1 Corinthians 12:1, spiritual gifts, to a church that had turned its differences into rankings, Paul keeps pressing on the one thing they all shared, which was the giver standing behind every single gift. Your gift and the gift of the person you envy did not come from different shops, they came from the same hand on the same day with the same purpose. The variety was never evidence that some believers got the premium package and others got the budget version, the variety was the design. A body made of nothing but eyes, would not be a super body, it would be a monster, blind in every way that is not seeing. The difference between you and the believer next to you was never a ranking in the first place, it is the very thing that lets the body do more than one thing at a time.
Notice what the text itself actually emphasizes, it does not hand you timetable, it hands you a purpose and a test. The purpose is the building up of the body, the test is love, wherever a gift is genuinely doing those two things, building the body and operating through love, you are standing on solid ground. For a long time, believers have argued whether all of these gifts still operate today, the conversation about timing matters, but it sits a level below the conversation about purpose and scripture spends far more energy on the second than the first. The gifts have attracted counterfeits in every single generation, the Corinthians themselves are the first proof that you can possess the real thing and still swing it around like a weapon.
Since then, every age has produced people who took the spirituals and turned them into a spectacle, into a stage act, into a marketplace, into a way of selling certainty or prestige or even promises of wealth and health to desperate people. The safeguard scripture gives against all of that is not a blanket suspicion of the gifts themselves, as if the answer to abuse were to lock the whole subject away, the safeguard is love and the body and the building up of people who are not you. Run any claimed gift through that filter and ask whether it is serving the body in love or serving the reputation of the one performing it and most of the confusion clears up quickly. A gift that consistently exalts the gifted, divides the body and gets traded like a status symbol is the very thing Paul wrote three entire chapters (1 Corinthians chapter 12;13;14) to correct whatever impressive name it happens to travel under.
Notice what the text itself actually emphasizes, it does not hand you timetable, it hands you a purpose and a test. The purpose is the building up of the body, the test is love, wherever a gift is genuinely doing those two things, building the body and operating through love, you are standing on solid ground. For a long time, believers have argued whether all of these gifts still operate today, the conversation about timing matters, but it sits a level below the conversation about purpose and scripture spends far more energy on the second than the first. The gifts have attracted counterfeits in every single generation, the Corinthians themselves are the first proof that you can possess the real thing and still swing it around like a weapon.
Since then, every age has produced people who took the spirituals and turned them into a spectacle, into a stage act, into a marketplace, into a way of selling certainty or prestige or even promises of wealth and health to desperate people. The safeguard scripture gives against all of that is not a blanket suspicion of the gifts themselves, as if the answer to abuse were to lock the whole subject away, the safeguard is love and the body and the building up of people who are not you. Run any claimed gift through that filter and ask whether it is serving the body in love or serving the reputation of the one performing it and most of the confusion clears up quickly. A gift that consistently exalts the gifted, divides the body and gets traded like a status symbol is the very thing Paul wrote three entire chapters (1 Corinthians chapter 12;13;14) to correct whatever impressive name it happens to travel under.
