According to the Scriptures

Announcer (Male): Pastor Damian Kyle offers a call to unity in the area of spiritual gifts, next.

Damian Kyle: Everywhere we find different spiritual gifts mentioned in the New Testament, it is always in the context of unity. There's something about spiritual gifts that divides. And so when Paul talks about it in Romans, he talks about it in this chapter here in Ephesians 4, he always couples his instruction with a call to unity and even an exhortation to unity.

Announcer (Male): One of these days, I'm gonna see the hand that took the nails for me. One of these days, I'm gonna hold the key to the mansion built for me. One of these days, I'm gonna walk the streets of gold never paved for me. One of these days, I'm gonna see my Savior face to face. One of these days. One of these days. One of these days. One of these days.

Do you consider yourself to be an integral part of the body of Christ? You know God does. Hi there, this is According to the Scriptures, and in our study today, the Apostle Paul explains the significance of the body of Christ working together as one.

As an analogy, he points to the human body, which has many parts but is to effectively function as one unit. Wouldn't it be great if that was a description of the church today? Let's go ahead and turn to our Bibles, 1 Corinthians chapter 12, as we catch up with Pastor Damian Kyle for a message recorded at Calvary Chapel Modesto.

Damian Kyle: As we saw last time in beginning this section of the book of 1 Corinthians that deals specifically with spiritual gifts and the purpose for them and an education on them, chapters 12 through 14, we noticed that the Apostle introduced the subject by comforting us and reassuring us that the Holy Spirit is absolutely safe in this regard in our lives. He is as safe as Jesus is in our experience with him.

And then second as well, he encouraged us in the fact that God has given some gift of the Holy Spirit, at least one gift of the Holy Spirit to every single Christian, including everyone in this room and everyone in the world today. And then he listed some of—we looked at some of the gifts that he's listed here in 1st Corinthians chapter 12.

Now, the why? We might wonder ourselves, why in the world does he give spiritual gifts? Well, he gives it for the profit of all as we'll see a little bit later, for the edification of the body, the strengthening of the body, and so forth, Christians, the body of Christ in the world. But he gives spiritual gifts to us, supernatural gifts by the Holy Spirit because we are engaged in a spiritual warfare in this world.

And the warfare that we're engaged in on the opposing side, it is a very supernatural force. We face a supernatural opposition in what God has called us to do and be in the world as the body of Christ. And so God has given us supernatural gifts to make us supernaturally effective in his purpose for us in the world.

Now, Paul expands on this in terms of understanding this in even more here as we continue in verses 12 through the rest of the chapter. And the instruction that he gives us here is we're to exercise our spiritual gifts without any sense of inferiority related to the gifts and the calling that God has on our lives, or any sense of superiority over other Christians because of his gift and his calling upon our lives.

The gifts were given for the purpose of the unity of the body of Christ. It's all for one and one for all. We really do need one another. But in a church environment—and I don't know that it was everybody in the church in Corinth, but it was enough to be a dominating influence—it was a carnal congregation.

And you had this exalting of the more public gifts like prophecy, tongues, other things. Those gifts were—people that had them were considered in a carnal way to be superior to others that didn't have that gift. And those that didn't have those gifts were inferior in their calling. So the exaltation of certain gifts, the minimizing or if not despising, the depreciating of other gifts just made for a terrible division.

And I don't know that—I could be wrong, but I don't know that there's been a single subject that has been more divisive through the ages in the body of Christ than the subject of the person of the Holy Spirit and spiritual gifts. And God never gave them that it might become what it has actually become in many quarters. And of course we don't want it to be that case in our lives.

So in this passage, verses 12 through 14 and then in verse 27, Paul informs us that as Christians, we are the body of Christ. And so he repeats the phrase "one body" in verses 12 and 13. And then he bluntly declares it in verse 27. He says, "Now you are the body of Christ."

And so in this passage, Paul uses the analogy of a human body to illustrate that just as the human body is one, yet it's made up of many individual parts, all of them working toward the same goal, so too the body of Christ is made up of many different people with many different giftings, many different callings, many different functions, but they're all working toward the same goal.

And what is that goal? It is to be the body of Christ in the world. It is in order that our lives might be as fully as God desires, each and every one of us as Christians, to be Jesus's means of expression and of his purposes being accomplished through our lives.

And so just as a physical body is the means by which the head expresses itself and then accomplishes its desires, then in the same way Jesus is the head of the body of Christ and uses the body of Christ for the same purposes. The human body, of course, is a marvel of unity. It is a unified diversity and is a marvel of unified diversity.

If it were not, if the human body was not a unified diversity, the result would be catastrophic. You can only imagine if every part of the body operated independent of the head and did not work toward the same goal. I mean, you wouldn't want to have a body like that.

And so too in the body of Christ, if it's not marked by unified diversity, the result will be catastrophic spiritually, as catastrophic spiritually as it would be catastrophic physically for a human body. So it's a call to unity here and that's what Corinth lacked.

We remember they had all of the spiritual gifts. And just as one might imagine, think in your mind having all of the individual parts of a human body laid out on a plastic sheet, all of them un-united. Personally, I like to see the body with skin on it. I don't want to see surgeries or anything like that.

But if you could take all of the pieces of a human body and lay them out on a tarp of some kind and there they are, all of them are there and they're represented, but if they aren't united, that body can't accomplish anything. And so too if you have all of the various spiritual gifts and giftings represented in a local church, but if they're not united, they can't accomplish anything.

And that's what was happening in the church at Corinth. And so Paul drives home the necessity of unity related to the gifts of the Holy Spirit. And the gifts of the Holy Spirit are given to allow us to work in a unified way toward God's ends. But he says—speaks of unity every way that he can in verses 12 through 14.

He uses the word "one" seven times in two verses. He uses the word "one body" four times or three verses. He uses "many members" three times. And so how many—how can you have many members or parts in one and have one body? And it's only through unity.

So we understand all of this, the means by which the human body is unified and it is interconnected to serve the purposes of the head, of the mind. And wonderfully created, the human body in all of its interconnectedness, in all of its unity. But that then raises the question: how is it that each of us as Christians, not only in the local church because this doesn't just operate in the local church?

By virtue of the spiritual gift that you have in your life, you have a gift that is necessarily associated with your calling as it relates to God's work through his people in the entire world because Christians in the entire world constitute the body of Christ. And so how is it that each of us as Christians enjoy this kind of coordination with one another?

And Paul says the answer is through the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, verse 13. The source of our unity is the Holy Spirit who came into each one of our lives the moment that we were born again by the Holy Spirit. Our unity can only be achieved and maintained as each of us submits to God and Jesus as the head.

And Holy Spirit is referred to as the Spirit of Christ. And so this unity is only achieved and maintained as each of us submits to Jesus as the head as we stay in tune with him. So if you put 10 different guitar players in 10 different rooms and take one guitar tuner to each of them room by room so they can tune their guitar to that same guitar—that same tuner—then when they're all brought together to play together, they'll be in tune with one another, having been tuned off of the same identical source.

And the key to unity in the body of Christ and for it to happen supernaturally naturally is not that we would tune off of one another or based upon some artificial formula that we can come up with for the unity of the body of Christ, but it occurs by each of us staying in tune with the Holy Spirit.

And this is one of the reasons why the fruitfulness and the effectiveness of our Christian service will never rise above our devotional life. Our Bible reading, our time of prayer, these aspects of the devotional life, that is how we individually stay in tune with God. And not only stay in tune with God by the Holy Spirit, but as a byproduct of that then, we are in tune with one another.

We're in tune with the head. And that's not only true related to our individual lives, but it's true of a local body. A local church will only operate in a coordinated fashion to the degree—I mean in terms of what God wants—to the degree that that devotional life, that time with God and the proportion with which it is represented within a local body.

To the degree that it is not, the local body is spastic. It is not operating the way that God wants it to. It's interesting and instructive to note that everywhere we find different spiritual gifts mentioned in the New Testament, it is always in the context of unity. There's something about the flesh or our carnal nature that fights against this unity and out of a desire to exalt certain gifts of the Holy Spirit or to minimize other gifts of the Holy Spirit.

And the Lord comes in and in this passage rebukes both of those extremes. There can be a tendency to exalt some gifts within a local church or within the body of Christ. And usually the gifts that get exalted, or that we think ought to be given more exaltation in a local church, are the gifts that we possess to the neglect of others.

And that's what was happening in Corinth. It's a temptation everywhere. It's a temptation in our fellowship. And I think that every Christian—and I exhort myself—has to be careful of this tendency toward what I would call gift exaltation.

And that is the carnal tendency to think that the gift that God has given me associated with my calling is the most important gift in the church or in the body of Christ, because that's the lens that we see the rest of the body of Christ through. Because we're so familiar with that gift, then it begins to dominate how we see the rest of the body of Christ.

So we can begin to exalt that gift and minimize other gifts. And so those with the gifting and calling of teaching, all they'll see is the need for more teaching in the body. We need more teaching, more teaching, more teaching. And all of the other gifts then and callings can be considered of secondary importance.

And here I'm not talking about the prominence that teaching is to be given in the church. It is to be given by design a prominent place within the local church compared to other gifts. But I'm simply speaking of one's attitude toward it. So the evangelist will look and say, "We need more evangelists. Everybody needs to be an evangelist and everybody needs to possess the same passion that someone with that gift and that calling possesses."

And they can be disappointed when everybody doesn't. Same thing with gifts of administration or helps or prophecy or tongues. Now, in this passage, Paul goes on to, as I've mentioned, to address two these two very damaging attitudes that had come to mark many of the Christians there in Corinth.

And they are as prevalent today and they are doing as much damage today if they exist in our hearts as ever they did. And so some Christians were in this early section of verses 15 through 25, some Christians were operating in the realm of their spiritual gifts out of a sense of inferiority. Others were operating in their spiritual gifts out of a sense of superiority.

And we examine first those Christians who are operating out of a sense of inferiority related to their gift. "My gift doesn't mean anything. My gift isn't important. What God has called me to do isn't important." And they are either feel inferior about God's calling upon their life, that it isn't making a difference in the way that they want to or whatever, or sometimes it can just be a discontentment.

"I'm called to do this and God's given me these gifts, but I want those gifts," for whatever reasons there can be. There were Christians in the church at Corinth who when they looked at their gift, they thought their gift was insignificant. It was no big deal. And what they felt, Paul perfectly encapsulated in the phrase that he repeats in verse 15 and 16, and it is those four words: "because I am not."

"Because I am not." And they're dominated, disabled by this sense of insignificance that I'm not needed. My good friend Lee Shaw, who's now in heaven, but he used to talk about this kind of person who would say, "Oh, I'm nothing, I'm a nobody, I'm just dirt under the toenail of the body of Christ."

Well, that's getting pretty low in terms of how you would view yourself, but we get the idea and what a person can get like in that kind of a mindset. So they're discontented. They believe that I'm not needed or they're discontented or they're envious of somebody who has a different gift and calling from God.

And so this is understandable in the church of Corinth because they had emphasized two gifts way out of proportion. And the two gifts that they had emphasized way out of proportion were the gift of tongues and the gift of prophecy. And they'd done it to such a degree that those that did not have the gift of tongues and did not have the gift of prophecy, they were made to feel like they were second-class citizens spiritually.

And a church can emphasize certain gifts to such a degree that everyone will feel that doesn't have those gifts like I'm nobody or nothing compared to all of these other people. So you had this very unhealthy dynamic that was happening there in Corinth.

So Paul, he likens it, verse 15, all of this discontentment or I'm not important, he likens it to a foot longing to be a hand in the physical body. So the foot, it serves a very much a humbler purpose in the body. It does all of its work and—look at this. Look at the spotlight on my hands!

What if my feet got envious of that? They're not only under socks, but they're in shoes. So they're hidden away, but they do an important thing. But the foot is, you know, saying this in a way that we could all understand, the foot is hardly noticed, taken for granted—I certainly do—and insignificant in comparison to the hand.

And it is the hand in each of our bodies is the comparative star of the show every day in our lives when you compare it to the feet. So you have the hands, they're able to grab, there's an opposable thumb related to things. You can type and break an egg or tie shoelaces, these kind of things.

And so someone might feel in a ministry environment like the church in Corinth that if they had the gift of helps or the mercy or administrative gift of administration, that they were in this kind of hidden away, these giftings that are operated in such quiet ways within the body of Christ that I'm overlooked or I'm insignificant compared to prophecy or teaching, these more public gifts.

Now, in verse 16, Paul further illustrates this sense of insignificance by contrasting the ear and the eye. And so you need both. So if the ear says, "Well, I'm not an eye, so I quit. I'm not, you know, in this and thinks it's nothing because it isn't an eye." And so the ear is very significant in life, but it does play second fiddle to the eye. There's no doubt about it.

Nobody ever comes up to somebody that they're dating and says, "I just love to look deeply into your ears." Not the eyes. Look at the eyes. I mean, they are the comparative star of the show on all of this. And don't think your ears don't know it. So but Paul goes on to say to notice his answer there to a Christian who has this kind of an attitude toward what God has called him to and gifted him to do.

He says in verse 17, "If the whole body was an eye, then how would it hear? If the whole body were an ear, then by what means would it be able to smell?" In other words, you can't have a body without every part taking its place and doing its job. It wouldn't be a body. It'd be just a monstrosity.

Otherwise, you just head out and walk down the street and there's just gigantic 6-foot-2, 170-pound eye lying on the sidewalk. What good is it without the rest of the body, no matter how significant the eye might be? And so it needs all the parts of the body, the eye does, in order to fulfill its function.

Not only the hands and the feet and arms and legs and that kind of thing, but also the heart, the lungs, the liver, all take their place that they do in a body. And the point is that every part of the body is needed. And in the same way, Paul says there are no insignificant or unnecessary callings of God upon any Christian's life. And there aren't any unnecessary giftings within our lives.

Announcer (Male): One of these days, I'm gonna see the hand that took the nails for me. One of these days, I'm gonna hold the key to the mansion built for me. One of these days, I'm gonna walk the streets of gold never paved for me. One of these days, I'm gonna see my Savior face to face. One of these days. One of these days. One of these days. One of these days. One of these days.

We're talking about spiritual gifts and the importance of unity here today on According to the Scriptures, part of Pastor Damian Kyle's study in 1st Corinthians.

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You can email us at ATTS@ccmodesto.com and include your prayer requests as well. That's ATTS@ccmodesto.com. According to the Scriptures with Damian Kyle is presented by Calvary Chapel Modesto. We'll catch you back here next time when we'll get back to our helpful series in 1st Corinthians.

One of these days, I'm gonna see the hand that took the nails for me. One of these days, I'm gonna hold the key to the mansion built for me. One of these days, I'm gonna walk the streets of gold never paved for me. One of these days, I'm gonna see my Savior face to face. One of these days. One of these days. One of these days. One of these days. One of these days. One of these days.