1 Corinthians 12:9-11 - The work of one and the same Spirit

12:9

Faith is mentioned as another gift. This is not “saving faith”, every believer has that! Rather it is the Spirit giving faith to someone in a particular situation about what is going to happen, what God is going to do. Moses had faith that the Red Sea would part. He had no reason to imagine that that would happen, other than that God told him what to do. Then there are gifts of healing. This does not mean medicine is of no value, absolutely not, but the Spirit does give gifts of healing. One of the prominent aspects of Jesus’ ministry was that He healed lots of people. Now this gift is controversial and problematic for various reasons. One is that some people misuse and abuse it. If someone is seriously ill, or a close relative is seriously ill, there is a great desire to see healing, and some people exploit this desire to get money out of people. Then there are times when healings are claimed, but nothing much has actually happened. Sometimes this is just over-claiming (ie there is no ill-intent, people are just claiming more than is justified by the facts), sometimes people are pretending. Then sometime we struggle with faith. However, there are also times when genuine healings do take place. So we should certainly not reject this gift, but we should seek the Lord in humility and faith.

12:10

Much the same as we have said about healings can be said about miracles. Miracles do happen, but by their very nature they will not happen very often. Prophecy is mentioned here, but Paul goes into this, along with tongues, in much more detail in chapter 14. So we will save discussion of prophecy and tongues till that chapter. While tongues is very common in charismatic/pentecostal churches, interpretation seems to be fairly rare. Discernment is the ability to see what is really going on. There are many so-called “discernment ministries”, especially in the US. On the whole these “ministries” do not have the gift of discernment.

12:11

So what are we to draw from all this? One is that we as churches are not very good with the gifts of the Spirit. We need to be more charismatic! We need to seek the Lord more, we need to expect more, and we need to look for reality, not fake.

All the gifts are empowered by the same Spirit. Our focus needs to be on God, and on what He is doing. Too often we put the focus on ourselves. Moreover, the Spirit gives the gifts as He wills, this is not in our hands, it is in His hands. So we should walk humbly with our God, being expectant.

It is implicit from Paul having listed the gifts, without explanation of what they are, that the Corinthians knew what the gifts were. They are meant to be a normal part of church life.