1 Corinthians 12
12
Chapter 12
Gifts from God's Spirit
1My Christian friends, I want you to understand clearly about spiritual gifts. 2You know how you lived before you came to know God. You let idols lead you in many wrong ways. And those idols cannot even speak! 3This is what I want you to understand now. God's Spirit will never lead anyone to say, ‘God has cursed Jesus.’ And it is only God's Spirit that will lead someone to say, ‘Jesus is Lord.’
4The Holy Spirit helps us with different kinds of gifts. But it is the same Spirit who gives them. 5We serve the Lord in different ways, but all of us serve the same Lord. 6We do different kinds of work. But it is the same God who helps us all to work in different ways.
7God helps each of us with a gift from his Spirit. He does that so that we can help others.
8The Spirit helps some people to speak wise messages. Other people can speak messages that help people to know what is true. It is the same Spirit that helps them to do that. 9The same Spirit causes other people to trust God strongly. He gives to other people gifts to make sick people well. 10The same Spirit gives other people power to do miracles. Other people can speak messages from God. Some people can recognize whether spirits are good or bad. Some people can speak in different kinds of languages. And other people can explain what those languages mean. 11There is only one Holy Spirit. The same Spirit helps people to do all these different things. He decides which gifts he will give to each person.
One body with many parts
12Each person has only one body, but that body has many parts. All those different parts make only one body. It is like that with Christ too. 13When they baptized us, we all became parts of one body. It was the one Spirit who brought us together. It made no difference whether we were Jews or Gentiles. It made no difference whether we were slaves or free people. God poured his one Spirit into all of us.
14A person's body does not have only one part. It has many parts. 15If the foot could speak, it might say, ‘I am not a hand, so I do not belong to this body.’ But what it says makes no difference. It is still a part of the body. 16If the ear could speak, it might say, ‘I am not an eye, so I do not belong to this body.’ But what it says makes no difference. It still belongs to the body. 17If the whole body was an eye, the body would not hear anything. If the whole body was an ear, it would not recognize different smells. 18But God has decided where each different part of our body should be.
19If our body was all the same part, it would not be a proper body. 20But as it is, a body has many parts. It is still only one whole body. 21For that reason, the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I do not need you.’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I do not need you.’ 22No. Even the parts of a body that seem to be weaker are very necessary. 23Think about the parts of our body that are not very special. We dress them carefully! And we take special care of those parts that we do not want people to see. 24But we do not need to do this with the beautiful parts of our body.
God has put all these parts together in one body. Some parts seem to be not very special. But God has shown that those parts are very valuable. 25He has done that to bring all the parts together as one body. All the parts work together to help each other. 26Then if one part of the body hurts, every other part also hurts. If people praise one part, every part of the body is also happy.
27All of you together are Christ's body. And each of you is a part of that body. 28Like the parts of a body, God has put people in different places in his church. First, there are apostles. Second, there are people who speak messages from God. Third, there are teachers. After that, there are people who do miracles. There are people who have gifts to make sick people well. There are people who help others in special ways. There are people who can lead others. And there are people who can speak different kinds of languages.
29Not everyone in the church is an apostle. Not everyone speaks messages from God. Not everyone is a teacher. Not everyone can do miracles. 30Not everyone has the gifts to make sick people well. Not everyone can speak in different kinds of languages. Nor can everyone explain what messages in those languages mean. You know that. 31But it is good if you really want the more valuable gifts from God.
Now I will show you a way that is better than anything else.
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MissionAssist 2018
1 Corinthians 12
12
Spiritual Gifts
1-3What I want to talk about now is the various ways God’s Spirit gets worked into our lives. This is complex and often misunderstood, but I want you to be informed and knowledgeable. Remember how you were when you didn’t know God, led from one phony god to another, never knowing what you were doing, just doing it because everybody else did it? It’s different in this life. God wants us to use our intelligence, to seek to understand as well as we can. For instance, by using your heads, you know perfectly well that the Spirit of God would never prompt anyone to say “Jesus be damned!” Nor would anyone be inclined to say “Jesus is Master!” without the insight of the Holy Spirit.
4-11God’s various gifts are handed out everywhere; but they all originate in God’s Spirit. God’s various ministries are carried out everywhere; but they all originate in God’s Spirit. God’s various expressions of power are in action everywhere; but God himself is behind it all. Each person is given something to do that shows who God is: Everyone gets in on it, everyone benefits. All kinds of things are handed out by the Spirit, and to all kinds of people! The variety is wonderful:
wise counsel
clear understanding
simple trust
healing the sick
miraculous acts
proclamation
distinguishing between spirits
tongues
interpretation of tongues.
All these gifts have a common origin, but are handed out one by one by the one Spirit of God. He decides who gets what, and when.
12-13You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body. Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body. It’s exactly the same with Christ. By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything. (This is what we proclaimed in word and action when we were baptized.) Each of us is now a part of his resurrection body, refreshed and sustained at one fountain—his Spirit—where we all come to drink. The old labels we once used to identify ourselves—labels like Jew or Greek, slave or free—are no longer useful. We need something larger, more comprehensive.
14-18I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not less. A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge. It’s all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together. If Foot said, “I’m not elegant like Hand, embellished with rings; I guess I don’t belong to this body,” would that make it so? If Ear said, “I’m not beautiful like Eye, transparent and expressive; I don’t deserve a place on the head,” would you want to remove it from the body? If the body was all eye, how could it hear? If all ear, how could it smell? As it is, we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where he wanted it.
19-24But I also want you to think about how this keeps your significance from getting blown up into self-importance. For no matter how significant you are, it is only because of what you are a part of. An enormous eye or a gigantic hand wouldn’t be a body, but a monster. What we have is one body with many parts, each its proper size and in its proper place. No part is important on its own. Can you imagine Eye telling Hand, “Get lost; I don’t need you”? Or, Head telling Foot, “You’re fired; your job has been phased out”? As a matter of fact, in practice it works the other way—the “lower” the part, the more basic, and therefore necessary. You can live without an eye, for instance, but not without a stomach. When it’s a part of your own body you are concerned with, it makes no difference whether the part is visible or clothed, higher or lower. You give it dignity and honor just as it is, without comparisons. If anything, you have more concern for the lower parts than the higher. If you had to choose, wouldn’t you prefer good digestion to full-bodied hair?
25-26The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don’t, the parts we see and the parts we don’t. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance.
27-31You are Christ’s body—that’s who you are! You must never forget this. Only as you accept your part of that body does your “part” mean anything. You’re familiar with some of the parts that God has formed in his church, which is his “body”:
apostles
prophets
teachers
miracle workers
healers
helpers
organizers
those who pray in tongues.
But it’s obvious by now, isn’t it, that Christ’s church is a complete Body and not a gigantic, unidimensional Part? It’s not all Apostle, not all Prophet, not all Miracle Worker, not all Healer, not all Prayer in Tongues, not all Interpreter of Tongues. And yet some of you keep competing for so-called “important” parts.
But now I want to lay out a far better way for you.
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THE MESSAGE: The Bible in Contemporary Language copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson. All rights reserved. Used by permission of NavPress. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers.