories the gifts fall into. All right? Three categories. There are sign gifts, there are speaking gifts, and there are serving gifts. That's easy to remember, each with an "s"...sign, speaking, serving.
Now the sign gifts were intended for that reason, for signs pointing to something very significant. They were unique to the time of the Apostles. They were unique to the New Testament age. They were unique to the establishing of the new covenant, to the time when Israel rejected the Messiah, when the Apostles' teaching needed to be authenticated. They were unique to the time of the writing of Scripture. That's why they are called in 2 Corinthians 12:12 special gifts or signs that belong to an Apostle. Second Corinthians 12 says in verse 12, "Truly the signs of an Apostle were wrought among you...and what are they?...in signs and wonders and mighty deeds, powerful deeds, miracle deeds." So the sign gifts, or the miracle gifts, tongues and healing and miracles and so forth, interpretation of tongues, those miracle gifts were for the apostolic period.
They are those gifts also referred to in Hebrews chapter 2 where it says that God was bearing witness with the ones who were with the Lord, the Apostles, with signs and wonders and diverse miracles and gifts of the Holy Spirit. They are referred to in the sixteenth chapter of Mark's gospel in verse 20, "And they went forth...the Apostles did...and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them and confirming the Word with signs following." Miraculous gifts attended the works of the Apostles so that the people would know that they were from God. There was no Bible. There was no New Testament to compare their teaching with, so it was the miracles that authenticated them.
Now the sign gifts are included in 1 Corinthians 12 where Paul talks about the gifts. First Corinthians 12 was written about 54 A.D., 54 in the year of our Lord, after Christ's birth, obviously. By 58, Romans is written. And what is intriguing is that in Paul's list of gifts in Romans, unlike his list of gifts in Corinthians, none of the miraculous gifts is mentioned. They were very much a part of the list of 1 Corinthians a few years earlier. They are not mentioned at all in the list in Romans. You find another indication of spiritual gifts in Ephesians, written about 63 A.D. and they're not mentioned there. And you find 1 Peter 4 mentioning the gifts and that's in 66 A.D. and they're none of them either.
So, it seems as though you can see even in the sequence of New Testament books that there was a diminishing of those gifts. Well, what is left? If the sign gifts passed away with the Apostles, what is left? Well, all you have to do is go to 1 Peter 4 and you will see what is left, the other two categories. First Peter 4:10, "As every man has received the gift, even so, minister the same one to another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God." You've been given gifts by God's grace, as you have received a gift, minister it as a good steward. You don't own your gift, you only manage it for God. It's His. He gave it to you to...as a point of stewardship. You are to use it for His glory. All right? So as you've received it, use it.
And then he divides those gifts into two kinds in verse 11. "If any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God. If any man serve, let him do it as the ability which God gives." And he divides the gifts into those two categories: speaking gifts and serving gifts, says nothing about sign gifts which were unique, of course, to the apostolic era.
So, here in Romans chapter 12, there's no mention of the sign gifts. Paul is giving instruction here for the ongoing life of the church. There's no need to correct the Roman church as there was need to correct the Corinthian church because they were misusing, counterfeiting and abusing those sign gifts. But that is not the issue in Romans and when he speaks here to the ongoing life of the church, he says nothing about the sign gifts, as Ephesians says nothing about it, as 1 Peter says nothing about it. So we are left then basically with two categories of gifts, the speaking gifts such as prophecy and teaching and exhortation and the serving gifts such as serving, giving, leading, and showing mercy. And I just wanted you to see why it is that Paul leaves out the sign gifts, it is because they have an end to them. It is because they belong to a unique era and not the ongoing life of the church. And his instruction here for the ongoing ministry of the church does not include them.
Now just another footnote. First Corinthians' list is called "spirituals." The word there is pneumatikon, here they are called charismata, grace gifts. In one place "spiritual" simply speaks about their origin. They are the energy of the Spirit. They are empower...rather about their power, their energy, it is spiritual. It comes from the Spirit of God. Here it speaks about them as grace gifts, speaking of their origin as gifts from God. So both of them just sort of emphasize a different aspect. They are gifts given by grace from God, energized by the Holy Spirit. But whether they're called spirituals or whether they're called charismata gifts here, they refer to the same thing.
Now just another thought, too, that the list in 1 Corinthians does include some things that aren't here in the speaking and the serving gifts and there are some included here that aren't in 1 Corinthians. Now what that tells me is that these are not rigid absolute lists, but there's a sense of flexibility and a sense of latitude. For example, in 1 Corinthians you have the gift of the word of wisdom, of the word of knowledge, very much like teaching. You have the gift of prophecy there, you have the gift of prophecy here. You have the gift of ministry here, or serving, and you have the gift of helps in 1 Corinthians. You have the gift of ruling here, you have the gift of government in 1 Corinthians. First Corinthians adds the gift of faith and the gift of discerning spirits. Romans adds the gifts of exhortation and giving and showing mercy. So some of them are the same, some of them are similar and some of them are different.
What this tells me is that there's great diversity and that the New Testament is not trying to lock us in as if this is all there is. The inexactness and the rather casual overlap is very good indication that they're only samples of the dimensions of function within the body of Christ. And I like to call them general categories of giftedness in which there could be a myriad different kinds of manifestations. As I've said in the past, you can take a hundred people with the gift of teaching and you would see distinction in every single one of them because of the uniqueness of God's design. These categories are very general and they may be blended like I use the illustration of an artist with a palette of colors, mixing his colors to get just the color he wants. God has painted us a color unlike any other color, mixing together the blending of the gifts he chose for us so that we come out with an individual gift that is very hard to identify in name because it's so unique to us.
So, keep in mind now that this is not going to produce little rubber ducks all doing exactly the same thing. These are categories of gifts in which there's tremendous diversity and blending of these categories. In fact, you may have...you may be the blend of many of these categories. But these are samples and a somewhat comprehensive sampling here in Romans of what Paul wants the church to be busy doing. First, present yourself to the Lord. Second, rightly evaluate what it is God has given you to do. And thirdly, understand that you must mingle as a member of a body and that means you are vital, you are absolutely necessary, you are crucial to that. And then he says do it, and that's his point beginning in middle of verse 6. You have the gift of prophecy‑‑then prophesy, ministry‑‑then minister, teaching‑‑then teach, exhortation‑‑then exhort, giving‑‑do it with singleness of heart or simplicity, ruling‑‑do it with speed, showing mercy‑‑do it with...in other words, do it. It is exhortative. He's not arguing. Like in 1 Corinthians when he presents the gifts there it's pretty much an apologetic. He's sort of trying to correct them and straighten them out and teach them the right things about gifts. Here he's just grabbing them sort of one at a time and saying if you've got it, man, do it. You present yourself a living sacrifice, you rightly estimate what God has given you to do, you understand that you're strategic to the entire body of Christ and then you get at it. There's no place for indulgence.
It's an important message. Some people say, "Well, at this point in my life I'm not doing anything." Well, that's not anything that's commendable. You have a gift...use it. That's the emphasis. And if you're not using it, then maybe you've forgotten the first eleven chapters of Romans, right? All that God did for you...you might say, "Well, Lord, it's just I...if you knew my schedule...oh my goodness, my schedule is so tough." Right. It must be so disappointing for the Lord to hear that kind of stuff. I mean, the one who came into the world to die on the cross for us, who paid the supreme price, the sinless Son of God became sin for us, and all that He went through, all the mercies of God outlined in chapters 1 to 11 and we say, "Hey, Lord, I would just like to get at this deal to show my gratitude but you don't know my schedule." God have mercy on us. What in the world kind of gratitude is that?
First, it indicates to me that you haven't presented yourself as a...what?...as a living sacrifice. Our church needs this. I mean, I don't know whether...I suppose some people think that everything's going to go on here whether you do it or not. It isn't so. "Well, you've got so many competent leaders and so many good folks doing everything and it will all work out, you don't need me. If I come or don't come, if I serve or don't serve, you don't need me." Oh yes we do need you. And sometimes we find the most difficult thing in the ministry is trying to do what the gifted people designed to do aren't doing. And then you try to organize the organism and that's difficult.
So, you've got to be doing it. That's the whole point. It's an exhortation. And it isn't out of the blue, "Hey, do this." And