Matt Chandler - In Pursuit of the Spirit

Well, good morning! How are we doing? All right. If you could do me a favor, we have a line stretching out this door almost to the other door, so please scoot towards the middle. If you are able, in the future, there is some room in the 8:30 service and quite a bit of room in the 12:30 service. If you could drift towards those services, that would exponentially help us as a church, especially since the 10:30 service is getting as crowded as we anticipated. Moving towards the middle will help us get people in more quickly.

In the coming weeks, specifically as school is about to start, if you are able to attend the 8:30 and 10:30 services, I know this doesn’t work for everyone, but if you can do that, it would certainly assist our church. If you have your Bibles, let’s go to 1 Corinthians chapter 14. We have been in a six-week series on the gifts—not just the sign gifts of the Holy Spirit but how God gifts His children. I want to briefly remind you of the context of this passage before we dive into what I think is one of the more controversial topics in the Bible. If you’re wondering what’s going on, welcome to the village! We are just going to dive in and see what the book says.

I want you to be able to see that we are just reading this from the Bible. If you don’t have one, there’s a hardback black one somewhere near you; grab that. 1 Corinthians 14 is where we will be. The church in Corinth, to which this letter is being written, is a train wreck. No matter what your backstory is, you have not been a part of a church as dysfunctional, immature, and foolish as the church at Corinth. In fact, upon reading the letter to the Corinthians, you would wonder why Paul didn’t just disband the church. It’s so toxic that it’s a marvel the letter doesn’t end with, «and this is our last gathering; amen.» But Paul doesn’t do that.

What’s going on in Corinth—or at least one of the things that has happened there—is that the sign gifts, or the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit, are making an appearance through certain men and women. The church begins to view the supernatural as this kind of varsity level; that’s what real Christianity looks like, while the other gifts are perceived as subpar. Paul is rebuking that absurdity, saying that you cannot take the more spectacular gifts and claim that this is what everyone should look like. In fact, Paul is passionately arguing that no one has all of the gifts, and all of us have at least one gift. God’s plan is to bake a cake in a certain space with the ingredients He has put there, so that no one, as desirous as they may be for another gift, should not delight in the gift that God has given them.

Are you tracking with me? What I’ve tried to do is put together a summary sentence of our time, and I’ll put it on the screen for emphasis: We must never lose sight of the purpose behind the gifts of the Spirit in the first place—the building up of the whole church through the Spirit-empowered ministry of the whole church. The whole church is built up by the Spirit-empowered ministry of who? The whole church. Not just a select few; there aren’t varsity full-time professionals and then junior varsity or sophomore C team third string tight ends, right? In Texas, they don’t even use tight ends anymore!

There’s no discrepancy in our minds. We distort the lines and pretend that there are professionals and then the rest of us. The more we forfeit the good gift of God’s grace in our lives to not be spectators but to be participants, the more we miss out. We must never lose sight of the purpose behind the gifts of the Spirit in the first place—the building up of the whole church through the Spirit-empowered ministry of the whole church. No individual receives all the gifts, so we need each other in the body of Christ. You are not disqualified from Christian ministry because you can’t teach like Jen Wilkin, or you can’t sing in the key of Bleeker or Grant. That does not disqualify you from ministry.

You are not disqualified from ministry because you are not as smart as J.T. English, who has a Ph.D. in the Trinity. That’s not a joke—his Ph.D. is on the Trinity! I didn’t make that up; that’s how smart that dude is! You are not unable to preach a sermon like Trevor Joy in 27 minutes. That’s not an indictment on anybody. I’m not sure why you’re applauding that; I’m not sure I appreciate it!

You are not disqualified in ministry because, as you look around, you don’t fit this mold or that mold. In fact, you have been uniquely wired by God for the purposes of God in this place, which means, for us to be us, we need you to be you. It’s not a good thing to despise the gift that you’ve been given for the desire of another one. It’s not a bad thing to desire another gift—in fact, gosh, I want them all! I even know the Bible says that it isn’t happening, but I want them!