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This morning we study through the letter that the Apostle Paul wrote to a church in the ancient city of Corinth: 1 Corinthians. We're almost through this book, and I invite you to turn to 1 Corinthians, chapter 14.
I'm going to read the entire chapter as Paul continues his encouragement and exhortation to this church. Here's what he says to them, beginning in verse one:
"Pursue love and earnestly desire spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy. For one who speaks in a tongue speaks not to men but to God, for no one understands him, but he utters mysteries in the Spirit. On the other hand, the one who prophesies speaks to people for their upbuilding, encouragement, and consolation. The one who speaks in a tongue builds up himself, but the one who prophesies builds up the church.
Now I want you all to speak in tongues, but even more to prophesy. The one who prophesies is greater than the one who speaks in tongues, unless someone interprets so that the church may be built up. Now, brothers, if I come to you speaking in tongues, how will I benefit you unless I bring you some revelation, or knowledge, or prophecy, or teaching?
If even lifeless instruments, such as the flute or the harp, do not give distinct notes, how will anyone know what is played? And if the bugle gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle? So with yourselves, if with your tongue you utter speech that is not intelligible, how will anyone know what is being said? For you will be speaking into the air. There are doubtless many different languages in the world, and none is without meaning. But if I do not know the meaning of the language, I will be a foreigner to the speaker, and the speaker a foreigner to me.
So with yourselves, since you are eager for manifestations of the Spirit, strive to excel in building up the church. Therefore, one who speaks in a tongue should pray that he may interpret. For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful. What am I to do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will pray with my mind also. I will sing praise with my spirit, but I will sing with my mind also. Otherwise, if you give thanks with your spirit, how can anyone in the position of an outsider say 'Amen' to your thanksgiving when he does not know what you are saying? For you may be giving thanks well enough, but the other person is not being built up.
I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you. Nevertheless, in the church, I would rather speak five words with my mind in order to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue.
Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature. In the Law it is written: 'By people of strange tongues and by the lips of foreigners will I speak to this people, and even then they will not listen to me, says the Lord.'
Thus, tongues are a sign not for believers, but for unbelievers, while prophecy is a sign not for unbelievers, but for believers. If, therefore, the whole church comes together and all speak in tongues, and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are out of your mind? But if all prophesy, and an unbeliever or outsider enters, he is convicted by all, he is called to account by all, the secrets of his heart are disclosed, and so, falling on his face, he will worship God and declare that God is really among you.
What then, brothers? When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up. If any speak in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three, and each in turn, and let someone interpret. But if there is no one to interpret, let each of them keep silent in church and speak to himself and to God. Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said. If a revelation is made to another sitting there, let the first be silent. For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all may be encouraged. The spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets. For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.
As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak but should be in submission, as the Law also says. If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home, for it is shameful for a woman to speak in the church.
Or was it from you that the word of God came? Or are you the only ones it has reached? If anyone thinks that he is a prophet or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord. If anyone does not recognize this, he is not recognized.
So, my brothers, earnestly desire to prophesy and do not forbid speaking in tongues. But all things should be done decently and in order.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
You may be seated.
Oh Lord God, we do pray for Your blessing and Your presence now. We ask that You would open our hearts and minds to receive Your word, that You would encourage us by it and build up Your church. In Jesus' name, Amen
When I was a brand-new Christian, I was not—I wasn't raised, um, going to church on Sunday typically. I was raised sort of nominally Roman Catholic. We would go to Mass once every three to four months. That's kind of how it was until I was in high school, and I started going to church on my own.
When I was a newer Christian, when I first began to follow Jesus, the church that I began attending was a church that believed that God was gifting people today with these gifts that Paul talks about here in 1 Corinthians, chapter 14—the gift of prophecy and the gift of tongues. We've talked about this a little bit over the last few weeks because this is really at the heart of 1 Corinthians 12-14.
Prophecy, in particular, was when the Spirit of God would come upon an individual, and they would be inspired to say something. It was, you know, miraculous. It was God-inspired speech, a revelation. And that's what Paul is talking about here—this gift, this miraculous gift of prophecy. Similarly, the gift of tongues—hopefully, you were listening when I was reading from the book of Acts, in Acts chapter 2—was the ability to speak in languages that you had never learned.
So, it'd be like, all of a sudden, right? You speak English—maybe English is the only language you speak—but all of a sudden, you're able to speak Chinese or Mandarin or, you know, Spanish or whatever it is, fluently. And in this particular language that you've never studied, you're declaring the mighty works of God. The gospel is going out. It was a miracle, right? Typically, you have to study for many years to be able to speak another language. This was a miraculous thing.
The church that I was attending as a newer believer was really into this—was really into these gifts of the Holy Spirit. And during the Sunday service, there were a couple of women who were a part of the church who, in between worship songs, would occasionally give a prophetic word. Some of you have been in churches that were, or are, like this as well.
Typically, the prophetic word sounded something like this: right in between worship songs, someone would stand up—one of these women in the church—and they'd say something like, "I believe the Lord is saying to me that there's someone here today who has been going through a difficult time with a family member, and God just wants you to trust Him, to let go of the anxiety you feel." Or something like, "I sense that there's someone here who has been turning away from the Lord. You're being tempted by something in your life, and God would just say to you, you need to renew your commitment to Me."
Oftentimes, these words of prophecy had scriptures attached to them: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding," or, "Rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I say rejoice."
Inevitably, as a newer Christian, I always thought these words of prophecy were for me—right? Like, directed to me. So, no matter what they said, I was like, "I'm totally turning away. I knew it!" You know, "I'm tempted by this, that, the other," and that's sort of how they functioned.
I got to the point, as a newer Christian, where before each service on Sunday, I would ask God to speak to me through one of these prophets—to give me a word. And I would wait with bated breath in the short interval, you know, that five to ten seconds before the next worship song would start. In between worship songs, I would wait with bated breath, wondering, "Is someone going to stand up and say something?"
I became so fixated on these prophetic words that when my mother decided to move us two hours away from where we were living, I was distraught. I depended on these. How would I survive the Christian life without these sure and specific words from the Lord? I quickly looked up the churches in the town where we were moving, and I called them, wanting to know one question. I'll never forget it. The phone rang, and the secretary of the Idlewild Bible Church picked up and said something like, "Good morning, Idlewild Bible Church. How can I help you?"
And I said, "Does your church have prophets?"
After a brief silence, the lady responded, "Excuse me?" To which I said, "Do you believe in prophets?"
"Oh, yes," she replied. "Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel..." She began to go down the list of the biblical prophets, and I interrupted her and said, "No, do you have prophets in your church who give words from God?" And she hung up the phone.
Well, she didn’t really hang up. She said, "I don’t think we do." And I was pretty bummed out. I was devastated. How can you live the Christian life without prophets?
And you’re probably wondering, "How in the world did you ever become a Presbyterian pastor?" Right? Like, you read 1 Corinthians 14, and you consider the description of the worship that’s taking place here that Paul describes, and you think about how that compares with our worship service—what we've been doing here this morning—and there are obvious discrepancies.
In 1 Corinthians 14, you have people taking turns praying out loud—sometimes in tongues, in other languages, sometimes as a prophetic utterance, saying, "Thus saith the Lord." And then you have the elders of the church weighing what is said, judging it, determining, you know, "What’s good? Is this solid? Is this legit?" It’d be sort of like if, in our service, the elders were all here gathered at the front, and one of you said, "I have a word from the Lord," and you stood up and began to share this inspired speech.
And as you were talking, maybe another person said, "Wait a minute, I—I've got a word from the Lord," and they stand up, and you sit down, and they begin to say, "Thus saith the Lord." And then the elders are saying, "Okay, this is legit," or, "I don't know that that was a word from the Lord." You know, we're weighing the things that are said, saying, "Amen," or "I'm not sure about that."
Paul says in verse 29 here, "Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said. If a revelation is made to another sitting there, let the first be silent."
And so, there's something of an elephant in the room. Why does our worship service look so different from what is described here in 1 Corinthians, chapter 14? There are a couple of possible answers. One is that we just aren't faithful to the Bible—worship should look like this, but we're missing the mark. The other is that while this passage describes what worship looked like in some first-century churches, it doesn't prescribe what worship was going to look like throughout all the ages.
In other words, this wasn't supposed to be a standard for the church throughout all ages. And while we can draw applications from this passage for today, God isn't ordinarily giving these miraculous gifts—like tongues and prophecy—as He was in the first century. Now, why might that be the case?
In short, the reason that's often given—you know, "Why isn’t God..." We’ve all asked this question: "Why isn’t God doing miracles like He was?" You know, you read the Bible, and you’re like, "People are being raised from the dead and healed of various diseases." And sure, you know, we hear about miracles happening, but it doesn't seem like it’s happening the way it was happening there in the Gospels.
What gives? Have we just fallen away so much as a church and as Christians?
Well, the reason often given is that the initial spread of the gospel was attended by an influx of miraculous activity—miraculous gifts and phenomena—in order to validate or confirm that this message is true. This is really God at work here.
Is there any biblical evidence for this? Well, the answer is yes. Consider what the author of Hebrews said, for example, in Hebrews 2:1-4:
"Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. For since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?"
He's saying that the message—that gospel—that you heard, we need to focus on it, lest we drift away from it. How can we escape if we neglect this great salvation?
Then he continues: "It was declared at first by the Lord." Jesus is the first one who preached the gospel. "And it was attested to us by those who heard, while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to His will."
Now, note how the author of Hebrews—some people think that St. Paul wrote the book of Hebrews—is writing perhaps a decade or two after 1 Corinthians was written. He ties the initial spread of the gospel to signs and wonders, which served the purpose of bearing witness to the veracity of the message.
This is how miracles in the Bible function—how miracles in the New Testament function—not so much as an end in and of themselves, but as a means of magnifying the message of the gospel, of saying, "This is real. Jesus really did rise from the dead. He really can forgive all of your sins."
Think about Acts 14:3, for example: "So they remained for a long time, speaking boldly the word of the Lord, who bore witness to the word of His grace, granting signs and wonders to be done by their hands."
It's also worth mentioning the Gospel of Mark. In Mark 2, do you remember when Jesus healed the paralytic? Why did He heal the paralytic? In John 2, He told the people that were gathered together, "Look, the reason I did this is so that you might know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins." Miracles are meant to confirm that Jesus Christ can forgive sins.
Of course, someone might ask, "Well, can't they still function that way today?" The answer to that would be yes. God is still able to do miracles whenever He pleases. In our confession of faith, in the section on providence—Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 5, Section 3—we read: "God, in His ordinary providence, maketh use of means, yet is free to work without, above, and against them at His pleasure."
Ordinarily, God works through means—the preaching of the holy gospel, the administration of the sacraments, a doctor, the advice of a friend. But God is free, because He is God, to work miraculously if He pleases—to heal, to providentially guide whenever He wants.
We're not against the idea that God is a miracle-working God. But we have to distinguish between how God ordinarily works in our lives as believers—to build us up and encourage us in our faith—and those extraordinary gifts or experiences that don't make up the ordinary life and diet of the church. They are anomalies.
We are, as a church, an "ordinary means of grace" type of church. What I mean by that is that we believe the primary way God builds us up as Christians—as a church body—isn't through daily supernatural experiences, but through daily bread—every word that comes from the mouth of God.
It's easy to pine after a religious experience, a new revelation, and to neglect or despise the revealed word of God—what He has already given to us and set down for us in Scripture.
To a degree, I fell into that trap as a newer believer. I went to church every Sunday hoping to hear from God—not first and foremost through the preached word, which seemed boring and basic. I wanted something more. Many people feel that way still.
There are many people, and there are many churches, that aren't really interested in the ordinary Christian life. They think real spirituality is like living on a mountaintop—you know, you're just on fire for Jesus 24/7, getting new words from God all the time. But the reality is, growth in the Christian life—growth as a follower of Jesus, sanctification, becoming more and more like Jesus—often does not feel like a continual mountaintop experience.
And I think everybody in this room, if you've been walking with Jesus for any amount of time, could say that. You could say, "Amen" to that.
It feels sometimes like hard work—like being committed to a church of people who are different from you, like hearing and not despising the preaching of the word, like learning to pray every day even when you don't feel like praying, like reading Holy Scripture, believing that God speaks to you through it, like serving others when you would rather serve yourself.
What does it look like? It looks like love. Sure, there are times where we feel more on fire for Jesus than at other moments, but the Christian life is not the constant pursuit of spiritual high. Rather, it is the constant pursuit of love, which often brings us low. And so Paul says again in verse one: "Pursue love and earnestly desire spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy."
What does it mean to pursue love? I've never really been hunting. I keep saying, "Man, that would be fun." Like, I would love to go hunting one of these days. I imagine it's a lot of work—getting ready, getting the hunting tags, traveling to wherever it is you're going to shoot deer or buffalo or whatever it is that you're hunting. I don't know if there's buffalo. And then there's the actual hunt—tracking the animal, stalking it, shooting it, and finally having the prize that you've worked so hard to win.
The closest we get occasionally as a family is fishing off the Coronado Pier, which is not as exciting. But even there, it is a process in and of itself. There are the poles and the hook, which can be dangerous. Then there's getting the right bait to make sure you catch something, getting everything ready, and getting your line in the water. But it's all worth it in the end. When you get your prize—when you see, for us, our six children reel in their first fish—it's awesome.
Now, it would be really hard to accidentally catch a fish. You have to go through a whole process. It would also be hard to accidentally hunt for an animal, shoot a deer, and in a similar way, you and I don’t ever love by accident. There’s a conscious choice to prepare and to pursue a particular prize. Christians are people who hunt for love.
The reason I'm saying that is because the word that the Apostle Paul uses here when he says "pursue love" is an interesting word. It's the Greek word "dioko," and more often than not in the New Testament, it’s translated as "persecute." To persecute someone is to harass them because of their beliefs—you’re fixated on this individual that you’re upset with or angry at. Paul said before his conversion, "I persecuted the Way to the death, binding and delivering to prison both men and women." Paul used to be a persecutor of Christians. He used to hunt Christians. But after Jesus, he became a fisher of men for Christ’s sake and a pursuer, or hunter, of love.
Don’t be a Christian who waits for love to come to you. "Well, if it presents itself to me, if a need presents itself to me, I’d be happy to help. I’d be happy to oblige," we say to ourselves. Instead of waiting, go hunting for love. See love as the great prize of your labor—the good of your brother or sister in Christ. Stalk their well-being. Pursue it, Paul says. If you just sit back and think, "Well, love will come to me sometime," your life will be a lot less full of love than it should be.
Now, here Paul says it's not just love that we should be pursuing, but we should also be after spiritual gifts. He says, "Pursue love and earnestly desire spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy." The priority of love doesn’t cancel out the need for spiritual gifts, but it should be the guiding principle behind our pursuit of spiritual gifts. Paul says some spiritual gifts are actually more valued than others, ranked higher.
For Paul, what makes some gifts superior to others? It’s whether or not they build up the church—whether or not they are intelligible. As Christians, we should seek to be understandable and upbuilding, edifying others. In other words, we’re a community of love, and when people come to us, our speech should not be impossible to understand.
Now, let me for a moment be critical of my own tradition—a Reformed church, a Reformed Presbyterian church. What are Reformed churches stereotypically known for? Is it love and deeds of mercy? Is it that our sermons are understandable? The Babylon Bee had a parody news article they shared at the beginning of this year with the heading: "Presbyterian Church to Begin Tasing Anyone Who Raises Hands During Worship." This is the stereotype. We are the frozen chosen, known by many for being more intellectual and theological than your average Bible church or evangelical church.
I saw a meme the other day that said, "Can’t afford seminary? Pick a fight with a Calvinist and get lectures for free." The stereotype is that Reformed churches are kind of cold, argumentative, and hard to understand—you need a theological degree, an advanced degree, to follow the sermons, which are mostly like academic lectures. Stereotypes exist for a reason. There’s probably some truth in this caricature, and it’s a shame.
Because here, Paul says, "If there’s anything that a church should be known for, it’s love and intelligibility." That doesn’t mean we water down the truth in any way. It doesn’t mean that everything is immediately understandable to people who don’t go to church. But Paul wants the church to be a place where even non-Christians come in and are convicted of the truth, called to account, so that falling on their faces, they might worship God and say, "He is truly among you" (verse 25).
I once heard Dr. Godfrey, a church historian, give a lecture on the spread of Pentecostalism. If you’re familiar with Pentecostalism, it believes in tongues and prophecy for today. Throughout the world, Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing Christian denomination. Dr. Godfrey was asking the question, "Why is that?" Here we are, confident that we believe the Bible, that our interpretation of the Bible is true, that we embrace the truth about God. Why do other movements, which differ significantly from ours, or even sects that may not even be Christian, grow at a far more rapid rate?
The professor suggested: Maybe it has something to do with the simplicity of the message. Have we so overthought the gospel that we can’t talk about it without making it sound confusing? Have we, in our preaching and teaching, in our conversation, lost something of the simplicity of the message? Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, and I am among those He came to rescue.
We may as well be talking in tongues in some of our churches, given the degree of interpretation needed for a person to be able to say "Amen." Rather than being known for being cold, insular, and hard to understand, would that our church was different from the stereotype. Would that people came to North Park Pres, even for the first time in their lives, and encountered the love of God in Christ Jesus in a way that did not minimize, water down, or set aside sound doctrine—but also did not make it hard to understand or unintelligible.
Would that we, as a church and as individuals, would be known as a people who hunt for love.
Sometimes Paul's encouragement to pursue spiritual gifts gets lost in the discussion about whether or not the miraculous gifts are still for today. Are they still being given today? His exhortation here often goes unmentioned in churches like ours that emphasize the ordinary work of God in the life of the church.
Just as people can adopt a passive view of love—"I'll get around to it if there's a need that I see"—we can also adopt a passive view when it comes to spiritual gifts. We can be clueless and say, "I don't know what my spiritual gift is, and I just don't really care." Or we can be resigned and say, "Well, I'm only good at X; I guess that's my spiritual gift." Then we accept the fact that we're just not good at evangelism, mercy, hospitality, generosity, or other gifts.
Here’s what Paul is saying: If there is something you don't have that you know would benefit the church, eagerly desire it. Pursue it. Ask God, by the grace of His Spirit, to fill you with a heart of hospitality, a heart of mercy. What he's talking about here isn't limited to miraculous charismatic gifts like prophecy and tongues. That means we shouldn't look at this passage and conclude, "Paul is exhorting us to desire spiritual gifts like prophecy, but since we think prophecy isn’t ordinarily given in the church today, this passage has no application for me."
No, the reason Paul emphasizes prophecy here is because of its ability to edify and build up. He does the same with the gift of interpretation of tongues. He says, "Look, if tongues are being spoken and someone interprets those unknown languages for the benefit of the rest of the church, then the gift is elevated. Now others are being built up too." It's the principle of intelligibility and edification that Paul is after in this passage.
That means we should be proactive as individuals in saying, "God, equip me to bless others, to build others up, to strengthen the church. Help me, with Your manifold gifts of grace, to clearly communicate the truth of the gospel so that people in the church can be edified and those outside the church might be convicted, have an encounter with Jesus, and come to faith."
Note how Paul is concerned that what we do in worship is geared toward building up the church, but he also wants non-Christians—people who aren’t part of this community—to understand what’s happening and grasp something of the truth of the gospel. There’s been a long-standing debate about what or who the church is for. Is it supposed to be seeker-sensitive? Is the church primarily focused on bringing outsiders in, or is it first and foremost for the building up of believers?
I think Paul gives us an answer here. For Paul, the priority is on building up believers, but not at the exclusion of non-believers. He is sensitive to both, and we should follow his lead. The ministry of the church is for the life of the world because Jesus Christ came into the world to seek and save sinners.
I often criticize my own tradition, so it's only fair that I place myself squarely in it. I've shared this before: A couple of Christmases ago, we were with my family. One of my aunts, along with her husband, was sitting around the table with us. My aunt, who doesn’t typically go to church, asked a question that every Christian hopes to be asked—or at least, I hope they do. She said, "What would you say the message of Christianity is all about? What is the gospel?"
You could not have asked for a better setup. I, being a pastor and seminary-trained, proceeded to speak in tongues. Not literally the gift of tongues, but I thought to myself, "Her husband is a philosophy professor, and she’s a psychologist. I’m going to have to give a real deep and philosophical presentation of the gospel." So I began by talking about the kingdom of God, how Jesus came to usher it in, how it's already here but not yet. I explained the eschatological tension we find in the gospels, how this all came about through the Son’s assumption of humanity via the hypostatic union, and so forth.
And everyone at the table looked at me like I was out of my mind.
They were thinking, "What are you talking about?" My sweet wife, the evangelist that she is, interrupted my lecture with a simple statement: "Isn't it about how Jesus came to save us from our sins?"
And I said, "Yeah, that’s it." She was right. There was something everyone around the table understood: Jesus came to save you. If you know Him, He gives you His Spirit and gifts you, by the grace of His Spirit, to serve Him and the people around you. Paul says we should seek those gifts out, and he calls us to hunt for love—to pursue it.
So let’s give careful thought to how we can do good to one another, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Let’s pray:
Father, we thank You for Your grace and mercy. We pray, Lord, that as a church, even with our love for sound doctrine and Your Word, and our commitment to good theology, that first and foremost, we would be characterized by the Spirit-wrought love that comes through faithfulness to Your Word—for one another and for all people.
God, help us to be a people who don’t create extra barriers for those who don’t yet understand Your grace. Help us to be a community that is understandable and intelligible, making clear the truth of the gospel for one another and for the world. We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.
