Most churches have given up trying to have any kind of blended music in their worship.  They have either chosen to have all hymns, all newer worship choruses, or have gone to 2 services– one of which is traditional and the other is more upbeat praise choruses.  The problem with this solution is that you end up having 2 separate congregations, and I believe can cheat the people of God out of the fuller experience of worship which a blended service offers.  If the church is too large to fit in the sanctuary for one service, then the leadership has to make some decisions, of course.  I believe the Lord has something fuller, richer and better for this congregation.  I didn’t have time to completely unfold for you what I wanted to say last week, so we are picking up where we left off.
To set this up, I want to begin by talking about the gifts the Spirit has given to us and how this is to be a important aspect of our worship.  We are in our third week of preaching about worship, one of the central pieces to the vision the Lord has given to us.  There are 5 pieces to this vision– we are to be whole-hearted in our love for the Lord, we are to be worshipers who seek to worship the Lord in Spirit and Truth.  These are the first 2 pieces to our vision– who God has called us to be as a church. 

God has given spiritual gifts to each member of this church.  If you know Jesus Christ, then you have been given one or more gifts which God desires to use to build up this body, and to make us into all that He wants us to be.  This morning we are looking at the truth that We are to worship the Lord using whatever gifts He has given to us, and receive blessing from Him through the gifts of others He has called into the same body.

I. We are to eagerly desire to use our spiritual gifts.
This passage is immediately after the “love” passage in chapter 13.  Paul has been admonishing the Christians in this particular church to love one another more than elevating any particular gift.  This church has been abusing the gift of tongues, and elevating this gift to a place it should not have.  Paul doesn’t teach us to forbid the gift of tongues anywhere in the passage, but he does clearly teach us that any gift which is used must be used in love. 

But notice the first thing he tells them– Christians, you are to eagerly desire spiritual gifts.  Are gifts bad or good?  Clearly they are good in Paul’s view– earnestly covet, or zealously desire spiritual gifts.  The wording here does not lead one to believe they are optional extras.  Some Christians believe htat this passage is only speaking about Christians in this church or in this era, but context does not allow for that misinterpretation.  These gifts are for us today.  Too long the church has been impoverished because Christian leaders have been afraid of or never sought after spiritual gifts which were intended by God to bless the body.  I haven’t heard too many Christians ever earnestly desire that God would give them a certain gift or any gift to be used to edify the body.  If you don’t yet know your spiritual gift or gifts, brothers and sisters, the Lord wants for you to know what it is and to use it.  This is an important aspect of our worship.  Worship is about giving– you give praise to the Lord, you give financial gifts back to the Lord as an offering, you give your time to serve so that the body is blessed, and you give your spiritual gift to be used by God to bless others.  I know this flies in the face of our culture, which tells you to get.  If you are given a gift, you hoard it for yourself!  You don’t give away what you have been given or you won’t have as much of it and more is always better, right?  Wrong!!

God’s economy works the opposite of the world.  If you truly want to experience the blessing of God in your life and in your worship, give yourself away to God in worship, give by faith what He has asked you to give financially, give away the gift He has given to you for that purpose.  As you give away, blessing is the result for the whole body of Christ, but also for you as you do what you were created by God to do.  This truth applies to every spiritual gift.  We believe that all the gifts still function today and have witnessed this truth in our church family.  Many of the gifts are “behind the scenes gifts, so may not be used on a Sunday morning per se, but here is what happens.  You are blessed with the gift of administration, and help organize a ministry retreat.  Many others are blessed by the retreat, and you get the blessing of seeing some of the fruit, and so used your gift as an act of worship to the Lord during the week.  You, and hopefully many others, have been using your gift during the week and others testify of the way they were blessed by the Lord through the ministry which you and many others put together.  You come to worship Sunday morning, and others are using their gifts also to bless you.  You come expectant, because you are already rejoicing at what God has done.  And you know He isn’t finished, but will continue to pour out His blessing on you.  As the Lord multiplies this acros all the members of the family, watch out when we come together to worship, because there is going to be an explosion of faith, which will result in revival.  By the way, the opposite is also true– one member withholds their gift, and so blessing is not passed along.  There is no faith given and no blessing received.  If this mentality is multiplied across the congregation, then I can already tell you what will happen when we come together to worship the next Sunday– next to nothing.

In other words, there is a direct connection between how we are worshiping all week and what is released on Sunday morning as we come together to corporately worship.  This is one of the reasons I know that Presbytery worship times are going to be excellent.  A group of Ruling and Teaching elders and their wives and others who have been giving themselves away come together to corporately seek the face of God.  Something fantastic is going to happen, and it doesn’t matter a whole lot what music has been selected, I already know that the Lord is going to show up and it is going to be good!!

II. Prophecy is used by God to bless His church, and the most important of the gifts.

I don’t know that I have ever heard a sermon preached on this passage, in part because most pastors don’t like what it says.  We area asked to zealously desire to know and use our spiritual gifts, especially the gift of prophecy.  The Greek is interesting here– we area to earnestly desire, which implies we are praying for and seeking to know and use our spiritual gifts, but much more to have and use the gift of prophecy.  Is prohecy a better gift than the other gifts?  This seems to fly in the face of other passages which talk about every part of the body needing every other part of the body, doesn’t it? 

Let’s put this in context so we can understand what is being communicated by Paul.  The Corinthian Christians are elevating the gift of tongues above other gifts, and so Paul is calling them back to a balanced and correct view of all the gifts.  First and foremost, all the gifts are to be exercised in the context of selfless love, or they are meaningless.  Second, all the gifts are to be desired and sought after by each of us, so that God’s grace might be poured thorugh us to others as an act of worship.  But third, prophecy is more valuable to edify the body of Christ, because it is a direct communication from God which everyone can understand.  In verse 5, Paul seems to equate the gifts of tongues with interpretation with prophesy, because in that case, the interpretation is understood and the body is edified.  A gift which builds up the whole body is better than a gift which simply edifies an individual.  Paul doesn’t forbid tongues– he encourages tongues.  But for the sake of the body of Christ, prophesy is a much more valuable gift!

At Trinity, we embrace both gifts, in fact all gifts if they are from the Holy Spirit.  This is perfectly in line with what we read in this passage.  Just to be clear, prophecy is an immediate communication from God to His people as inspired by the Holy Spirit.  Prophetic words come to people in various ways– for some of you it will be specific words the Spirit gives to you.  For others, it will be picture, but you know the meaning of the picture which was given.  For others, it will be a Scripture verse which is emblazoned upon your mind, which you know has been inspired by the Spirit of God.  For me personally, the Lord usually speaks to me in this third way.  Every word which a person receives at Trinity is taken through a biblical process we have set up.  No Word which comes from the Lord ill in any way violate or contradict anything in His written revealed will in the Scriptures.  The Scriptures are used to judge any Word given to the church.  If you believe the Lord has given you a Word of any kind, we want to hear it.  Simply submit this word to an elder who is seated in the back of the congregation.  That elder will find one other elder so the Word can be tested by biblical criteria, and affirmed by 2 or more witnesses, which is also biblical.  Then the person is invited to speak or give the word to the body.  We believe this process lines up with I Thessalonians 5:19 and I John 4:1-4, which call on your leaders to test the prophecies and to test everything to make sure it is from the Lord.
If God desires to speak 2 words to us as a family, I would rather hear those 2 words than 10,000 from any other source.  We need to hear any Word from the Lord.  I believe that the Lord desires to speak to us so that we know His will as a body.  Again, He often speaks through His written Word, but also speaks in the ways we have described.  We need and long for this to happen, because our passage this morning tells us to long for this kind of communication from the Lord, which implies we are praying for this to happen.

III. Our aim and confidence in worship as a church.

I am sharing these truths with you this morning for a couple of reasons.  First, we want each of you to seek the Lord and to ask Him to reveal to you your spiritual gift or gifts, so you can begin to walk with this church family to use your gift to bless the body as we have described.  Second, we want all the gifts to be expressed through the life of this family, becaue we believe this will both lead to a greater encounter with the Lord in worship, and will bless your socks off as you both give away your gift and receive blessing of grace through others who are giving away their gifts.  Third, we need to hear from the Lord, and I wanted to remind you that this stance we have on the Scriptures about spiritual gifts is both balanced and biblical.  And my last reason for unfolding thes things this morning has to do with our whole worship life and experience as a church.

Several years ago, the Lord spoke a prophetic word through a visitor, which I believe is God’s heart for Trinity.  Because this word was from a visitor, I wrote her back to glean more information from her, but I believe this was and is from the Lord.  The elders have seen this and affirmed it as a group a few years ago, and it lines up with other things we have seen and heard from the Lord. 

Before I came to Trinity, the Lord had prepared me for this church through other experiences in worship I had at the last church and even with the para-church campus ministry we worked in for years.  So, when this word came to us, it wasn’t a surprise in that sense of something I had never thought of, but reaffirmed what I already knew to be the Lord’s mind.  The prophetic word said:

“I see what has taken you so long to do
The hours you have labored
The tears you have shed.
And know that I am now about to birth something in your midst,
Something that no committee, no board, no member can argue with;
For it will be Holy and pure
And no man’s hand will be able to touch it.
You have the old and it is good;
And there are some who want to do away with the old to make room for the new.
But I tell you– you will see the old and the new together– and I am in their midst.
But why you say, does not your Word say that new wine must be put into new wineskins?

I believe the Lord is bringing this to pass.  I also believe that we are to be a church which embraces the old and new; which prefers one another above ourselves in such a way that we long for others to be blessed so much that we will gladly submit our personal preferences to bless others.  As I wrote the women who wrote this to us back in 2002, she told me several other interesting and exciting things.  She said she had never done this before, and it was merely by God’s sovereign direction that she and her friend showed up at Trinity that morning.  She is a Marketing Analyst by profession, and is a reserved and analytical person by nature, and not very emotional.  Yet she wept and prayed all the way home on her 4 hour drive.  She wrote back to several questions which I asked and said she sensed that we were not to be church filled with programs, but rather Holy Spirit inspired ways of doing things.  There will be such unity that the rest of the world will stand and scratch their heads wondering how it is possible.  She said she saw new buildings and phenomenal growth– many people had tears int heir eyes and I knew that God was purifying them with the gift of repentance.