Father, you are faithful. We are learning. We have a long ways to go, but we're moving rapidly through the work of your Spirit in our lives. You bring things in, and our prayer is for you to move the mountain. And you keep those things in our lives and your instructions are to learn how to climb. And so may we trust you. May we not get frustrated. May we not get wrapped up in ourselves. May our focus be your son Jesus Christ. And as we teach some more on the spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12 to 14, may the big picture be obvious. May the details be clear and may you help us forget much of what we've been taught in the past because so many have not taken time to really look at the text. They're passing on what is comfortable or what's convenient or what seems to make sense. But I thank you for the details that you've given to us and pray that those would come out and that we would be able to obey you in all that you've told us to do, especially in the area of loving. you, but especially loving one another. So thank you for this time, Father. Use it for your glory, I pray. In Jesus' name, amen. Chapter 13 is a little more, 1 Corinthians 13 is a little more academic. He's just kind of going through and giving details. He gets back into more of the personal side of it when he gets into chapter 14. So forgive me if it comes across that way, but that's how it's taught, or that's how it's presented. We're looking back now just into chapter 13, the first three verses. Spiritual gifts without God's love are Worthless, useless, accomplish nothing. So we wanna keep that in mind as we looked at the first three verses that were bringing up gifts and how they were, they may have been to the extreme and even an exaggeration, but without love, worthless. So if you lock just into that thought with the idea of spiritual gifts as people claim to be doing them today, most of it is being done wrong. And again, I have a position that I think the gifts are gone. I'll explain that a little bit today. I think they had a purpose and God used them and they are to have been taking us along. They were crushes to get us to a position of walking by the Spirit and not waiting on somebody else. to be the giver, or somebody else to be the helper, or the teacher, or whatever it may have been, and realizing that that is a role that you've given to all of us. And so, we need to reflect. I'd written down a note to remind myself, and there it went. And again, just the process here. Gifts are not to exalt men, and how are the Corinthians doing with that? They were selfishly exalting themselves and they were getting everything upside down and backwards. But at the same time, the spiritual gifts are not to excuse men. Oh, I don't have that gift. I've heard that many times in my life. And so as we looked at that, it didn't give us the right to independently stand up and try to draw attention to ourselves, nor did it give us the right to sit back and let somebody else do it. If the gifts are really gone, which is a Jack Ebner teaching and very few others, so if you don't agree with that, you're in good company. But if they really are gone, it's a time for us to step up and ask God where do we fit in. What's lacking today, especially in the men of our society is Leadership and love would be part of that. The reason men don't want to lead is because they get shot down. That is a selfish response on the man's part. The reason men don't want to lead is many of them were not trained by their fathers and their grandfathers. They didn't get the background and so they make the excuses, I don't know how to do that. That's an unloving excuse. See, what a man does, just like a soldier, if you got out to the battlefront and you had never been in combat before, do you stand back and say, okay, everybody that's been shot at, you guys go up front and show me how to do it. Is that how it works? How well would those guys respond to you? If you didn't move fast enough, they'd show you how to shoot by aiming it at you. Friendly fire as they called it. And so there's a lot of that going on today where we're making excuses rather than obeying scripture and learning how to be mature and how to love one another even when I don't feel like it because love is not a feeling. It's an act of the will. Our feelings get hurt and the first thing we do is run to our flesh to give a response back. We dump the Holy Spirit. This isn't working. I don't like this. And the Holy Spirit isn't doing anything about it, so I'm gonna do something about it. And that's a tendency on our part. It's very dangerous. So spiritual gifts without God's love are useless, and we need to understand that from Paul's teaching in verses one to three. But secondly, in verses four to seven, genuine love is supernaturally sacrificial. And I keep stressing the supernatural because I keep having people come up to you and said, well, if spiritual gifts are gone, then there are no people helping. There are no people giving. There's no people with faith. There's no, and it's like, that has nothing to do with it. And we're going to explain some of that this morning. When somebody had the spiritual gift of prophesying, the first one we're going to mention here, they didn't just walk around prophesying. It wasn't something they did 24 hours a day. When did they do it? when God gave them a word, just like the prophets of the Old Testament and John and the apostles, whenever they received a word, that's what they passed on. When they didn't get it, they would, in scripture, wait 10 days. Finally, God spoke to them and they told them what they were to do. So when they got to church and everybody is doing their own thing, it's not coming from God. So Paul writes to them, we're gonna see that in chapter 14, and he puts boundaries on both prophesying, how many? You're not reading ahead, chapter 14, you need to get the big context. Two or at the most three are gonna be prophesying and all of them are going to be. interpreted or they're going to be scrutinized by the other prophets to make sure this is real. The first thing they're going to look for is, is this biblical? Is this conflicted with something that God has already taught us? Then it isn't from God. Men's group brought that up last Sunday night. We recognize that you can prophesy and you can claim it, but if it isn't true, it isn't from God. And there's a lot of that going on, but they were limited. In church, they prophesied two or at the most three on a given Sunday. That was it. You would think, and some are thinking, that they walked around with this gift during the week and all of a sudden you'd walk over and the guy would be sitting there and he goes, I got a message. And they just start spouting it off. And you see a lot of that being claimed today on TV. That's not how it works. It's not how God instructed it. And we have the scriptures completed, so the foundational gifts of apostle and prophet are gone. Exodus, I mean, Ephesians 2, 20. Very clear is the foundation, Jesus Christ himself being the cornerstone. You guys are really quiet, so this must be information that has not been taught regularly. I don't think it's in your study Bibles, but it's in your text. And this is all I ever tell you to do is read your Bible. And then when you get down and you wanna get nitty gritty, you've gotta get to the language. You're not gonna understand what's going on, and we're gonna see some of that, until you understand what the Greek language in the New Testament is trying to bring out. You don't have to be a scholar. None of us are. But you need to examine what's there and find out, why did he write it this way? So the whole issue comes down to this last section, eight to 13, that genuine love is forever superior to all of the gifts. You wanna pursue something? He's gonna tell you in chapter 14, verse one, pursue love. Don't be running after the gifts. Love is far superior to them. Figure out how to love one another through the work of the Holy Spirit in your life. Figure out how to tell your flesh. No. 1 Corinthians 9, Paul buffeted his body. That's not buffeted his body. Buffeted his body, made it his slave, lest after he had preached to others, he himself should be a castaway. He doesn't mean losing his salvation, but being useless, something you just throw away. That is not what he wanted. And so as Paul's trying to explain this here, we stress here that love is an act of the will. That's why in spite of all the songs we sing, you don't fall in love. You may fall into, what do we call it? Puppy love, infatuation. You may be like some in the Bible, I gotta have her. She's gotta be the one in my life. What is it gonna take? Bevis, we were just watching a movie the other night, and they're traveling on a wagon train, love comes something, one of those love things, and they're on the wagon train, and the wife dies of the one gentleman, and the husband dies of the woman, and he takes her in and marries her because she had to live somewhere, but that was not the intent. She was leaving in the spring. And you watch love developing because it's an act of the will. It was not a feeling that was there immediate. It wasn't looks that made it happen, which is what many people claim today. They're infatuated. Instead of saying, I love you, they should be saying, I lust you. That's the message that's coming out, because they don't understand what love is. Love is all the characteristics we just looked at last week. It's patient, it's kind, and unselfish really summarizes a few of those others. It's not about itself. That's why it will die for others. That's why this whole idea here that it is a selfless, sacrificial devotion. When God so loved the world, it wasn't because we looked good. It wasn't because we had something that he wanted. If anything, we were repugnant to him. That's where love shines. That's where it really stands out. That's where we need to understand, if you're really a believer, how to make this work and you commit yourself to love. You ignore your feelings. As you hang on the cross, you say, Father, forgive them. They know not what they do. You are not focused on yourself. You're focused on others. You are sacrificially devoted them in a selfless way. And so as we get into this, I need you to understand here, those background areas need to be crystal clear. And you also recognize as we go through what I mentioned, Observation's the key. Everybody wants application today. Everybody wants preachers, as I've shared a couple weeks ago, that are just telling them stories and making them laugh, making them cry, making it so enjoyable. It's like I've been at the movies and they entertain. The problem is they're trying to use the Word of God to make the application, but they never observe what it said. How are you doing with your observation? When you read, you kind of race through it, up, got my reading done, check, what's next? What does your spouse or your boss have to call you up and say, where are you? I got so wrapped up in the scriptures and just the time of prayer and enjoying the Lord and recognizing the things he wanted to work on in my life and just, we were having a great time and I just lost all track of time. That's what God wants in our lives. So he goes into this section with this uselessness of gifts without love to this supernatural sacrificial description he gave into this section here where he's pointing out why and how it's superior. Look at verse 8, finally getting to the text. He says, love never fails. We usually attach that on to verse seven. We think it's just kind of a summary of the qualification, but in reality, it stands alone. It's trying to bring out something. So he takes the word love, agape, as we've described it and been working on it, and he says, never, it never is out of use. It is the issue where he's trying to bring out, not even at any time does it stop working. That's just what love is. And it never fails, literally the word here, It's a present tense, it's never falling. It's the word falls. And you kind of go, well that's kind of weird why they translate it fails. And literally, the idea of falling here is to come to ruin, to become null and void. Love never goes there. Lust does. Spiritual gifts do. Other things that we do selfishly do. But love never changes. It never varies. It never alters. It's never made inactive or inoperative in any way, shape, or form. It's eternal. And what you'll find here is this word is used of describing a leaf from a tree, a leaf falling to the ground, withering and decaying. That's what he's saying here that love never does. So how do we use the term today? What happened to people's love? They would say things like, we don't love each other anymore. Well, if that's true, you never did. Because love never fails. Love never falls. Love never becomes inoperative. You had a relationship based on mutual appreciation, benefit, finances, the kids. You make all these other decisions instead of recognizing that if you really want the best home and the best marriage, you decide to love. That's it, 100%. When I do counseling, I stress to individuals I'm sharing with, love gives 100%. It's not a 50-50 proposition. Never has been, never will be. So no matter what your spouse does, and believe me, some spouses turn out to not be believers, and they wander off or they do things, heaven forbid they spend all of your money, that's the worst one, that's worthy of divorce right there, right? Never, because the love never gives up. Your money at marriage becomes their money. Now you may need to figure out some ways to stop the bleeding. but you always do it for their best interest and to help them. So love here is a clear proclamation. It never falls to the ground. It survives everything. It holds its place. It never becomes null and void or coming to ruin. That's what he's stressing right off, because now he's gonna examine some things to help us to see how that works. Gifts do, love doesn't. We're going back to the context. This is what's left out a lot. When you get to the perfect, they always want to throw stuff in there that has nothing to do with the context. And I'm sure your study Bibles tell you it's the return of Christ or the completion of the scriptures, or who knows how many other things have come up. And I'm going, where did that come from? When you're talking to somebody, you all of a sudden throw some totally unrelated thing in the middle of your sentence or your conversation, and then go back to the other, and they sit there and look at you like, what? Well, that's what too many people are doing because they're skipping observation and they're trying to move into, well, I got to come up with interpretation, which is what does it mean? Well, how do you know what it means if you never looked at what it says? And then you finally figure out, well, what does it mean to me? How does this work in my life? And that's what everybody's eager to do today. They skip the hard steps. They skip the work because all they want to do is, I want it easy, easy, easy. I want a handout. I want to be a baby bird in the nest where mom feeds me the rest of my life. Wouldn't that be great? Instead of bringing me these chewed up pre-digested worms, you know, start bringing me some Taco Bell or McDonald's or, you know, some things that I really enjoy. But I'm still going to just stay in the nest. It's comfortable here. Nice view, away from the predators. You're understanding my point. This is where we're at. This is not love. So if you think love's gonna get easier in this world, it's not in America because America is going further and further away from God. And so in turn, they're going further and further away from genuine love. Don't use the world as an example. Don't hold out and say, well, if they treat me right, I'll treat them right. That's not love. Love's not waiting for somebody else to do the right thing before they act. Love is an act of the will on my part. It never fails. So it goes into the description of the context here, and he's trying to bring out, but if there are gifts of prophecy, literally, but if prophecies, plural, they will be done away. If tongues, plural, they will cease. If knowledge, singular, it will be done away. So he picks on three. Why those three? Did you notice what he talked about up earlier in the chapter? For, excuse me, first one was tongues. He's trying to talk about this and some think that this is related in some way. Then the second one in verse two, prophecy. Then in verse three, you guys are quiet today. giving, if you wanna summarize in something, sacrifice. But he's laying out three, then he gets down here, he mixes them up, and he brings up a couple other things. A word of knowledge is number three is only mentioned back in chapter 12, verse eight. We don't know what it is. We don't know what a word of faith is. But it's singular. And he brings these up here for a reason. He's trying to point out that even though you may be impressed with prophecy, you may be impressed with tongues, you may be impressed with this instantaneous, supernatural, experiential knowledge that all of a sudden got dumped on somebody. And they're standing there describing the moon to you. In detail, how far in their foots went in the little dust. My dad worked on some things to do with the moon back at Lockheed. And he said when they built those landers, they put those big, huge pads on them because they thought there's going to be two to three feet of moon dust. Well, they should have realized when they got about two and a half inches that their calculations were somewhat out of whack. I'd play it safe, believe me, if you didn't know. But if I told you before they ever landed on the moon what it was going to be like, all the details, what the dust was going to be like, and if I even recognized experiential knowledge as if I had been through it, I had perceived it and understood it all by myself. You'd be pretty impressed when that took place. It's not a prophecy in the same way as it is a recognition that I know, as if I had been there. This is the three things he's bringing out here. But he says if prophecy is plural, the supernatural ability to receive revelation from God and pass it on to the church, because it's when the church was gathered, which was God's position there, it's the most valuable one. He says they're gonna be done away. Put out of use. It's a passive. The prophecies aren't gonna sit around, okay, let's get some prophecies together and they're gonna have a talk and say, okay, we just need to stop. That's not how it's gonna work. They're gonna be stopped and caused to come to an end, rendered inoperative. Why would that be? This is the simplest one to understand because it was foundational. Once the revelation had been passed on and the scriptures had been completed, why do I need a prophet? And so when John gets to the end of Revelation, he says, don't add to this book. Don't take away from this book either, but don't add because now you're revealing more information directly from God. Don't do that. So it's pretty straightforward, pretty simple, right there in the text. He picks on a second one because this is the one they were elevating, even though Paul had taught them in chapter 12, that this is the least of the gifts. He says, if tongues, and then he changes over from the passive to a middle. It says, they will cease. They will stop themselves. They will take their rest. Why is that? When you get over to 1 Corinthians 14, 22, which we'll take some time in the next three weeks to look at, two weeks from today, Lord willing, you realize the only purpose of tongues was to be a sign to unbelieving Jews. I heard on the radio two times this week, one person was kind of disappointed that somebody on the mission field wasn't able to speak in tongues, so they weren't able to share the gospel. The Bible doesn't tell you that tongues are for sharing the gospel. Even on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2, they didn't share the gospel in tongues. It was all 12 of the apostles, well 11 at that point, and then they picked a new one. All 11 of them that spoke in tongues, even in the dialect of the listeners, which was supernaturally, instantaneously given to them. But when Peter shared the message that brought 3,000 people to Christ, he was not speaking in tongues. It was described in 1112, right in that area there, of what had occurred. It was a sign. And what did the Jews do? They all came. They had tongues of fire over their heads. They all gone, what is this? They must be drunk. There must be some human explanation of what's going on here. Nope. It was a sign from God. It was an attention getter. Like a road sign on the road. Dangerous turn ahead. 15 miles an hour. Hard right. I don't believe that. I'm not listening to the sign. I'm not following the sign. I'm going to shoot off into the river. That's kind of what the Jews were doing ultimately as a nation, but a few believe, but it was for a sign. That's what it was to draw them in. It was serving the church when 3000 people became the church. and so it had a purpose to serve. But it says they will cease, middle voice, I know that you don't like to get hung up on that. You understand passive, you understand active, but the Greek has the middle where it does it to itself is the simplest way to describe it. So tongues are gonna cease on their own. No longer necessary. Why would that be? Why would they fade out from the Holy Spirit because it's a gift from the Holy Spirit? Why would he stop giving that ability to people? It's because the nation of Israel chucked it. Is I allowed to say that on video? They were rejecting it. The nation rejected it. The judgment came approximately 40 years later when Israel is destroyed, wiped out, and the Jews are scattered, their temple taken away, their records, the genealogical records are destroyed. So many things happened in that to make the Jews scatter out. Now they have a diaspora commission today. I shared that, I think, Wednesday night. They keep track of where all the Jews are in the world. And they sent a message to them and said, we're losing America. What's that message for? Take note, you might need to get out. Who's gonna listen? Probably just the conservative ones, the ones that really believe the scriptures, that believe what's coming. Why do they need to be in Israel? Because a remnant is gonna flee into the wilderness and be protected by God. until Christ sets up his reign. And enter into the millennium in human bodies, reproducing human children because those people never died. And so you start to see some things even today that's very interesting. America is the key to the world domination by the Antichrist. So if he can't break it, he'll change it. And that's what you're seeing happening before your eyes. And you are rejoicing. You're giving thanks. You're excited about opportunities that God is opening up for the gospel? There's a lot of people really scared that goes beyond COVID. That was another one, though, to take advantage of. And so here he's trying to get across the tongues were going to stop on their own. The prophesying was going to be done away. God would stop giving them that message. But tongues, the real tongues was going to cease because there was no unbelieving Jews to share it with. They're gone. Although you see it in Acts 2, Acts 10, Acts 19, they're scattering and they're still reaching out to them, but that mission stops. And then you get to the third one, if knowledge, this is that gnosis kind of knowledge, it said it too is gonna be done away. This is the supernatural ability to know experientially information that had never been investigated. And this is the one I refer back to in 12.8. It was a word of knowledge. God would give them a message, a word, a logos, a testimony of some sort to pass on. And how it was used, we don't know because we don't have an example of it in the New Testament. And a few others we don't have an example of. But people seem to be eager to explain all of them to everybody without observation. And they seem to be eager to make sure that you figure out what gift or gifts you have. Why? If you have the gift of prophecy, and God gives you a revelation, and you love the church, and you're walking by the Spirit, what are you gonna do on Sunday? You're gonna share that revelation. And if two or three others were ahead of you, you might wait till the next Sunday. because it's controllable. It's not a spirit craziness where you just kind of can't help yourself, or you even fall on the ground, or heaven forbid, you start barking like a dog, or whatever people are claiming today, that's not God. Those things are out of line with scripture. The Holy Spirit's not behind that. The prophets could control their prophesying. The people speaking in tongues could control their tongue speaking. And what was the motivation behind it? Edification of the body. That's what 1 Corinthians 14 brings out. Because that's what love does. And if it supersedes everything I'm doing, at the time, the gifts were real and they were there. I just believe, as I look at scripture, and I got other indications of why, and I'm gonna run out of time. To point out, some of them will come out in chapter 14, as to why they're gone. But you can look at Hebrews 2, verse 4, and you see a progression of four things there. They agree that the first three are done, but when they get to the last one, gifts of the Spirit, all of a sudden your commentaries, your study Bible, will either ignore it, or they'll say, well, that hasn't happened yet. but they're in the same tense as the same information being shared. And I remember a paper I got from the seminary I went to, or actually a magazine, and I saw an article on that passage and I went, oh, this is gonna be great. And I go in there and they explained the first thing that had gone, the second thing had gone, the third thing had gone, and then they went dot, dot, dot, and they never talked about the fourth one. It didn't surprise me. They don't know what to do with it. But it's just one more factor that makes me say, they're gone. Those crutches are no longer necessary. We have the scriptures completed. We have the signs given out to the Jews. And if we don't serve one another with what they call the service gifts, you got speaking gifts, that's how man breaks it down. Don't get hung up on it. Speaking gifts, service gifts, sign gifts. The speaking ones were supernatural, speaking through an apostle or prophet. And those have been the foundation, they were settled. The signed gifts, the Jews have rejected the one. Even the healings that come in there, they're gone. You can send cards and letters, it won't bother me at all. It's not how God's working today. They had a purpose. They were to validate. They were to show you that the individual doing the gift was real. They were not what you see on TV today. It's phony. They were real dead people coming to life around their families. When Dorcas comes out or Lazarus raises forth or whoever it was, who do you think was waiting outside? Perfect strangers that had no idea what had taken place, that had no idea that they were really dead. Do you go around wrapping up your relatives and sticking them in tombs if you really believe they aren't dead? I hope not. Some people do that. It's called murder. But for some reason we throw out logic, like logic doesn't belong in the Bible, and it's God who's created logic. It's God who puts pieces together. It's God who's given us evidence, proof of the resurrection, and on and on you go as you read your Bibles. He's not left us without a witness. He gives us all of creation pointing back to him as our God and our creator. Logic's not the problem, it's jumping ahead of scripture, ignoring observation and trying to figure out how can I interpret this, or better yet, how do we apply this? How do we put all these people up on the stage and make them look like they're getting healed? How come there aren't dead people up there? Probably illegal, so I'm not promoting that. How come it isn't things that you can obviously see? Somebody walks up and they take their shirt off and they don't have an arm. And the guy puts one on him. The withered hand, the ability to stand up after 40 years and not only stand, but to rise up and walk and dance, leap and praise God. They were obvious things that God did because it was a sign. If you can't see it because it's low back pain or a migraine headache, that's not gonna work for a sign. It's not that Jesus didn't do some of that, but it wasn't why he did it. And then people think, well, he healed everybody. Nope, didn't even come close. He was validating who he was. He wasn't trying to give people eternal health. And then many claim, well, that's in the gospel, it's in Isaiah 53, he bore our sins, or whatever, a lot of phrases they pull out. It has nothing to do with that. It is a spiritual focus, and we've gotta get back to the spiritual, which is what love is, not the physical, which is what selfishness drives. You may feel rotten right now. Part of life. You may have a headache, but because you're an adult, you go ahead and do some things. You're not incapacitated. It's not a migraine. It's not something that's severe. You don't need to be rushing to the doctor right now. You don't need an ambulance, and Fred's not here because he's working. You make do. And if you stop and ask yourself, how did I deal with pain 10 years ago? 20, 30, 40. What incapacitated you as a two-year-old when they lose it. And the whole world revolves around them for some reason that I can't get out of them. I don't know what's wrong. I just know they're not happy and they seem to be in pain. And you've grown. You have matured to the point where that isn't the focus. When you come to church, it isn't the first thing you want to talk about with people. They may ask. There may be things that you can share and you want to get the focus back on Jesus Christ. You wanna get the focus back on edifying the church. So he goes through this really simply, and he says, love never fails, but prophecy, tongues, knowledge, and by implication, the spiritual gifts do. Love never is out of use. These gifts are going to be out of use, and we're gonna see how that works down here. Look at verse nine. He says, for we know in part, and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away. You see the beginning word for, it's a causal idea, because we know in part, because we have this information, supernaturally even, experiential, but it's limited. People think when you have the gift of knowledge, that you get it all. God has to move over or he put another throne up or something and give you equal space. No, that's why the scriptures make it really clear. It is a word of knowledge. It is very limited for an appropriate point in time. However that worked. When you got a prophecy, same thing. You didn't know everything about everything. You simply passed on a revelation that God had given to you supernaturally. And you batted 1,000%. None of the prophecies you ever shared with a spiritual gift of prophecy operating under the Holy Spirit ever came wrong, ever failed. They didn't. But he's trying to wrestle here. We know in part, the word in part, if you go back to chapter 12, verse 27, you can tell I'm already in a race mode. Way too much to cover here. I will hang after church and we'll have more Bible study if you like. But in 1227, now you are Christ's body. Talking to the church at Corinth. And individually members of it. That's the exact same word. Now you are Christ's body and in part members of it. Each one of you has your part to play. That's what he's stressing. He brings that same idea here. So I could reverse it and translate it like chapter 12, verse nine. For we know individually and we prophesy individually. But when the perfect or the complete comes, the whole comes, the partial, the individual will be done away. What's he getting at? Is he still talking about spiritual gifts? Is he still talking about love? Is that the context? If that's the situation, then this is what he's referring to here. And he even says, we know we prophesy. But there's going to come a point when the perfect comes and the partial is going to be passive, put out of use, made to stop. No more prophesying, no more words of knowledge. This is what he's trying to bring out when he goes down here. So the whole question people come to in verse 10 is, what is the perfect? I don't wanna pick on your study Bible, don't tell me who wrote it or who's behind it, but what do you guys have down in your notes or what have you been told in the past by other people that the perfect means? Okay, I taught you love, but you can't use that one. The what? Oh, the end of something. Okay, so it's real general. Okay, it's when Jesus came, but he already came, so it's when he comes a second time, and that is a big one that people use. Where is that in the context? Yeah, there's nothing there. Linda? Oh, okay, that's the one Jesus. You're looking at your study Bible to see if you have any notes. Did they skip it? How many of you have very little on that? Okay? Some of you, they don't want to get into it. It's too divisive because they can't prove what it is. That's why they have multiple answers. But if you just go to the context and you realize, what's he comparing? Love with spiritual gifts. What did he just tell you? What was in part spiritual gifts? What's going to be perfect or the whole, teleon, complete It's gotta be love. That's what the context is. There is no need to guess or figure it out or claim that Jack is false teaching. It's what he's doing and he says when the perfect comes, the individual, the partial or the in part will be done away. You won't need the spiritual gifts when the perfect comes. So that's why they go to Jesus Christ's return. That's gotta be perfect, right? Is he waiting for that? What happened to apostles and prophets? They're gone. They were foundational in Ephesians 2.20. They set the foundation. God is no longer using them. People say, well, what has replaced them, Ephesians 4.12, is evangelists and teachers. What the apostles used to do is go out establishing churches and getting it recognized. They had authority. They, too, were able to work signs, as Paul did in 2 Corinthians 13.5. They, too, were able to receive revelation. They had a special role to play and it was supernatural. Then came along the prophets whose role in those churches that were begun was to come in and give them revelation because they didn't have a Bible. Even when it started to be written in the first century, how long did it take? They didn't go to the printer and the press and run off 500,000 copies. They're handwritten, and then you had errors because of that. If you weren't a type A plus that was overseen and checked out by another A plus that proofread what you were doing, you got into big trouble. And that's how some things started getting passed around. That's why they go back to textual criticism, and they examine the manuscript evidence that we have today, and they go back and try to figure out what was the original that have all been destroyed. They didn't last. They were on materials that came apart or disintegrated. There is a copper scroll with a very small section on it, but very little has made it from the first century. And so as you realize that, you go, oh, now how do I know? Well, people that are hung up on the King James Version, they don't realize the King James didn't even have a complete Greek Testament. They use other translations and sections where they lack the language and just put that in there. They also don't realize that the King James Version has six revisions over about 20, 30 years, whatever it was in there. What does that tell you about the first one? It needed to be improved on. Second one, improved on. Third one, improved on. Fourth one, improved on. You get the point? People get hung up and they're King James only, and they don't even go back and figure out, observing what is the reality of what was there. So we do the best we can, it is amazing. They're still finding manuscripts today, whether it's the Dead Sea Scrolls or wherever it may be, and that was 1949, but they're still finding things, and they put them back in. I have a Greek New Testament, fifth edition, with a textual apparatus on the bottom, and it gives you all the evidence for anything questionable. I had the third, I got the fifth for Christmas a while back, and I've gone in and actually looked and see they add a few more manuscripts that they found. Papyri, unseals, whatever they may have been, they picked up. They aren't telling you what to believe, they're showing you what they are, and they all have relative dates, how old they are, how far back. I know you all can't wait, you're gonna go buy a Greek New Testament with a textual apparatus in it so you can figure it out for yourself. How do we know what the truth is? Because God established it in the beginning, using men with supernatural spiritual gifts to start with. Then the scriptures that were recorded, and now that has been passed on to the degree that they found a copy of the book of Isaiah. A thousand years older than the last copy they had, I mean newer than the last copy they had. A thousand years. You know how many mistakes there were in it? Eight letters. You know what the letters were in mostly? Names. So you may have seen my name 1,000 years earlier and it was Jack, and then you saw my name 1,000 years later and it was Jackie. Throw the Bible away, right? Now, you going back and you're making, you're observing what's there. You have a scripture, if you have a good copy, a good translation, in your lap that is as accurate as can be because God makes it happen. It is an eternal book. He's not trying to lead you astray. The Holy Spirit uses man, he uses his word. It was established, but he's done doing that. Am I making that point? The spiritual gift of tongues, interpretation of tongues, had a purpose, the purpose ended, it stopped on its own. even charismatics will tell you that I hate to use that word the word that's a Greek word in the New Testament it's not a bad word but it's just a Pentecostals charismatics people use it today to describe people that are looking for some kind of miraculous supernatural and they want to see with their own eyes and then they start twisting things and saying if you don't speak in tongues you can't be saved where's the Bible say that It's all getting distorted because they aren't observing the text. So here you have the perfect, and he says here when he starts it in verse 10, when the perfect comes, you're gonna see a different use of when coming up. I think it's verse 11 or verse 12. But this when here is a conjunction, and the idea here is hatan, it's whenever. It's not pointing to a specific date or Christ's return. It's an indefinite idea, an indefinite future with this word. Why is that? Because when you came into the church of Corinth, or the churches of Galatia, or the church of Rome, and that church had matured, they'd taken in all what the spiritual gifts had provided, they had grown from the word, they had written copies of the word, the teachers were being accurate with the scriptures. When you reached that, and they knew the truth, and they were living it out, that's the whenever. See, that church, one church may be more mature than another church. And thus, you read your Bible and how's the book, how the Corinthians doing? Poor. One thing after another, after another in the book of 1 Corinthians, he's trying to straighten out. Then when you get into 2 Corinthians, he said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Chapter two, it's enough. You've punished this guy enough. They went from flippant to, I don't know, mean and dangerous. And so Paul's trying to help them move along. They still have all the gifts, as you notice in chapter one. What did that tell you about the church? They hadn't reached maturity. They hadn't reached the perfect yet. But whenever the perfect comes, and this is the idea of attained, the end of a purpose, whenever it arrives, and it's not the return of Christ, that's not what God's waiting for. And I'm sorry I don't have more time. We started early, I can't take advantage of you and let you out late and you won't even have the slightest idea if you didn't look at your watches. How many of you looked at your watches? Oh, we do have the guys that keep a track of me, all right. You will forget what you saw. But he's trying to point out here, here's the context, it's simple, it's laid out, I'm covering it quickly. You can go back, come tonight to the men's group, interact with it, ask me questions. If God keeps me in Lapine in the future, I have no idea what I'm doing. I may be dying, moving, or staying. Those are my three options. How about you? Dying maybe? Moving maybe? Staying maybe? All right, you're all in the same category I'm in. So if I, wherever I am, I'm going to be involved with Bible study. Even if it's just coming over and I'm crippled and now it's my wife taking care of me instead of vice versa, and I can barely move, and heaven forbid, I can barely talk. I think my mouth will be the last thing to die. They'll be reading my vital signs, and the heart will stop, and the blood pressure will go, and my lips are still gonna be moving. It's just how it works. A few of you are like that too, so you can't blame it all on me. But he's trying to bring out here that this point comes, but the whole idea of coming, and I didn't mention it, I keep leaving out stuff. It's an heiress tense. In spite of how they butchered the heiress tense in the Greek, it's purposely going out of its way to not give you a definite time. That's what the heiress is for. I can show you Greek scholars that would agree, but I can show you too many others that make it into all kinds of weird things. When it comes, he's not saying it's coming at a certain point. Aorist, you know the word we use in the English? I've taught you this many times. What? It's the word horizon. So when you put an A in front of a word in Greek, it makes it negative unless it's already built into that word. But when they add an A to an existing word, it's no horizon. Aorist. No boundary. You can look up heiress in your dictionary and it will tell you the same thing. Indefinite. It's going out of its way to not give you some time. If you think this was referring to Jesus Christ's return, would it be indefinite? Or would it be a very definite once in a time? And I can give you other verbs that would work there. He's leaving it loose because it's gonna come as you mature. You don't need the gift of giving when the whole church, like they've treated us this last week, is just handing out meals and checking up and doing things for Bev. And then I hear regularly, and this is what I've watched for as a shepherd of this church, for decades, people getting rides or the family moving and now they have the sickness. And I check up and I wanna make sure they're covered. I can't do it all and that's part of the reason why I'm retiring. I don't do it well at all. I used to be the one checking up. And if possible, try to take somebody with me. Years and years ago, I went visiting regularly and figured out back in the very beginning of being in Lapine, you needed at least an hour. Don't set up a thing. Don't drop in on people in Lapine. You find the dog, the gun, the people not home, the door locked, somebody you'll not be happy with. So you set up and you go visit on a schedule. And when you get there, it's going to be a minimum of an hour visit. Takes time. And majority of that is gonna be shooting the breeze. You're getting to know them, you're listening to what's happening in their life lately, you're just kind of reestablishing connection there personally, and then you wanna get some spiritual things in there if at all possible. Not just a closing in prayer. And so you're constantly trying to deal with all this, and it's what God is after in the church, bringing the church to maturity. Look at Colossians 1. I know I'm leaving you sitting there listening a lot. I'll give you something you have to turn to or push buttons to get to. Colossians 1, go eat popcorn. Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians. Those are the initials. And when you get to chapter one, look at the end of the chapter. Look what Paul is doing. Verse 27, to whom God willed to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles. And he says, which is Christ in you? Unheard of in the Old Testament. The Jews were shocked that this would even take place. But he's making that known. Christ in you, the hope of glory. And then look what he says in verse 28. We proclaim him. What was Paul doing? Proclaiming Christ. What was he doing with that? Admonishing every man. People don't like to be admonished. They respond by the flesh. You get a very bad time together. But admonishing every man, teaching every man with all wisdom that we may present every man Teleos in Christ. Complete, whole, mature. That's what Paul was doing. That's what he was after. The spiritual gifts have actually gotten in the way of the church today. For the two reasons, too many are exalting themselves, or too many others are excusing themselves. You know how you figure it out? If the gifts are functional today in the first century, you know how they figured out what gift you had? They watched you walk by the Spirit. There it was. You didn't sit there and meditate as they do with yoga or with some other dangerous things that are out there that people say, oh, I don't do the bad yoga. I don't do the bad martial arts. There's no such thing, folks. You cannot separate what the world is teaching. And they try to water it down and create something else. Now I'm gonna get more cards and letters. What does the Bible tell you to practice yoga? What does the Bible tell you to do? Meditate on what? Yoga says nothing. I could have had that wrong a little bit, but that's a big part of a lot of meditation today. What does the Bible say? The Word of God, Psalm 1. You'll start finding out it's not a matter of me just turning my brain loose for the devil to do whatever he wants with it. And so as I'm in here looking at this, I realize there's a danger. It gives two illustrations. I only called the first one an illustration. If I was ever to preach this again, A would be illustration number one, B would be illustration number two. So you can change your notes if you like. Pat will remind me of this in five years if I'm still alive. But as you're looking at verse 11, now he uses a different word for when. In this word here, hatha just means as long as, or while I was a child. I used to speak as a child, think as a child, reason as a child. That's pretty understandable. Those are all imperfect tenses. Imperfect, continual, action, and pastime. If that's what you were back then, that's how you acted. So he says here, when I was a child, and he uses a term here, a very strong term, to describe an infant. Literally, the word means not speaking. Well, you got a problem. If you're not speaking, what's the first thing a child does? Hear. I used to speak as a child. So he's not talking about not making sounds. He's talking about not using a language. And so at a young age, what are they doing? After they say it to you, because you can understand the syllables. You can recognize they said the same thing four times in a row. And then they got mad. Maybe they only give you two times. I don't know what level of patience your child has. The food doesn't show up. Where's my lunch? I'm on the mama. Wow. Then they start losing throwing toys. And all of a sudden, you're totally distracted. Because what you don't understand is you didn't hear them. You didn't pick up what was being sought. That's how a child speaks. They babble, they make vocal utterances, but who knows what it is. It's not tongues. I can tell you that. But it is a language, but it's not the spiritual gift of tongues. He says, I used to think as a child, imperfect tense, this is what I did all the time, and it carries the idea of reflecting, considering in the mind, having a view about things. The children do that, just because we can't understand them. They're doing that in the womb. They're human beings that are being executed. God calls that murder, when they're taken out and killed. The sad part, which I cannot go into and I don't want to, is they are experimenting on thousands of aborted babies that never died. See, the definition of abortion today does not mean the baby died. And literally in the Bible, it means they came out. They come out alive. They're using all kinds of parts. So we won't go any deeper than that because that's a very sad thing. That is our world today. Lots of people are doing that. It is not a pretty picture. But he's trying to bring out here, these people, these children at all these ages, when the brain reaches a certain point, they are thinking, they're reflecting, they're considering the mind, the view. What tells them to put their thumb in their mouth when they're in the womb? Oh, it's just an automatic reflex. Well, then why don't they put their foot in their mouth? Oh, maybe they do, which is more common. Let's go back to observation and figure out what the facts are. What do they do after they're born? They still have their foot in their mouth? No, but they still have their thumb in their mouth oftentimes, early on. And what do we do? We keep jerking it out and jerking it out, and we find some other thing to stick in there, whatever's handy, often called a pacifier. Then we find out the dentist says, you shouldn't have done that. Nicole's not here to defend the dentist, but But here's a child, this infant, this baby, babbling and reflecting in the mind whatever they do. And then he says, I used to reason. This goes beyond that, to ponder, to regard, to come to a conclusion, make a decision. They actually calculate what they're doing as a one-year-old, a one-and-a-half-year-old. When they stand there, as I told you before, and they put their hands on their hips and they say, no. And you can understand it very clearly. That's what Paul says we used to do. Why is he bringing this up? Is he zeroing in on speaking, thinking, reasoning because he's pointing back to three of the gifts? Is he showing how they're an immature way to reach what ultimately he wants when he wants believers fully mature? Can I go up to you this morning after the service and punch you in the nose and have you say thank you? Jesus could. Who are we trying to become like according to Paul? Jesus. Do I want to become like Jesus if I get punches in the nose? Nope. But what's the Holy Spirit going to lead me into? In the world you shall have tribulation. 2 Timothy talks about the persecution that we're going to suffer. Are you getting ready for what's coming? What's your attitude going to be? And the way you get that way is you grow in Christ. You are making practice right now with your spouse. So you can turn to your spouse and say, hit me again. Elbow in the side. Notice some of you make a little room, put children in between. Very convenient. I don't want somebody telling me what to do. That's the flesh. I want God and the people he chooses to use telling me what to do. Hebrews 13, seven, obey your leaders as those who will give an account Let them do this with joy and not with grief. They're not grieving over the pain, they're grieving over your immaturity. They're grieving over the fact that you're not gonna recognize what they're bringing up to you is necessary and beneficial, just like a parent to a child. And then you go off and do your own thing. And then you come back, very few do, but some come back and they admit you were right. With all the battle scars, with the marriage broken up, with children that have wandered off, And then they say, could you fix this? It's kind of like the Humpty Dumpty rule. And so you're working it. But this is what love does. Love never gives up. Churches that split are demonstrating immaturity. Believers that quit because it gets too hard, immaturity. Marriages that divorce, immaturity. Oftentimes it may be because they aren't believers, or one isn't a believer. But the believer's love should never fail. but it's costing me too much. Love can't cost too much. We'll see that as we get down here. I'm running out of time too fast. So he moves from the immature in the illustration to the mature. He says in the second half of verse 11, when, while, or as long as I became a man, and that's a perfect tense, and I can't go in and explain too much, but once I had grown up, once I had converted into this changed person, once I had become a male and gone through puberty, he says the idea here is I did away with childish things. Perfect tense. I not only made a decision to make them inactive in the past, I don't act that way anymore. Do you know if you were, when you were a child, if you ever threw yourself on the floor? Come on, admit it. You had a little temper tantrum, you threw yourself down because mom always responded to me on the floor. I got what I wanted. Yeah, you're in denial. or it was too young, you don't remember, or mom covered it up, she's not gonna remind you of those things. But as you're going in that, you don't do that anymore. Not only do you not throw yourself down because you're not getting what you want, you put yourself back out there if that's what God wants. I became a man. I did away with these childish choices and the immaturity there. It wasn't just a physical thing about my body becoming a man, the size, my voice, my muscles. I stopped being a big baby. I made a decision. That's the illustration. So he's trying to bring up what here? Why would he throw that illustration into the middle of this context? What's the contrast he's trying to paint? Spiritual gifts can be very Immature. They can be done very selfishly. The Corinthian church was good at that. They had it all out of whack. And Paul's trying to write them and help them get it straightened up. They were acting like children. But if you would grow up and act like mature believers, that problem would go away. I say, I want to ask you questions. I can't, I'm out of time anyway. But if I started asking, you know, maybe you think I have a spiritual gift of something or other. And I said, you know, just ask you, did anybody ever tell you you had that gift? Do you ever think you had that gift? And then it's like, so that means nobody else can perform that in the church? That's why the gifts were necessary. They got things established. When you're learning, I was painting on my house yesterday and I'm watching Lance. helping me at the time, do some things with the gun and stuff. I'm learning. I'm watching him how to not fall off the scaffolding and all kinds of stuff. But that's how children learn from their parents. They need to see it. Then at an appropriate age, you don't put your child on a bicycle at four and try to learn how to ride without training wheels in the middle of the freeway. appropriate place. You're slowly bringing them along. And you got to figure out the balance. It's okay to fall down. It's not okay to get run over by a semi. You see the thing, you're constantly, well, God's doing the same thing with us. And He's trying to motivate us. Like Paul, we're trying to bring everybody along and make them complete in Christ. Mature. To where they don't go, well, I don't have that gift. or nobody appreciates my gifts, I'm gonna go to a different church where I can perform it and get some recognition. That's the last thing somebody with a spiritual gift ever does motivated by the Holy Spirit. Obscurity is great. Look at Jesus, where was he born? Bethlehem, ugh. Where'd he grow up? Nazareth, ugh, that's even worse. That's like a logging camp, as I've tried to explain in the past. Bad area, a lot of Romans around there. What job did he take on? Probably carpentry. They called him that, but we don't have him building anything in scripture. But it's probably because that's what his dad did. That is an outstanding occupation. That'll be known by the world as your furniture gets sent around and bought by the rich and famous. Everything about his life was in obscurity. That's part of the reason the Jews had trouble with him, because he wasn't, what? Like the Pharisees, but he wasn't promoted, he wasn't doing something, he wasn't working his signs in Pharaoh's, or Pharaoh's, I got one back too far, in Pilate's court, or in some other situation where the elite could watch. Remember how one of them wanted Paul to come along in the book of Acts? He said, we've heard you do these miracles. Come do one for me. Entertain me. You're just a court jester. It was the common folk. It was the humble folk. It was the ones that really recognized their needs and got on their knees before God and accepted Jesus Christ as Savior. So as he wraps this up, he gives you a second illustration. In verse 12, he says, for now, because now we see in a mirror dimly. The idea here now is another adverb. At the present moment, we see in a mirror dimly. We see in a reflection. It could have been glass or metal. James 123 uses this about seeing our own image in a mirror. But we see it dimly. It's a riddle. It's an enigma. It's hard to recognize. We see it darkly. It's a poor reflection, because what they had back in that time was not what we have today. And someday, they're going to invent a better mirror, and you're going to really be able to see what you look like. Heaven forbid. And when you get old and you don't recognize yourself in the mirror, and then you put your glasses on and it kind of shocks you, you almost want to go back to the optometrist and say, could you lessen this? I don't want the ability to see what's there. But he's saying right here, now we see dimly. That's the spiritual gifts he's bringing up again. That's the limited, partial, individual, if you don't have a prophet at church Sunday, guess what you don't get? New revelation. That's the Corinth, even though it was famous for the manufacture of mirrors, they were getting a very poor reflection in the way they were treating one another. And he contrasted, then at that time, sometime in the future, face to face. This is a Hebrew expression suggesting openness, honesty, friendship. It is a clear understanding between two people. That's what God wants. That's what he wants in the church. Not that you should do this and you probably never should, but to go share with somebody because you can trust them. Tell them something real personal. Tell them some nasty habit that you have. You never even told your parents and nobody's ever caught you doing it, but this is what I do. And we think drugs are the bad one, but there's many of them out there. You find someone that you can go open up with. You've now gone to a face-to-face relationship. You've now become mature where you are being patient and kind toward one another. And how you respond when you find out, I've seen it before, I've talked to felons that have come to our church. They said, I've been in prison for 15 years or whatever, some number. And he goes, I don't want anybody to know. Why? Because they treat me poorly or they kick me out. That's God's church. We're all felons. Don't you understand why you were deterred? Well, you should have gone to hell. You were God's enemy. You were as bad as you could be. Why would I turn around and point the finger at somebody else? Because I don't love them. But he says this face-to-face relationship is what God's after. I know in part, I know individually, I have my little click that I'm in, but I shall know fully, this exact perception, this clear recognition, I will see myself the way God sees me, and I will be totally comfortable in that, because I'm being honest, I'm being real, rejoicing with the truth. not acting unbecomingly. And you go down through the list and I need to close off. So he goes to the last section here, this conclusion in verse 13. I will say after. We'll talk about this tonight if you'd like to. I will even have a private Bible study in someone's home if I need to, because the women can't come tonight. You let me know if that would be useful. But he says here in verse 13, but now, and again, this idea behind the nuni here, taking, this is another word here, but he says, taking everything into account as things are, We have what is abiding, present tense, and it's faith, hope, love. People in your study Bibles will tell you all those, faith and hope are gonna disappear. You're hard pressed to find that in Scripture. Faith is confident persuasion. It's a trust, a belief, a reliance. Used seven times in the book of 1 Corinthians. Hope is a confident expectation. Four times in 1 Corinthians, describing this happy anticipation, a favorable future as you look forward. But love is this sacrificial devotion involving patience, kindness, and all the other characteristics. 15 times in the book of 1 Corinthians, totally selfless. And so what does he conclude? As he wraps it up, these three are abiding. Not telling you they're going away someday, they're abiding. But the greatest of these is love. Greatest is most important, the weightier one, the ranking one. If I have love, then faith and hope can survive very well. If I have love, I'm mature, I'm whole, I'm complete, I'm Christ-like. This is the goal for all believers. Now I race through that. I race through every message I teach. Humanly, I can't cover it well enough. I don't put it like Jesus loved the Sermon on the Mount where he condensed so much into a short little time. If you sat down and read it, you realize this is really short. This isn't like one of Jack's messages, but I'm not God. So I encourage you to not follow me. I encourage you to open your word this week. You spend time in it and you invite God in and don't be in a hurry. Go back over this and ponder what's going on here. The perfect is not some mysterious thing that he's trying to bring up and make you guess. We're gonna, well, let's guess this. All right, let's guess this. It's in the context. He's after love in the church, and when there's genuine love, there is no need of spiritual gifts. Kind of weird to think about, but if you don't understand that, you wanna go back and look at what the spiritual gifts were for. to bring us to Christ-likeness, to bring us to maturity. Let's pray. Father, you are so good. You have met all of our needs. You have loved us when we were so unlovely. We have so much to learn. We need to turn off the flesh. We need to buffet it. Make it our slave, not let it rear its little ugly head, which all of us struggle with at times. The temptations there, but all of us give in at times for whatever reason. May we grow out of that. May we stop acting like babies and start acting like Jesus. We thank you for the truth. We thank you for the reminder. And we ask you to help this to sink in and become a reality in our lives. I pray in Jesus' name, amen. So Mark is going to start another song or mic.