TOOL KIT TABLE OF CONTENTS
Sermon Passage breakdown for Sundays
Three Foundational Questions on Spiritual Gifts
The Specific Gifts of the Holy Spirit
Finding Your Gift and Your Place
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This is part 3 or a larger set of Tool Kits designed to help church members and leaders flesh out more of the impact and transformation potential of Paul’s ancient letter to the Corinthian church.
The letter we know as First Corinthians is one of Paul’s many responses to the young church in Corinth, Greece, which he planted/founded on his second missionary journey. He wrote at least three letters to Corinth, the first of which has been lost to history. The letter we know as “first” is a response to different issues Paul had heard from a delegation of believers from Corinth that likely came to him in Ephesus. In the first six chapters of the letter, Paul responds to the verbal report. But the delegation also brought a letter from the church to Paul, which seems to have contained several questions and reports of other issues. Paul responds to these, in turn, in the final ten chapters of the letter (chapters and verses were added in the 1500’s). In chapters 12 through 14, Paul turns to the matter of the gifts of the Holy Spirit of God, a subject which was causing great friction in the small gatherings of the young church in Corinth. These three critical chapters are the focus of this Tool Kit and teaching series entitled Life with the Holy Spirit.
In order to approach this new series and section well, we need to understand the original issue in Corinth. It is perhaps not what the modern reader is inclined to expect. Leon Morris writes:
“Most likely the present issue was raised in the Corinthians’ letter [to Paul, to which this is the response]; nonetheless, both the length and the nature of Paul’s response allow for a fairly straightforward reconstruction of the problem. …On the basis of chapter 12 alone, one might think that they were asking questions about spiritual gifts; but chapter 14 indicates that, as throughout the letter, Paul’s answer is intended to be corrective not instructive or informational. Thus, even if they presented themselves to Paul with a question (or questions), his response seems to take exception to their viewpoint, not simply inform them in areas where they lack understanding.”
So Paul is not primarily writing a treatise on spiritual gifts. That is not his purpose here. He is correcting inappropriate spiritual gift employment and deployment in Corinthian church gatherings. Chapter 12 then is important theological and cultural groundwork for the direct corrective in chapter 14. Chapter 13 serves as the pastoral and applicational plea in between. Although the precise problem seems to be an abuse of some gifts and a neglect of edification, Paul does not refuse or limit any of the gifts. The appropriate response, it has been said, to abuse, is not disuse but proper use.
Keener writes more succinctly with the same helpful insight at the outset: “With his new ‘now concerning,’ Paul turns to a new topic, namely, the proper function of spiritual gifts.” Proper function. That is as relevant in the church today as it has ever been.
This Tool Kit has three distinct purposes that overlap and are mutually dependent. First, it will help leaders and family members dig more deeply into the text of First Corinthians 12-14. Second it will provide a wider, more comprehensive view of spiritual gifts. Third, it will also provide a wider exploration of the Holy Spirit, however brief. I pray all of it is a help and blessing.
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