1 Corinthians 12:1, spiritual gifts, all of this finally points back to Christ and that turn is not a tiny bow stapled onto the end, because a Bible study is supposed to end somewhere religious, consider where the word charisma came from. Charisma, the grace thing grown straight out of charis, grace itself and the New Testament is absolutely relentless about where grace comes from. Grace does not float free in the universe like weather settling at random on the deserving, it comes through one person.
The gifts are not impersonal spiritual energy dispensed to whoever qualifies, they are distributions from a particular giver, one with a face and a name. As another of Paul’s letters describes him, Philippians 2:6-8, he did not cling to his equality with God, but took the form of a servant and gave himself away completely, all the way down to a cross. The gifts carry his fingerprints all over them, they are unearned, because he is the kind of God who gives lavishly to people who could never possibly pay him back.
The gifts are wildly diverse, because he made a body and not a row of identical clones and they are worthless without love, because love is not some technique the church bolts onto its gifts to make them acceptable, love is his actual character. Love is the shape of the one who knelt and washed dirty feet the night before he died, the one who kept no record of the wrongs done to him even as they nailed him down. When Paul writes that love is patient and kind, that it is not arrogant, that it does not insist on its own way, that it bears all things and endures all things, he is not floating an abstract ideal, he is describing almost line-by-line the way God in Christ has actually treated us.
The love chapter (1 Corinthians 13) is a portrait before it is ever a command, you are asked to love like that only because you have already been loved exactly like that first. Which is also why a gift bent toward personal status is such a deep contradiction, not just a small mistake, it takes something that was born out of self-giving love and twists it back around to serve the self, it takes the fingerprints of the servant King and tries to use them to climb onto a throne, the gift and the giver are pulling in opposite directions and the gift loses every time.
The gifts are not impersonal spiritual energy dispensed to whoever qualifies, they are distributions from a particular giver, one with a face and a name. As another of Paul’s letters describes him, Philippians 2:6-8, he did not cling to his equality with God, but took the form of a servant and gave himself away completely, all the way down to a cross. The gifts carry his fingerprints all over them, they are unearned, because he is the kind of God who gives lavishly to people who could never possibly pay him back.
The gifts are wildly diverse, because he made a body and not a row of identical clones and they are worthless without love, because love is not some technique the church bolts onto its gifts to make them acceptable, love is his actual character. Love is the shape of the one who knelt and washed dirty feet the night before he died, the one who kept no record of the wrongs done to him even as they nailed him down. When Paul writes that love is patient and kind, that it is not arrogant, that it does not insist on its own way, that it bears all things and endures all things, he is not floating an abstract ideal, he is describing almost line-by-line the way God in Christ has actually treated us.
The love chapter (1 Corinthians 13) is a portrait before it is ever a command, you are asked to love like that only because you have already been loved exactly like that first. Which is also why a gift bent toward personal status is such a deep contradiction, not just a small mistake, it takes something that was born out of self-giving love and twists it back around to serve the self, it takes the fingerprints of the servant King and tries to use them to climb onto a throne, the gift and the giver are pulling in opposite directions and the gift loses every time.