1 Corinthians 12

Today’s Passage: 1 Corinthians 12

A church that had learned to rank its preachers was now ranking its gifts, and Paul takes up the whole tangled subject with a patience that is worth watching. He begins not with the gifts at all but with a memory and a test. These people had been pagans once, dragged along to idols that could not speak a word, and now the Spirit of the living God had come to dwell in them, so the first question about any spirit is not how loud or how strange it is but what it says about Jesus. From there the chapter opens into one of the most beautiful passages Paul ever wrote. There are different gifts, but the same Spirit. Different ministries, but the same Lord. Different ways of working, but the same God working all of them in all people. And the gift, whatever it is, was never handed out as a trophy. It was given for the common good. Then comes the picture that has fed the church ever since: a body, one body with many parts, where the foot cannot resign because it is not a hand and the eye cannot dismiss the hand because it does not need it, where the parts that look weakest turn out to be the ones you cannot live without, and where God Himself has arranged every member exactly as He wanted it. The chapter ends by naming the church plainly, “Now you are the body of Christ,” and then pointing past all the gifting to something better still, “a more excellent way,” which is where chapter thirteen will take us.

As you read, hold this: One Spirit hands out many different gifts to one body, so that no member of Christ may be despised and no member may boast.

1 Corinthians 12:1–3 (BSB)

¹ Now about spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be uninformed. ² You know that when you were pagans, you were influenced and led astray to mute idols. ³ Therefore I inform you that no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says, “Jesus be cursed,” and no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit.

Notice where Paul begins. Not with a list of gifts, but with their past. “When you were pagans, you were influenced and led astray to mute idols.” Sit with that phrase for a moment, because there is a whole sermon buried in it. The gods of Corinth had mouths of marble and could not speak, yet they had a strange power to move people about, carrying them along in processions and passions and frenzies while never once saying anything true. That was the religion these believers came out of, and Paul is warning them gently that a heart trained by such a religion will still be tempted to measure the Spirit by the size of the commotion. So he hands them a test, and it is startlingly simple. Never mind the volume. What does the spirit say about Jesus? No one speaking by the Spirit of God curses Him, and no one calls Him Lord except by the Holy Spirit. Both halves of that verse are worth taking to heart. The first gives you a plain rule for discerning any voice that claims to be from God, in that century or in ours: if it dishonors the Lord Jesus, it is not from the Spirit of God, whatever else it can do. And the second is pure comfort. If you can say from the bottom of your soul, “Jesus is Lord,” and mean it, then the Holy Spirit Himself has already done the deepest work in you that any gift could ever signify. The plainest confession in the church is the surest evidence of the Spirit’s presence.

1 Corinthians 12:4–6 (BSB)

⁴ There are different gifts, but the same Spirit. ⁵ There are different ministries, but the same Lord. ⁶ There are different ways of working, but the same God works all things in all people.

Three sentences, built the same way three times, and they lay the foundation for everything that follows. Different gifts (χάρισμα) charisma, pronounced KHAR-iss-mah. Strong's G5486, a gift of grace, freely given. This is one of Paul’s favorite words, and its root tells the whole story. It is built straight on charis, the word for grace, so a charisma is simply grace taking a particular shape in a particular person. Not a wage. Not an achievement. Not a badge of spiritual advancement. A thing given, and given freely, out of the same generosity that saved us in the first place. Paul uses the very same word in Romans for eternal life itself, “the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord,” and that is worth holding beside our chapter, because it means the gifts distributed here belong to the same family as salvation. They come from the open hand of God to people who had nothing to bring. That settles two things at once. It settles pride, for no one boasts about a present he did nothing to earn, and it settles envy, for the Giver decides what to give and He has never once made a mistake in the distribution. To call your ability a charisma is to confess that it is on loan from grace, and that it was placed in your hands for someone else’s good. , one Spirit. Different ministries, one Lord. Different ways of working, one God. The Corinthians had been staring at the differences and drawing lines through the church with them, and Paul does not deny the differences for a moment. They are real and God intends them. But he sets behind every one of them the same triple name, the Spirit, the Lord, the God who works all things in all people, so that no believer can ever look at the gift in his own hands and think it came from anywhere but the same fountain that supplied his brother. Let the shape of this sink in. If the Spirit is one, then variety is not a threat to unity but the very way that unity displays itself. A single light passing through a window comes out in a dozen colors, and nobody supposes there are a dozen suns. And there is a quiet dignity here for every believer who has ever felt like the plain one in a room of remarkable people. The word Paul chooses for the working of God in verse six is the word we get “energy” from. It is God who energizes all of them in all of them. Whatever is genuinely good in the least noticed servant in the congregation is the working of the same God who is at work in the most gifted.

1 Corinthians 12:7 (BSB)

⁷ Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.

Here is the hinge of the chapter, and every word in it is loaded. “To each one.” Not to the elite, not to a spiritual upper tier, but to each one, so that there is no such thing in the church of God as a member the Spirit passed over. Then the manifestation (φανέρωσις) phanerōsis, pronounced fah-NEH-roh-sis. Strong's G5321, a bringing to light, a manifestation. The word is rare, and Paul seems to have reached for it deliberately. It comes from the verb meaning to bring into the light, to make plain what was hidden, and the noun form appears only twice in all the New Testament, here and in the second letter to this same church. A phanerōsis is a showing forth, an unveiling. So think carefully about what Paul is claiming. The Holy Spirit is invisible. No one has ever seen Him, and no camera will ever catch Him. Yet when a believer teaches truth clearly, or gives out of a thin purse, or sits all night with the dying, or says the wise word that unties a knot no one else could untie, the invisible Spirit of God has just been made visible in the room. That is a staggering dignity to hang on ordinary service. It also explains why Paul will not let these gifts be treated as private property. A manifestation exists to be seen by somebody. It is light, and light was never made to be admired in the lamp but to fall on the faces of the people in the house. of the Spirit, which is to say that when a believer serves, something invisible is being made visible, and the God whom no eye has seen is showing Himself through ordinary people doing what He fitted them to do. And then the purpose, stated so plainly that it cannot be argued with: it is given for the common good (συμφέρω) sympherō, pronounced soom-FEH-roh. Strong's G4851, to bring together, to profit, to be advantageous. The phrase behind “for the common good” is pros to sympheron, from a verb that means literally to bring together, and from there to be profitable or advantageous. What is sympheron is what carries things together toward a good end. Paul uses the same verb elsewhere in this letter when he says that everything may be permissible but not everything is beneficial, and the sense is always the same: the question is not what I may do but what actually helps. Here it settles the purpose of every gift in the church of God. The Spirit does not distribute Himself to decorate individuals; He distributes Himself to build a people. So the honest question to put to any gift you have been given is not “How far will this take me?” but “Who is being carried along by this?” A gift used for display divides a congregation, and a gift used for service knits it. That is why the chapter can move so naturally from the list of gifts to the picture of a body. A body is exactly what you get when many different parts all spend themselves for the good of the whole, and it is the only thing the Spirit is building. . There is the sentence that would have reorganized the whole church at Corinth if they had let it. They were treating gifts as personal ornaments, evidence of a private standing with God to be displayed in the assembly and compared afterward. Paul says the gift was never yours in that sense at all. It was put into your hands the way a loaf is put into the hands of the one nearest the table, to be broken and passed down. Any use of a gift that leaves the giver more admired and the church no more built up has missed the reason it was given. And notice how this cuts both ways at once. It tells the impressive member that his gift is not about him, and it tells the overlooked member that what he has, however plain, is a genuine showing of the Spirit and the body actually needs it.

1 Corinthians 12:8–11 (BSB)

⁸ To one there is given through the Spirit the message of wisdom, to another the message of knowledge by the same Spirit, ⁹ to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by that one Spirit, ¹⁰ to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another distinguishing between spirits, to another speaking in various tongues, and to still another the interpretation of tongues. ¹¹ All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, who apportions them to each one as He determines.

Read the list slowly and then read the refrain that runs through it, because the refrain is doing more work than the list. Through the Spirit. By the same Spirit. By the same Spirit. By that one Spirit. And then the summary, “All these are the work of one and the same Spirit.” Paul cannot let a single item stand without stamping the same name on it. These were real gifts, really given to a real congregation in a real city, and the Corinthians could look around the room and see them. The message of wisdom and the message of knowledge, faith of the mountain-moving kind, healings, miracles, prophecy, the discerning of spirits, tongues and their interpretation. God was pleased to do all of that among them, and we should not read the chapter with a grudging spirit, as though we would rather it had not happened. Praise Him that it did.

But everything turns on the last clause, and the Corinthians needed it more than they knew. The Spirit “apportions them to each one as He determines.” He decides. Not the recipient, who did not choose his gift and cannot congratulate himself on it, and not the congregation, which cannot vote a gift into being or make one gift the entrance requirement for the rest. The distribution is the sovereign act of God, deliberate and personal, one to this one and another to that one, and He has never handed out a gift by accident. Take that in and two diseases die together. Pride dies, because what you were given was assigned to you and not earned by you. Envy dies, because what you were not given was withheld by a wisdom that loves you and knows what the body needs. The Spirit is not a resource we deploy. He is a Person who decides, and He is good.

1 Corinthians 12:12–13 (BSB)

¹² The body is a unit, though it is composed of many parts. And although its parts are many, they all form one body. So it is with Christ. ¹³ For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free, and we were all given one Spirit to drink.

Now the great picture arrives, and notice how Paul lands it. He builds the comparison carefully, one body (σῶμα) sōma, pronounced SO-mah. Strong's G4983, body, a living organized whole. The Greek word for body is one of the most ordinary words in the language, used for the physical frame of a person or an animal, and even for a corpse or the trunk of a tree. Paul takes that plain, earthy word and makes it one of the great theological terms of the New Testament. A sōma is not a heap of parts; it is a living whole, organized, animated, and utterly interdependent, in which nothing can be removed without loss and nothing functions alone. Two things follow, and the church has needed both in every century. First, the local congregation is not a club of like-minded individuals who share a building. It is an organism. When you cut yourself off from it you are not skipping a meeting; you are behaving like a hand that has decided to live on its own. Second, and more wonderful, this sōma has a Head, and the same apostle who calls the church a body calls Christ its Head. The life running through every member is His life. That is why the honor owed to the least member is real honor, for the body belongs to Him, and how you treat His body is how you treat Him. with many parts, many parts forming one body, and then instead of finishing with “so it is with the church,” which is what we expect, he says, “So it is with Christ.” That is not a slip of the pen. The church is not merely like a body. It is the body of Christ, joined to Him and filled with His Spirit, and to belong to the one is to belong to the other.

And how did anyone get into it? “In one Spirit we were all baptized into one body.” Look at the words “all” and “one” doing their patient work again. Whether Jews or Greeks, which in that world was the deepest division on earth, the difference of covenant and culture and centuries. Whether slave or free, which in Corinth was the difference between a person who owned his own body and a person who did not. Both walls fall in a single sentence, not because anyone abolished them by decree, but because one Spirit put every last one of them into one body. Then Paul adds a second picture, that we were “all given one Spirit to drink,” and a people who knew what thirst was in a Mediterranean summer would have felt it. The Spirit is not only the One who joined us; He is the One who satisfies us, poured out and taken in until He is inside each member alike. There is no second-class citizen in this body and no member drinking from a lesser stream. If you are in Christ, you were put there by the same Spirit that put in the greatest saint you have ever admired, and you drink from the same fountain he does.

1 Corinthians 12:14–17 (BSB)

¹⁴ For the body does not consist of one part, but of many. ¹⁵ If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. ¹⁶ And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. ¹⁷ If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be?

Here Paul turns to the member who wants to resign, and he speaks with a tenderness that is easy to miss because the picture is so homely. A foot looks up at a hand, sees something quicker and more skilled and far more admired, and concludes, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body.” An ear listens to the praise heaped on the eye and thinks the same thing. This is the ache of the overlooked believer in every congregation that ever met, the one who compares, comes up short, and quietly withdraws. And Paul’s answer is not flattery. He does not tell the foot that it is really a hand after all. He simply says that its self-assessment does not change the facts: it “would not make it any less a part of the body.” You do not get to excommunicate yourself by feeling ordinary. God put you in, and your low opinion of your usefulness has no authority to take you out.

Then, having comforted the foot, Paul asks the question that exposes how foolish the comparison was in the first place. “If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be?” Imagine it and you will laugh, and that is the point. A body made entirely of the most admired organ would not be a super-body; it would be a monster, blind to nothing and deaf to everything. The very thing the discouraged member wishes for, that everyone were like the gifted ones, would destroy the church. Your difference is not your disqualification. It is the reason God can hear through you what the eye will never see.

1 Corinthians 12:18–20 (BSB)

¹⁸ But in fact, God has arranged the members of the body, every one of them, according to His design. ¹⁹ If they were all one part, where would the body be? ²⁰ As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

“But in fact.” Paul cuts through all the anxious comparison with a statement of what is actually so, and it is a sentence to build a life on. “God has arranged the members of the body, every one of them, according to His design.” Every one of them. Not the prominent ones only, and not the ones anybody would have chosen. The word behind “arranged” is the word for setting a thing deliberately in its place, the way a builder sets a stone or a general positions his troops, and it stands in the perfect tense, meaning it was done and it stands done. Your place in the body is not an accident of history or the leftover after the important assignments were made. God set you there, on purpose, according to His own design, and He is not in the habit of misplacing His people. Praise Him for that. It means the quiet member with the unremarkable gift is exactly where the Designer wanted him, and the congregation that has learned to say so about every one of its members has learned something the Corinthians had not. And once more Paul asks his gentle question, “If they were all one part, where would the body be?” There would be no body at all, only a specimen. The many-ness is not a problem God is tolerating. It is the thing He made.

1 Corinthians 12:21–24 (BSB)

²¹ The eye cannot say to the hand, “I do not need you.” Nor can the head say to the feet, “I do not need you.” ²² On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, ²³ and the parts we consider less honorable, we treat with greater honor. And our unpresentable parts are treated with special modesty, ²⁴ whereas our presentable parts have no such need. But God has composed the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it,

Having steadied the member who felt useless, Paul now turns to the member who felt superior, and the rebuke is quieter than we might expect but it leaves nothing standing. “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I do not need you.’” Cannot. Not merely should not, as though it were bad manners. The eye is not able to do without the hand, whatever it may say, for an eye without hands sees the danger and cannot lift a finger against it. In the church this is the sin of the gifted, and it does not usually announce itself in words. It shows up as the assumption that certain members are essential and others are pleasant extras, that the meeting could go on quite well if the quiet ones stopped coming. Paul says the assumption is simply false as a matter of fact.

Then he presses further than mere mutual tolerance, and this is where the passage becomes glorious. The parts that “seem to be weaker are indispensable.” Seem. To eyes trained by Corinth, strength was obvious and weakness was obvious, and both judgments were wrong. Consider your own frame. The lungs and the heart are hidden, soft, easily injured, and you cannot live ten minutes without them, while the parts everyone admires could be lost and you would go on breathing. And notice what we all do without thinking: the parts we reckon less honorable we clothe with the greater care, covering and protecting what is tender and leaving the face bare. Human beings instinctively give extra honor where nature gave less display. And then Paul lifts the whole observation up to God, who has “composed the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it.” That is the character of our God laid bare in a single line. He is not drawn to the impressive. He deliberately dresses the overlooked in honor, in the body and in the church alike, and any congregation that gives its warmth to the visible and its leftovers to the hidden has got the mind of God exactly backwards.

1 Corinthians 12:25–26 (BSB)

²⁵ so that there should be no division in the body, but that its members should have mutual concern for one another. ²⁶ If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

Now we are told why God arranged things this way, and the reason reaches back to the very first chapter of the letter. “So that there should be no division in the body.” Division was the disease at Corinth from the beginning, the quarreling factions, the ranked apostles, the rich eating first at the Lord’s Table, and here Paul shows that God’s own way of composing the body was designed to make division impossible. Give the honor where it was lacking, and there is nothing left to fight over. In its place comes something warmer than a truce: “mutual concern for one another,” members actually caring about each other’s welfare as they care about their own.

And then verse twenty-six, which may be the most searching sentence in the chapter, because it does not command a feeling but describes a fact. “If one part suffers, every part suffers with it.” Strike your thumb with a hammer and your whole self says ouch. You do not decide to sympathize with your thumb; the pain is simply yours, because the thumb is you. That is what Paul says the church is like. When a member of the body is grieving, the grief belongs to all of us, and a congregation where one family can go through sorrow unnoticed is a body with something wrong in its nerves. But hear the second half too, because it is harder than the first and it is where love is really tested. “If one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.” It is a good deal easier to weep with someone who has been laid low than to be genuinely glad about someone who has been lifted up, especially if he was lifted into the place you had hoped for. A body that can rejoice at another member’s honor without a trace of sourness has been taught by the Spirit of God Himself.

1 Corinthians 12:27–28 (BSB)

²⁷ Now you are the body of Christ, and each of you is a member of it. ²⁸ And in the church God has appointed first of all apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles, and those with gifts of healing, helping, administration, and various tongues.

“Now you are the body of Christ, and each of you is a member of it.” Paul says it flatly to a congregation that had been squabbling and boasting and eating badly at the Lord’s Table, and he says it anyway, because it was true of them by grace and not by performance. Take the sentence personally and let it search you. You are not an audience for the body of Christ. You are a member of it, and the word means a limb, a living part with a function, not a name on a list.

Then he gives an ordering, and it is an ordering that quietly overturns the Corinthian scale of values. First apostles, second prophets, third teachers. The gifts they prized most highly are named toward the end, and the ministries of the word come first, because the church is founded and fed by the truth of God before it is anything else. And here is the place to say plainly, and only once, what we hold in this house. Those first offices were foundational in the strict sense. The apostles were the eyewitnesses of the risen Christ, sent with His own authority, and Paul tells another church that the household of God is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus Himself as the cornerstone.” A foundation is laid once. The miraculous sign gifts named here, the tongues, the prophecy that brought new revelation, the wonders that authenticated an apostle’s message before there was a New Testament to read, belonged to that founding age and to the laying of that foundation, and with the Scriptures now complete we do not look for fresh revelation binding on the conscience. Brothers and sisters we love read this differently, and we will not sneer at them for it. But note what does not change by a hair: the body is still the body. Everything Paul has said about the foot and the ear, about the weaker parts being indispensable, about suffering together and rejoicing together, applies to your congregation this morning exactly as it applied to theirs. The list of gifts has a history. The body does not expire.

1 Corinthians 12:29–31 (BSB)

²⁹ Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? ³⁰ Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? ³¹ But eagerly desire the greater gifts. And now I will show you the most excellent way.

Seven questions, and in the Greek every one of them is framed to expect the answer no. Are all apostles? No. Are all prophets? No. Do all speak in tongues? No. Paul is finishing what he began with the foot and the ear, and he is closing the door on the whole Corinthian project of finding one gift that every real Christian must have. If the answer to any of those questions were yes, the body would collapse back into the monstrous single organ he laughed at in verse seventeen. The variety is not a failure of distribution. It is the design.

And then the last verse turns, and it turns toward something the Corinthians had not even thought to want. “But eagerly desire the greater gifts.” He does not forbid desire; he redirects it, teaching them to want what builds the church most rather than what displays the individual best. Then he sets down his pen on the whole subject with one of the loveliest sentences in his letters: “And now I will show you the most excellent way.” Not a greater gift. A way. Something open to every member of the body, the foot as much as the hand, something no one is left out of because the Spirit apportioned it elsewhere. He is about to spend a whole chapter on love, and he has arranged the argument so that we arrive there breathless and ready. All the gifting in the world, sorted and ranked and admired, and then a quiet voice saying, there is something better than all of it, and you may have it.