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Practice: Index

A casebook can win an argument and leave a church exactly where it was. That would be a failure, and not only a practical one. The gifts are given "for the common good" (1 Corinthians 12:7), and the New Testament's one extended picture of them is a congregational meeting: "each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up" (14:26). Paul is not describing a conference. He is describing a room of ordinary Christians, some of them confused, learning to use what God gave them.

The practical turn

But an argument is not a practice. A church can agree that prophecy continues and still have no idea what to do on Sunday; it can believe in healing and still wound the person who is not healed. These five pages ask how a congregation seeks, tests, orders, and embodies the gifts.

They also take the case one step back, because application is only as good as the exegesis underneath it. If the reading of 1 Corinthians 12-14 in the gifts in the church is wrong, the practice built on it is wrong too.

The five pages

Page The question it answers
Seeking the gifts If the gifts are given, how does a church ask for them — and what if nothing seems to happen?
Testing the spirits How do we obey "test everything" without quenching the Spirit?
When healing does not come How do we pray and speak when the prayer of faith does not end in a cure?
The gifts in the local church What does an orderly, edifying meeting look like?
Love, the more excellent way Why is love the mode of the gifts and not their replacement?

The five rows above are the section's map.

Practice must follow the text

Practice has a way of becoming its own authority. A church has an experience, the experience is repeated, and soon the experience cannot be questioned — with Scripture quoted to decorate it rather than to judge it. That is how movements drift, and how the gifts acquire a bad name among people who love the Bible.

So the rule here is simple: nothing in this section may be done or believed on the strength of a later experience, a famous name, or a method that appears to work. It must be traceable to the text. Where the text commands, we obey. Where it describes, we may imitate cautiously. Where it is silent, we say so.

That is why the section runs in this order: desire, testing, perseverance, order, love — because the gifts are given to be desired, desire without discernment is credulity, and love builds where confusion scatters.

What this section will not do

It will not promise that everyone prayed for is healed, or that a technique will produce a gift. The Spirit "apportions to each one individually as he wills" (1 Corinthians 12:11), and a gift summoned by a method would not be a gift.

See also