1 Corinthians 12:1, spiritual gifts, love, that is more excellent way Paul promised, it is not a better gift to add to the top of the list, it is a different kind of thing altogether, the very thing the gifts were always meant to be carrying. Love is not item number one on the inventory of gifts, love is the reason the inventory exists at all. Strip it out and the most spectacular gift in the room becomes noise and noise builds nothing and building was always the entire point. Consider the full shape of what Paul has built come into focus, because every piece has been laid with intention.
A grace thing, first of all, handed out by a generous God, never earned and never deserved, because the word itself forbids it, distributed personally and sovereignly as the Holy Spirit wills, so that no two believers carry exactly the same equipment and no list could ever capture the whole range. Placed deliberately inside a body where the entire genius of the design is that the parts are different, the differences are necessary and ranking the parts against each other is a sickness and then the whole arrangement set in motion by love, because a gift exercised without love is a gong in an empty room and a gong builds nothing. Consider all of that together and you can finally see what the gifts of the Holy Spirit are actually for, they are for building.
The word Paul keeps circling back to throughout these chapters, 12, 13, 14 in 1 Corinthians is a word older translations render as edification, which sounds abstract and churchy until you remember that it is simply a construction word. To edify is to build a structure, to raise something up stone-by-stone, that is the purpose of the gifts, they are not handed out so that you can finally discover how special and uniquely talented you are, they are handed out so that the body gets built stronger and more mature and more unified until, as Paul puts it in another letter, Ephesians 4:13-16, it grows up into the full stature of Christ himself.
The gift points away from the person holding it, it points away from you every single time, it points toward the people it was given to serve and beyond them toward the one who gave it in the first place. Underneath the whole passage runs a drum beat that makes the same point another way, as Paul rattles through the variety of gifts and services and activities, he keeps repeating one phrase like a refrain. The same Holy Spirit, the same Lord, the same God who works all of them and everyone, different gifts Paul keeps saying, same source, he is doing something deliberate with that.
A grace thing, first of all, handed out by a generous God, never earned and never deserved, because the word itself forbids it, distributed personally and sovereignly as the Holy Spirit wills, so that no two believers carry exactly the same equipment and no list could ever capture the whole range. Placed deliberately inside a body where the entire genius of the design is that the parts are different, the differences are necessary and ranking the parts against each other is a sickness and then the whole arrangement set in motion by love, because a gift exercised without love is a gong in an empty room and a gong builds nothing. Consider all of that together and you can finally see what the gifts of the Holy Spirit are actually for, they are for building.
The word Paul keeps circling back to throughout these chapters, 12, 13, 14 in 1 Corinthians is a word older translations render as edification, which sounds abstract and churchy until you remember that it is simply a construction word. To edify is to build a structure, to raise something up stone-by-stone, that is the purpose of the gifts, they are not handed out so that you can finally discover how special and uniquely talented you are, they are handed out so that the body gets built stronger and more mature and more unified until, as Paul puts it in another letter, Ephesians 4:13-16, it grows up into the full stature of Christ himself.
The gift points away from the person holding it, it points away from you every single time, it points toward the people it was given to serve and beyond them toward the one who gave it in the first place. Underneath the whole passage runs a drum beat that makes the same point another way, as Paul rattles through the variety of gifts and services and activities, he keeps repeating one phrase like a refrain. The same Holy Spirit, the same Lord, the same God who works all of them and everyone, different gifts Paul keeps saying, same source, he is doing something deliberate with that.