Paul’s Letter to the Romans
A good toe-nail is not an unsuccessful attempt at a brain: and if it were conscious it would delight in being simply a good toe-nail.
– C. S. Lewis (1898 – 1963),
This evening, we will get together for Week 11 of 12 in our “Make Disciples.” series. Below you will find links to an overview of the full 12 weeks and for the eleventh area on the map, Experiencing God’s Power: Spiritual Gifts.
During the 12 weeks, we are addressing areas on a comprehensive discipleship map. After discussing each area, we will try to establish Milestones that would provide evidence of personal spiritual growth – markers that we work toward.
The Letters of Paul
God builds the church out of a variety of people who have a variety of spiritual gifts. All of them are needed.
We might imagine we have to be very special people to be used in some significant way by the Almighty. If we think so we are mistaken. In this very personal letter we know as 3 John, the elderly apostle reveals that it is a very simple thing to become a fellow worker for the truth.
(And by the way, at the end there is a song performed by two Amish sisters from Northern Indiana who have lately been attending Horizon Central while in Indianapolis. That alone is worth a listen.)
Immaturity can be defined as imperfection, greenness, unpreparedness, inexperience, childishness or ineptitude. In this section, Paul shows us how a church can grow up – how a church can become mature, ripe and fruitful in the deepest spiritual sense.
Chuck Smith in his book Charisma Versus Charismania begins with a story of the abuse of the gift of tongues that he witnessed as a young man. The church in 1st Century Corinth bore some similarity to the church of Chuck Smith’s 20th Century youth. It seems some of things that made Chuck uneasy made the Apostle Paul uneasy too. Today’s chapter deals with a church’s prioritizing and use of the Holy Spirit’s gifts.
Perhaps the biggest problem in the Corinthian Church was disunity. This disunity came out in any number of ways, but these were mostly symptoms of one core fault: The church in Corinth as a group did not value each member’s place within the church. Paul takes on this problem of disunity by comparing the church to a body, specifically, the body of Christ. He explains that the body is composed of people who all have differing spiritual gifts.
