[Passage: 1 Cor 12: 1 – 31; Sunday morning, 25 Jan, 2009]

BRACE YOURSELVES for this news: if you are a Christian, you are charismatic. If you are not charismatic, you are not a Christian, because Christians are gifted by the Holy Spirit.

Charismatic
Some Church–goers would have walked out by now, because “Charismatic” has become a dirty word.
But we are governed by the Bible, not by the customs and prejudices of a few troubled people. And God”s Word declares it. It tells us without a shadow of doubt:
…no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit.
12:4 There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. 5 There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. 6 There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men.
12:7 Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.
If you declare that Jesus is Lord, and if you believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you shall be saved. Isn’t that true? Can you say, “Amen!” to that?
So, how do you get to saying, “Jesus is Lord!”? Isn’t it the work of the Holy Spirit?
And this is the same Spirit who distributes different kinds of gifts, as we just heard. Gifts is the English word which translates the Greek, charismata. We get the word, charismatic, from the same root.
We also read that each one, each person who declares, “Jesus is Lord!” has received a manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.

Look closely at that sentence again.

To each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given…

There it is again. Gifts. A different word, the same idea. God, by the Holy Spirit, gifts and empowers his people for the common good. Here are the charismata at work, and we are the charismatics who use those gifts for the common good.

I am not telling you that you have to speak in tongues — we will look at that in a couple of weeks.
And I am not telling you that you must not speak in tongues, either, because that is not Biblical.
I am telling you that you are gifted, you are empowered, and the main reason we don’t know it is because we never try it.

Do you remember when Jesus sent the 72 out to prepare the way for him in the villages he was to go to?
When they came back, they were excited because demons obeyed their commands. Jesus hadn’t told them that they had that authority, but they discovered it when they tried.

I know a chap who loves evangelism, and has a clear gift for evangelism, but he spent nine years in one church without winning more than one or two. But, over those nine years, he healed a split which was over a century old and released the bulk of the members into their own ministries. I think that’s an apostolic kind of ministry, but he wouldn’t have known he had the gift of an apostle if he hadn’t just gotten into ministry and found out what he could do.

Sometimes that sense of your gifting comes suddenly and without warning, but even so, it’s usually just something to get you kick started.

That’s where I think the Pentecostals had something right. Everyone who speaks in tongues knows she or he has at least one spiritual gift, and that is a start.
Years ago, I handed out a Spiritual Gifts Inventory — a checklist where you could work out more clearly what your gifts might be. And it was all about what do you think you have, what do others think you have, and what have you seen working in your own ministry. In other words, it comes out of your experiences and the experiences of others as they work with you.

I want our church to be a charismatic church, a ”little c“ charismatic church, where we recognise and exercise spiritual gifts, because they are what the Holy Spirit has given us for ministry, and we are not about quenching the Spirit, we are not about putting out his fire.

Diverse
Some people are worried that the diversity of gifts, the variety found in a church which has room for gifts, is too much.
But our job is not to decide what the Holy Spirit can do and can’t do. Our job is to let him do his job and not get in his way.
Paul provides an enormous list of different things that the Holy Spirit might do in each one of us.

  • the message of wisdom,
  • the message of knowledge
  • faith
  • gifts of healing
  • miraculous powers
  • prophecy
  • distinguishing between spirits
  • speaking in different kinds of tongues
  • the interpretation of tongues.
  • apostleship
  • prophecy
  • helping others
  • administration

In Ephesians, he talks about gifts like being

  • Apostles
  • Prophets
  • Evangelists
  • Pastor–teachers.

In Romans, he mentions

  • prophesying
  • faith
  • serving
  • teaching
  • encouraging
  • contributing to the needs of others
  • leadership
  • showing mercy

Martyrdom is another gift mentioned, and so is celibacy.
Not everyone is gifted in all of those ways, of course. Some have many gifts, some have few. Never envy those with many gifts: it can be a burden.

I have a friend, a very gifted — and enormously gifted — woman. I mean gifted in a natural sense. She does the work she does very well: she is truly skilled at it. Yet she is also very frustrated because she knows she could do much better than staying in that job. The problem is that she is too good at too many things, and too happy doing them all, and she just doesn’t know which one to jump into. Meanwhile, life drifts on, “like sands through an hourglass,” as they say.

That list I just gave you contains 22 or 23 items, depending on how far some of them overlap with each other.

I knew a man who, in his earlier days, was a really inspiring and challenging evangelistic preacher. People were won to faith most times that he preached. But he was not an outstanding personal worker.
On the other hand, some of you might remember an American chap named Fred Schaeffer who worked in Marrickville area and came here a couple of times before he moved into remote Northern Australia to work with Aboriginal people.
Fred was an entirely different kind of evangelist from the other one. He could sit down alongside someone and talk; and suddently that person would be under conviction about following Christ. He was a very good personal evangelist, and led a seminar here once on personal evangelism.

Both these men had the gift of evangelism, but the way it manifested in each of them was entirely different.

Look at the way John David was a gifted administrator, and we also must say that Bruce had administrative gifts, but each exercised that gift in an entirely different way.
So all these gifts are just broad categories. God’s people are a riot of colour, an orchestral symphony of harmonious tones, each individual bringing something different to the entire mix.

We can use the whole lot. We don’t need to fear diversity, because God made it. It is the Spirit’s gift to all humankind.

In fact, people who fear diversity are people who are insecure about their own identity.
When I edited The Australian Baptist, I was often aware of how many Baptists live in determination that everyone should be made to conform. Some worried about clothes, because they thought dress standards were slipping. Some worried about the songs we used, because Scripture in Song or Hillsong was too rhythmic, and rhythm, melody and harmony were all clearly something the Devil introduced to music. Some thought only the King James Version of the Bible should be used…
Whatever it was, someone was pushing it. And anyone who didn’t fit in had to be demonised or deluded.

How different from the variety of expression God has built into his church! How much we need to release into use, because all our gifts are tools for the good of God’s kingdom!
…to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.
For the common good — that’s God’s view of our diversity in the Spirit.

United
This passage talks about us as being charismatic, about us as being diverse, and about us as being united.
Some people just can’t see how any group can be both diverse and united.
If they read their Bibles more carefully, they would understand it.

Paul makes it very clear. What unites us is not our various gifts, but our shared experience of the Holy Spirit.
He writes clearly,
1COR 12:4 There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. 5 There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. 6 There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men.
There is one Holy Spirit, one Lord Jesus Christ, one God, the Father of all.

I feel sorry fo those poor little twins you see where their mother dresses them identically, and you wouldn’t know which one was which. They might look cute, but they are being robbed of their individuality.
Would you hate it if you met with your family at Christmas, and every single person there received exactly the same present?

God wouldn’t like it! He gives everyone something different, and enjoys seeing how each one does something different with it.

But he loves each one equally.
Paul also writes,

1COR 12:7 Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.

The main point is not what gift we have, but what the aim was in giving it to us. What you have, what I have, is for the common good. That means that our spiritual gifts are, in the first place, for our fellow believers.
Paul takes it right back to our initiation into Christ. He says

1COR 12:12 The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. 13 For we were all baptised by one Spirit into one body — whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free — and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.

In the Spirit, we might be very different from each other, but the experience of the Holy Spirit makes all the difference, and draws us together despite our differences.

But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honour to the parts that lacked it, 25 so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. 26 If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it.
1COR 12:27 Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.

We are not made for division, but for unity, for a unity where each difference is important.

CONCLUSION
There are so many different things we could find in this passage, but I want to draw out some conclusions which you might not have thought of.
We have seen that we have to be charismatic, we have to be a church which allows the Spirit to express himself through us.
We have seen that this results quite properly in our being very different.
And we have seen that this difference does not mean we should be divided, but that we should, in fact, be more united.
And this means that we must not allow ourselves to be afraid of spiritual gifts, we should not allow ourselves to be squeezed into the world’s mould, and we must not let our differences cause any kind of division among us.

When we refuse to use spiritual gifts, it doesn’t matter how many good theological arguments we can devise to say that we shouldn’t use those gifts, the fact remains that we are putting out the Spirit’s fire, to use St Paul’s words, or you could say we are quenching him, as the old translation used to put it.
And that is sin.

We have to stop pussyfooting around these things, and tell it like it is. Any church which rejects spiritual gifts is sinning against the Holy Spirit, and in danger of disappearing.
What this also means is that our services should change in quite radical ways.
We are different — so what? It basically means that God has given us an enormous wealth of resources that we can build with. Every one of us has something different to keep us in balance.
I was talking to a young man who was amazed that, with 15 people, we weren’t turning Marrickville upside down and growing.like mad. “We started with seven,” he told me, “And now, only a few years later, we have over 100.”
As I said to him, it is a vastly different thing, turning the Titanic, from launching it in the first place.

But the fact is that Philip led a great movement of the Spirit by himself in Samaria; Paul and Barnabas, or Paul and Silas, worked  wonders using their very different gifts wherever they went in Jesus‘ name.

God does wonderful things when his people stop being afraid of their gifts, when they stop being afraid to try out what they have, and make mistakes, and look foolish.

You start in church, and what you learn there, you can use wherever you go.

Jan sometimes takes up the offering. I bet that seemed very wierd, praying aloud and getting up to walk around like that, but it becomes s skill, doesn‘t it?
So let”s be charismatic, diverse, united people, and let‘s expect God to do miracles in us and through us!

AMEN