The Church and the Gifts of the Spirit (Part 2)

Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters,

I do not want you to be unaware.

1 Corinthians 12:1 (NASB)

Some of our readers have shared with us the difficulty they experience in understanding the use of spiritual gifts and their manifestation. This is a glaring reality within our churches. We live in a deeply "spiritual" world—and yet, often, a deeply confused one. We observe this through trends such as being "spiritual but not religious," or the quest for supernatural "sensations and emotions." We find this same tendency within the Church itself, where greater value is sometimes placed on the emotion felt during worship or preaching than on the truth of the message.

The Church in Corinth faced this exact same problem. It was a church richly endowed with spiritual gifts, yet also a church characterized by disorder regarding the Christian lives of its members and their relationship with God. Its members were obsessed with the spectacular, the noisy, and the ecstatic. In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul intervenes to dispel this fog. He desires that they cease being "swept away" by the currents and become, instead, "firmly anchored" in the truth.

Paul begins with a pastoral appeal: "I do not want you to be uninformed." The Corinthians considered themselves experts in spiritual matters because they had undergone powerful experiences. But Paul reminds us that experience without instruction leads to error. You may possess all the "fire" in the world, but without a hearth—that framework provided by knowledge grounded in the Word of God—you will only reduce the house to ashes. Our primary calling, as believers, is to be disciples of the Spirit, not mere spectators of the Spirit.

In short: Christian spirituality does not consist of losing one's head or being swept away by an uncontrollable force. If your spirituality makes you a less coherent person, it is not the Holy Spirit who is at work. The Holy Spirit does not bypass your intellect; He renews it. The greatest miracle the Holy Spirit can perform is to take a heart that once worshipped mute idols—or itself—and give it a voice to cry out: "Jesus is Lord!"

May the grace and peace of God be with you.