1 Corinthians 12:1, spiritual gifts, Paul tells you so almost in a single phrase that turns out to be the key that unlocks the whole subject, the spirit, he says, distributes these gifts to each one individually as he wills, 1 Corinthians 12:11. The giving is personal and it is sovereign, it is not Paul standing at the door of the church handing every believer the same identical starter, kit, it is the Holy Spirit of God reading a particular church in a particular city, facing particular needs in a particular moment of history and supplying precisely the grace a particular body of Christ needs in order to function and grow.
A church in a missionary frontier might be given one cluster of gifts. A church weathering persecution might be given another. A church learning to care for its poor might be given a third. The giver tailors the gift to the body and the body to the moment, which means the four lists were never meant to be exhaustive boundaries, they are samples, snapshots of what grace happened to be doing in those specific rooms when those specific letters were written. The mismatch between them is not a problem for scholars to solve or a contradiction to explain away, the mismatch is the answer, it is the proof.
Grace is not a vending machine with a fixed set of buttons where everyone who inserts the right coin gets the same packaged options. grace is a person giving freely to persons and a living giver does not hand out identical kits, he gives what is needed, where it is needed, when it is needed to whom he chooses. Have you ever taken one of those quizzes and felt vaguely boxed in by the result or felt that your gift was not on the official menu, the menu was always a sample, the giver was never limited to it.
Consider the 1 Corinthians material, right in the middle of teaching about the gifts, Paul stops listing them and he starts describing a body. The foot cannot announce that it has no place in the body just because it is not a hand. The ear cannot resign from the body on the grounds that it is not an eye. And the eye for all its importance cannot turn to the hand and declare that it has no need of it any more than the head can say so to the feet. Every part belongs, every part is necessary and then Paul twists the knife in the most beautiful way, the parts of the body that seem weaker, he says, are indispensable. And the parts you think less honorable, you clothe with greater honor and the unpresentable parts get treated with the most modesty and care of all. God arranged the body that way on purpose, Paul says, so that there would be no division and so that the members would care for one another.
A church in a missionary frontier might be given one cluster of gifts. A church weathering persecution might be given another. A church learning to care for its poor might be given a third. The giver tailors the gift to the body and the body to the moment, which means the four lists were never meant to be exhaustive boundaries, they are samples, snapshots of what grace happened to be doing in those specific rooms when those specific letters were written. The mismatch between them is not a problem for scholars to solve or a contradiction to explain away, the mismatch is the answer, it is the proof.
Grace is not a vending machine with a fixed set of buttons where everyone who inserts the right coin gets the same packaged options. grace is a person giving freely to persons and a living giver does not hand out identical kits, he gives what is needed, where it is needed, when it is needed to whom he chooses. Have you ever taken one of those quizzes and felt vaguely boxed in by the result or felt that your gift was not on the official menu, the menu was always a sample, the giver was never limited to it.
Consider the 1 Corinthians material, right in the middle of teaching about the gifts, Paul stops listing them and he starts describing a body. The foot cannot announce that it has no place in the body just because it is not a hand. The ear cannot resign from the body on the grounds that it is not an eye. And the eye for all its importance cannot turn to the hand and declare that it has no need of it any more than the head can say so to the feet. Every part belongs, every part is necessary and then Paul twists the knife in the most beautiful way, the parts of the body that seem weaker, he says, are indispensable. And the parts you think less honorable, you clothe with greater honor and the unpresentable parts get treated with the most modesty and care of all. God arranged the body that way on purpose, Paul says, so that there would be no division and so that the members would care for one another.