1 Corinthians 12:1-12 | Episode #996

August 4, 2025

Hope Alive: Applying God’s Word to Your Daily Life

1 Corinthians 12:1-12

I am Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and had been serving as a pastor for 25 years. I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life. The purpose of studying scripture is that you might know the character of Jesus Christ, and that you might see the world from the Father's perspective. That you gain wisdom that changes your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open His word to you and allow you to see Him and to know Him. To know His will, that you might glorify Him and that you might walk in faith and power each day, especially today. In Jesus name.

If you would like to revisit today’s Bible study, please visit our website at https://hopealive.buzzsprout.com/ to download the transcript. 

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Transcript

This is Chad Harrison, and you're listening to Hope Applying God's word to your daily life.

As we finish Faithful Finance, we want to produce our winter Bible study done at Lake Community Church on First Corinthians.

It'll be a fairly long Bible study.

We will break it up into different parts.

And so you will get a really good, really fast study through the book of 1 Corinthians before we move on to the book of Joshua.

1 Corinthians, chapter 12.

We're in First Corinthians, chapter 12.

This is written by the Apostle Paul,

and that's a critical understanding of first Corinthians. You also need to understand that Apostle Paul is considered by many one of the 10 smartest men to have ever lived.

And he is the author of the great majority of the New Testament, which would mean that his writings have influenced the world in a way that few people's writings have.

In fact, the truth is, nobody's writings have affected the world as much as the Apostle Paul.

And the Apostle Paul. Paul was the chief prosecutor for the nation of Israel.

And so he speaks with a legal mind, or he writes with a legal mind.

And so when he's writing these things, oftentimes you see him make sure he adds certain things that give you insight.

Sometimes they're even just.

They're not hidden to be hidden for hiding sake.

But. But you can just see him interweaving theology and understanding. Even when he's dealing with maybe just a common topic, maybe something that's not as exciting as some of the other things he's writing,

he writes in such a way that you can see the arguments behind it. And so tonight we're gonna go through the last five chapters of Corinthians and we're gonna deal with his teaching zone.

And in fact, that's how he it. He says now concerning spiritual or spirituals,

a lot of times you'll see many yalls Bibles, it'll say spiritual gifts. Many of your Bibles will have gifts. Italicized and the reason it's titalicized is because they've added that word so that the sentence might have more meaning to you or it might help you.

But the word gifts here is not in the passage.

Okay?

The word is now. He says now concerning spirituals. And he's going to spend the next four chapters dealing with spiritual matters. Whereas he was dealing with physical matters before. Okay, he was dealing with matters of church discipline.

He was dealing with matters of the Lord's Supper and things like that.

So now he's come along and he said, I'm going to deal with spiritual things,

and he's gonna deal with some of the things that we as the modern church have struggles with as far as how we operate and how we use and how we function with these gifts.

It says now, concerning spirituals, brethren,

I do not want you to be ignorant. Now remember, ignorance is not the inability to understand something.

It's the lack of knowledge in an area.

And so he's saying, I don't want you to be ignorant about these things. I want you to understand them.

And especially in the culture that we live in, this is a hot topic and a major issue, okay? And it has divided the church and in many ways has weakened the church and in many ways because of the division it's caused certain aspects of the church.

And when I talk about the church, I'm talking about the Catholic Church, the Church Universal, the universal Church of Jesus Christ. And. And it's happened in all denominations, including the Roman Catholic Church.

There's been a lot of divide about these gifts and about these understandings. And so it's not something that any aspect of Christendom has not had issues with,

especially for the last 100 years, okay? And so this is an important teaching he's going to give them and he's going to explain it to them.

And he says here, he says here, you know, that you were Gentiles, carried away with dumb idols.

However you were led. What he was saying is you were into all kinds of rituals and all kinds of weird idolatry and all kinds of funny things going on,

strange things,

things that whatever the priest of whatever temple you were at came up with,

you just carried away with them. And he says. He says that's not right,

okay? There is. There is structure and there's order to the worship of Jesus Christ. He says that quite clearly, the structure in order to the worship of Jesus Christ.

Therefore,

I make known to you that no one speaking by the Spirit of God calls Jesus accursed.

And no one can say that Jesus is Lord and except by the Holy Spirit. Now, what he's saying is, is the Holy Spirit glorifies God,

okay? And nobody's going to. Nobody's going to curse Jesus Christ.

No one's going to reject Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit.

And.

And no one can say that Jesus is. Is Lord. Nobody can. Nobody can affirm the lordship of Jesus Christ except by the Holy Spirit,

okay? And so he's explaining to you that when the Holy Spirit works and the Holy Spirit's Operating. And when somebody.

He's giving you, he's starting out. I'm not talking about lost people,

all right? I'm not talking about people who don't have the Holy Spirit indwelling them. He's telling you, I am talking about spiritual things.

And the,

and the,

and the genesis of spiritual things in your life is the work of the Holy Spirit by the will of the Father. And so he's saying,

we're not talking to people who say that Jesus isn't Lord, doesn't matter what they think,

all right? And we're not talking, we're not saying that. You can,

you can,

you can say somebody who, who you disagree with is not spiritual, is not born again. If they express that Jesus Christ is Lord.

If Jesus is Lord, he's their Lord. And that is an expression born of the Holy Spirit saying that they are born again,

okay? That's an expression of it. So he's trying to make sure that you understand when I get into this,

you can't start separating people out and telling. And this is on both sides of the issue,

okay? Some people say, well, they're nuts and they're not believers,

okay? And other people will say, well, if you don't have these gifts, you're not a believer, okay? And so before you know it, you have them divided into sections and denying the work of the Holy Spirit in the other people's lives.

He's making that statement up front.

That's one of those. When you're making a legal argument, that's one of those factuals that you'll put right at the front and say, this is a fact.

This is a fact. This is a fact. He's saying somebody expresses that Jesus is Lord, then he's Lord.

There are diversities of gifts,

but the same spirit.

Now this is real clear.

He's saying that everybody ain't the same.

Now, we talked about earlier in this Bible study, we talked about the, the, the, the difference between equity and equality.

We're all equal before the throne of Christ,

meaning that God loves us all the same and he loves us equally,

but we're not equitable before the throne of Christ.

What do I mean by that? Well, we're not the same.

We're not all the same,

okay?

So he is telling you that lack of sameness, that lack of not being exactly the same is not a result of humanity. It's a result of God's plan.

He is saying that here, and he's making sure you understand it. There are diversity of gifts,

but the same spirit Meaning it comes from God.

So this is something that is important to God,

and this is something that God desires so that he might use each person to uniquely glorify Him.

He says. He says there are different differences of ministries,

but the same Lord. I want you to notice he's weaving something in here. In verse four, he says there's diversity of gifts, but the same what Spirit?

He says there are differences in ministries, meaning there's different manifestations of God's ministry in a person's life, but they're the same what Lord? Who's the Lord Jesus. All right, then he says, and there are diversities of activities, meaning there's different ways.

Even if you have the same ministry,

that ministry might be carried out in all kinds of different activities,

but they're the same what God.

Theos, who works in all and all.

Now, if you'll notice in those three verses, he's telling you the way God works in each person is different.

But God is not different.

He is the Holy Spirit, the Son and the Father. And you see that woven in that passage, right?

He says the Holy Spirit.

He says, lord, the Lord, which is Jesus. And then he says,

and then he says the Father.

But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to each one for the profit of everyone or of all.

Meaning that the manifestation of the Holy Spirit in a single person's life is not for you,

it's for everyone.

It's not for you, it's not. It's for everyone.

He says, for to one is giving, given the word of wisdom through the Spirit.

What is that? Well, that's a understanding of the way the world operates from the, from the, from the knowledge and the view of God. So it's a word of wisdom,

he says, through the Spirit to another,

a word of knowledge. What is a word of knowledge? Well, as a word of knowledge is some. When somebody comes in and says,

says to a person,

I see this happening in your life. They're giving you an understanding of things that are happening that are going on, that are coming about in that person's life.

Okay, That's a word of knowledge. He says.

He says through the same spirit to another faith,

meaning the, the supernatural power of trusting God in situations where people don't naturally trust God.

He says to another, the gifts, the gifts of healing or of healings, I want you to notice it's not the gift of healings.

He says, the gifts of healings, which means there's many, many gifts and many, many manifestations of healing.

He says to another,

the working of miracles to another prophecy. And I'm going to define prophecy in a little bit, okay?

To another discerning of spirits, meaning to another, the ability to tell whether a spirit is from God or not from God.

To another. Different kinds of tongues. And he intentionally says different kinds of tongues.

Now, I'm. As we go through this, you're going to begin to realize that he is talking about this idea of tongues being in. In. In a ministry sense different.

In a.

In a setting or activity sense different.

And for the actual gift is actually different.

Okay. How that manifests in a person's life.

He says, and a lot of people say this is a lift list of the miraculous gifts, okay? When they try to categorize, categorize the gifts of the Holy Spirit, they call these the miraculous gifts.

I want you to hear me.

Anytime there is a list in scripture of the gifts of the Holy Spirit,

they're never identical.

They're never identical.

All right, so what. What does that say, Pastor? Well, what that means is if God's going to give me a list,

okay?

And they're not identical, one of two things has to be true. Either there's just one singular thing that's going on and I need to look for that one singular thing,

or these things are so numerous and many that there's no way to really define how that works out. And what you would call a spiritual gift in a certain person's life, how that manifests might be totally different than somebody else.

And you would even say it's a totally different gift, but it's not. It's the same.

So you don't even know what these things are.

When we go through these things I used to love, we used to have one. We used to do a spiritual gift inventory. And people would take a test and it'd tell them what gifts they had.

I don't know if y' all know this, but there's not a book of spiritual gift inventors in the Bible. There's not. You know, you know what the problem with that is, is that that, that narrowed it down to just 20 different gifts in a single context,

which is quite clearly against First Corinthians 12.

You. You don't. You can't say that. You can't operate that way.

You can't think of it that way.

He's telling us not to think of it that way.

But one and the same spirit works all things,

distributing to each one individually as he wills.

What he's saying is there's one spirit who's doing this work, and he's doing it throughout every individual as he wills to do it.

He says for as the body is one and has many members but all the members of that body being many are one body so also is Christ.

What he's saying is you've got a body and there's many parts to that body and there are individualistic parts to that body. They're very different but they're all a part of one body and so also is the body of Christ.

We're all part of one body no matter where you meet, no matter where you are,

no matter who you are if you are filled with the Holy Spirit if you're if you're in dwelt by the Holy Spirit if you're born again you are a part of the body of Christ.

As you go today I pray that the Lord will bless you and keep you that he'll make his face to shine upon you and that he will give you hope and peace today in Jesus name.