Intelligibility Over Impressiveness

But we're gonna dive in now to this pastor's scripture.

So what we've been looking at through 1 Corinthians, we're going 12 through the top of 15, is the gifts of the Spirit.

And Pastor Jordan did, I heard, I wasn't here, but I heard that he did a phenomenal job last week.

And he kind of reintroduced these kind of positions that are within the church, these two primary positions of cessationism, which means that the the belief that the gifts of the spirit have ceased because of a historical event.

That historical event they would point to the canonization of scriptures.

So what they're pointing to is, and the Council of Nicaea, where they canonize the text of what would be included in the Protestant Bible, Old Testament, and New Testament, they would deem that as the perfect which came.

And Corinthians tells us the gifts will cease when the perfect comes.

What cessationists do is they take that moment in history as the perfect coming.

Then there's another position, and that's the position that sacred mission takes, of called continuationism.

What we believe is that that wasn't the perfect.

Because we believe that the church is still being built, we then therefore settle on that the gifts continue for that end goal.

So we are continuationists.

Now, what we have to wrestle with a lot of the time is being uh formal continuationists and functional cessationists, right?

We can have great theology, but we don't practice what we believe, or we don't prepare for the moving of the Holy Spirit in our lives and in our church.

And so that's some of the workings that we're going to be diving into in these next sections of scriptures, and that's things that we're talking about.

We're trying to work through how do we create spaces where we can train, teach, and prepare for the moving of the Spirit inside of the lives of God's people.

So what we've been looking at is we just got out of the great love chapter of the Bible, right?

If you've been to a wedding in the last like 50 years, you've heard this verse, this chapter spoken, right?

1 Corinthians 13, you can talk about the love chapter, and it really lays out what love should look like within the church.

And Paul has really helped us to see all throughout this uh section of text uh the diversity of the gifts of the spirit.

So he's talking about how beautiful and how diverse the gifts of the spirit are, right?

He kind of gives us some lists of some different gifts, and we take the position that Paul wasn't working to give us an exhaustive list of the gifts of the spirit.

We believe that the list is much bigger and broader than even what Paul puts in here, because that wasn't his end goal.

His end goal was to show diversity.

He wasn't trying to exhaust the totality of the gifts of the spirit, because we see other lists within the Bible about the gifts of the Spirit that include certain gifts that uh aren't mentioned there in 1 Corinthians.

So he's also shown us the necessity to value and demonstrate that diversity.

He showed us the sovereignty of the Spirit on who is gifted with what.

He's also shown us the importance of focusing on the things that will truly last.

That's what came out of this love chapter.

Because love is eternal, we should focus on love primarily because it will not cease.

And now he's coming out of this to call to focus not simply on uh love itself, but on how love applies and forms these two particular gifts of which we're gonna be really focusing on today.

So he's kind of taking this broad picture of the gifts of the Spirit and the working of the Holy Spirit inside the church.

And what he's doing right now is he's getting ready to focus them in tightly on two gifts, prophecy and tongues.

Now, why is Paul choosing to do that in here?

If you understand his writings, he's usually writing or writing two churches to bring correction to bad theology or discipline to ungospeled behavior, right?

He's trying to inform them of the hope that they should have in Christ.

He's trying to correct sin that's inside of the church, and he's trying to point them back to the truth of Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection.

So why here is he focusing on prophecy in tongues?

Well, it was the primary source of pride and spiritual oppression in the Corinthian church.

Pride and spiritual oppression.

Because what was happening was the Corinthians, who were Greek, they typically had an idol about knowledge.

Knowledge was such an idolatrous reality to Greek culture.

The more you knew, the more prominent you were, the more prestigious you were.

And so here comes the Holy Spirit, and not only do they have knowledge, but they have transcendent knowledge that was given to them by a divine being.

Imagine the pride that would well up inside of someone that if they were gifted or endowed by with the Holy Spirit to be able to have knowledge beyond this temporal world, to be able to speak in knowledgeable languages that were of heaven.

And so this became a source of pride for them because if you spoke in tongues, oh man, you were now receiving this knowledge.

You were one who was gifted by this divine being to be able to utter such knowledgeable words that other people couldn't even understand you.

What pride would rise up and what spiritual oppression would follow for any believer who did not have that gift.

They were seen as lesser.

And Paul comes in to correct this, and so he's focusing here on 1 through 19 of four of chapter 14 to be able to help us understand the difference and the purpose of prophecy in tongues.

So if we looked at just verses 1 through 5, what we would look at in summarizing these sections here would be that the driving purpose of the gifts of the Spirit are for the building up of the church.

This is the driving force.

Why do the gifts of the Spirit exist?

The gifts of the Spirit exist for the building up of the church.

And that has to be what we keep in focus as we start interacting with the Holy Spirit and the gifts of which He's given us.

There's a difference between pursuit and desire.

And this is what he lays out in the very beginning.

So he says, pursue love and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts.

So we have to understand there's a difference between pursuit and desire.

One recognizes our ability to obtain it, and the other depends upon what we want to be given to us.

So we have an ability to obtain love.

That's something that we have somewhat control over in our spiritual lives.

Every single believer has been endowed with the Holy Spirit, filled with the Holy Spirit, and you are now powerful or empowered to pursue and obtain love.

And so if we're gonna have responsibility in our Christian life, it's to pursue that which we have a responsibility and opportunity to obtain in our life.

And so Paul tells us pursue love, and then he says, earnestly desire the gifts.

We're earnest, we're called to earnestly desire the gifts which are dependent upon the Spirit's will to distribute.

You see, love is accomplishable for all because all equally have the measure of the Holy Spirit needed to obtain it.

Gifts are not, because they are fully dependent upon that which the Spirit does not equally distribute.

So we can't really control what gifts of the Spirit we're given.

Well, we can't at all, right?

That's the purpose of a sovereign God.

So the Spirit sovereignly gives those gifts out to whom he wills.

But we're called to desire them.

We're called to pray for them, we're called to uh uh try to have uh ask and beg the Holy Spirit to have them demonstrated in our life.

But love we're called to pursue because we each equally have the measure of the Holy Spirit and the means to obtain it.

So that's why love is this driving force that Paul's coming out of the love chapter and still continuing that reality, even in relationship to the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Then he starts to emphasize prophecy.

Now, the emphasis on prophecy here is not in connection with the broader listing of spirit gifts given us to us earlier in this letter.

It's being brought into this microscopic focus so that it can be compared to the gifts of tongues.

So it's not just found in this broad list of gifts, it's being brought in here very specifically to be able to be compared to the gift of tongues.

It's between these two gifts that we should especially desire the gift of prophecy to be demonstrated in the church.

So again, he's not putting prophecy up against all the other gifts of the Spirit and elevating it to a certain place.

We have to realize that.

In context, what he's doing is specifically trying to uh uh parallel prophecy and tongues.

And when it comes to those two, we're going to discover that prophecy is greater, that's the language that Paul actually uses, than the gifts of tongues.

So he's trying to see how this would be demonstrated in the church.

Why?

The gift of tongues brings no understanding or edification by itself.

The gift of tongues brings no understanding or edification by itself.

However, the gift of prophecy brings understanding and edification intrinsically.

So the gift of tongues.

Because uninterpreted, it brings no understanding, it is a communication between an individual and God.

That's what kind of Paul lays out there.

That he who is speaking in tongues uninterpreted does not speak to men, but speaks to God.

So it's this vertical expression of language.

The gift itself is not inherently a private prayer language.

So a lot of times what we'll have inside of the church is two views of tongues.

We'll see a use of tongues as a private prayer language, and then some people think that the use of tongues is this kind of evangelistic gift for people of other languages.

We're not going to dive into the nitty-gritty details of that, but what we have to understand is that the gift itself is not inherently a private prayer language, but when it's used in absent of interpretation, it functions as one.

So the gift of tongues, when it's absent of interpretation, functions as a private prayer language because you're not speaking to men.

It's not intelligible language that's able to build up or edify the hearer.

Therefore, it defaults to this vertical language between man and God.

The gift is a spirit-given gift and spirit-empowered asset, but it must be used in proper place and purpose.

So as we kind of dive through this text, one thing that we're going to be tempted to do is throw away the gift of tongues as useless.

And that's a very dangerous default because that's not what Paul does here at all.

If you notice, anytime Paul brings correction to good God gifts, he never throws out the gift.

He asks that the heart be challenged and changed to use the gift properly and for the glory of God.

He does the same thing in the Corinthian letter to wine at communion.

Paul, when addressing their inability to exercise discipline in the consumption of wine, never says, Look, you guys obviously can't handle this.

So we're just gonna get rid of alcohol altogether because it's just better that way.

So when we do communion, we're gonna have Welches from here on out.

All right, Corinthian church?

That's not what Paul does.

Paul doesn't address the object or the gift, Paul addresses the heart of which we engage with the gift itself.

So he never calls us to throw out wine, he calls us to discipline ourselves under gospel truth so that we might enjoy the good gifts of God rightly for his glory and for our good.

He does the exact same thing here with the gift of tongues.

He never calls us, because Corinthians, you abuse this, because Corinthians, you know how to practice spiritual discipline in your lives, we're gonna get rid of this gift.

By the way, it's kind of useless anyway, because prophecy is greater.

So why don't we just shove this in the junk drawer of spiritual gifts and move on to better things?

It's not what Paul does, he exalts it to its proper place, but he also uh uh uh downplays it as far as its role and function in the church and understanding it rightly, and he works on the gospel heart of the people to enjoy God's gifts properly.

Now, prop prophecy.

So we have gift of tongues.

Now he's gonna parallel this to prophecy.

Well, we have to understand about prophecy is that we understand it through a spectrum.

This spectrum we would understand at one side of it is forth telling, that's this proclamation of God's word, because in its most fundamental principle, prophecy is reading the Bible out loud.

It is speaking and declaring God's word.

And so that's this forth telling.

And then there's the other side of the spectrum that we would put foretelling in.

This speaking of knowledge yet not revealed to us for God's people.

And so we'd work from this spectrum of forthelling and foretelling.

However, what we have to understand is that prophecy is dominantly forth telling, even in the scriptures.

It is dominantly forth telling.

We have to see the foretelling aspect of prophecy as the exception rather than the normative.

You see, what we see is we hear prophecy and we think people should go around like some type of uh palm reader or some type of person with this orb that can predict the future, because we only see prophecy on that side of the spectrum.

And so we get really nervous when we talk about prophecy within the church because we're thinking that it's all kinds of fortune telling or something that's gonna help us understand something that's coming in the future.

That's not the fullness nor the normative of prophecy, even in the scriptures, because what we see is when Peter uh stood up to prophesy uh in Acts, he quoted Joel.

And so he prophesied that of which God has said, and that was something that was able to be empowered and build up the church intrinsically from the forthelling side of the spectrum.

And then in Joel said, Your sons and your daughters will prophesy.

But what we don't have is that the entire church going around predicting everybody's future.

Hey, guess what?

I knew you were gonna wear that shirt today because the Lord told me, right?

Or, hey, listen, tomorrow you're gonna get in a car accident, right?

That that's not what, or a horse and buggy accident.

That's not what happened back in the they were just all going around telling everybody's future.

So we have to understand prophecy in this forth telling versus foretelling spectrum and realize that this is a wide gap of which prophecy fits into, but it's dominantly going to be on the side of forth telling.

Prophecy has been dominantly used to warn people of the coming judgment they face if they do not repent of their sin and live obedience to God.

When we typically see prophecy in the scriptures, it's to call sin out, warn people of the judgment that's coming, if they do not repent and turn to God.

This is one of the issues as I kind of got saved and grew up spiritually with inside the charismatic movement.

Uh, I got really frustrated with what I call cracker jack uh prophecy, right?

It's this reading the back of a cereal box or it's opening up some fortune cookie, and there was always this really good news, like you're gonna get money or you're gonna get success or you're gonna get whatever.

It's like, oh, who doesn't want to hear that?

Prophesy some more, brother.

But here, the reality is when we see prophecy within the scriptures, it's often mostly judgment, a calling of God's judgment to come if we do not repent of our sin and turn in obedience to God.

Now, prophecy in a New Testament perspective is not absent of this message, but must also contain the hope of Jesus through his death, burial, and resurrection.

Prophecy is also the proclamation of God's word to mature the body.

And in this text, we see that prophecy should accomplish three things.

Number one, it should accomplish upbuilding.

Gifts of the Spirit should never be used to tear down.

There is no gift of the spirit that should ever be used to tear down.

And this is a reality of when we look at prophecy and a warning of judgment, when we look at things like church discipline, we often see this as this kind of tearing down.

Every act of the church should be with the hope of restoration.

Even excommunication in form of church discipline should have an end hope for restoration to come to the individual and be brought back to the church, restored amongst gospel community.

And so even prophecy, it's not meant to tear down, even if it is a judgment, because the hope of God is that our hearts would be softened, that we would repent from our sin, and that we would turn in active living obedience to Him.

So there's no gift, no gift that should ever be used to tear down, especially prophecy.

Number two, prophecy should bring encouragement.

Encouragement.

This word means to be called in alongside to assist and support.

Man, imagine somebody going through just a tumultuous time.

I mean in our day and time right now, what people are going through, they're losing all hope in politics and economy and their jobs and their uh Facebook friends feed, right?

Hope is just gone, it's vanished.

But this is what prophecy should do to come alongside them, to encourage them.

Man, that sounds like just opening up the text and reading to them the promises of God in Christ Jesus for their good.

Because his promises are yes and amen.

They never return void to us.

So if you want to prophesy to your friend, open the text and say, look at this.

Nothing can pluck you from his hand.

He is the author and finisher of your faith, he is the Alpha and the Omega.

He who began a good work in you will be confident and assured to finish it in you.

Right?

These are the promises of which we can declare.

That's prophetic promises to bring encouragement to our brothers and sisters.

This language of encouragement is actually reference to the exact same language used in the Gospel of John to talk about the person and work of the Holy Spirit.

This paraclete, this one who would come alongside us to help us, to strengthen us, to assist us and support us.

Thirdly, prophecy should bring consolation.

Bringing peace in the midst of chaos.

That's what prophecy should do.

If we're gonna exercise this gift in the church, it should bring consolation to its ears.

Man, what kind of peace.

Imagine if you would, Jesus speaking to the storm on the boat.

Peace be still.

That's the power of prophecy that it has within the church.

And if these three things aren't the fruit of prophetic utterance in the church, then we have abused or minimally missed the gifting of the Holy Spirit.

These should be the endeavors of using and demonstrating the gift of prophecy.

Then Paul works into the one who speaks in the tongue builds up himself.

This is kind of still in that one through five framework.

He says that the use of tongues without interpretation only results in the building up of self.

Now listen, this is not inherently a bad thing.

As we need building up.

In fact, Paul stays consistent in his messaging to see all speak in tongues, even under this realization.

So we should not throw out a gift of the Spirit simply because it because it functions privately as personal edification at times.

We must force ourselves, however, to see it rightly in the bigger picture of the purpose of the gifts when exercised publicly.

So let's walk through this private versus public reality.

Because when you hear me say, well, no gift should ever be used for tearing down, it should always be used for the building up of the church, that's right in the context of the assembly.

Any gift demonstrated in the assembly will always be for the building up of others.

But Paul gives us freedom and gospel truth to practice certain gifts specifically.

Specifically, the gift of tongues privately for self-edification.

And so what we have to do is fight to understand that tension.

That we should never come into the church gathered, speaking in unknown tongues without interpretation, because we fail to demonstrate the building up of the church corporately.

But Paul here gives us permission privately to use this gift even for self-edification.

There is greater emphasis on honor, on prophecy when used in the assembly, because it works to the end of building up the church.

Then we look at verse 6 through 12.

In verse 6 through 12, I'd summarize it this way: that the agent of edification is intelligibility.

The agent of edification is intelligibility.

The use of tongues alone in the church has no benefit to the end goal of maturity.

Again, use of tongues alone, that's without interpretation, in the church, in the assembly, has no benefit to the end goal of maturity.

Fundamentally, because it lacks intelligibility.

We can only be built up by and through what we can understand.

Our faith is fueled by understanding.

We have to understand.

We have to have that intelligibility to be able to be matured in the faith of which we have.

You see, even the gospel without the power of the Holy Spirit was foolishness to us.

We didn't understand it.

It didn't make any sense to us.

And so it had no power or effect on our spiritual life.

In fact, because we were spiritually dead, we had to first be made alive, empowered by the Holy Spirit to be able to understand intelligibly the truth of the gospel.

Because to a depraved, unregenerate person, the gospel makes no sense.

It is unintelligible.

Therefore, it brings us no true hope.

So our faith is actually fueled by understanding.

And when tongues is used without interpretation within the church, it's kind of like this.

This was one of the analogies I thought was really helpful.

How many of you ever been to a symphony or an orchestra?

Yeah?

Have you ever heard them warm up?

It's a nightmare just to listen to them warm up.

It's just all of them playing their own little things and it's it's chaos and it's mess and there's no beauty to it, right?

Oh, but then when they stop and they start playing the right notes in the right time and the right key, you see that this beautiful work and score of masterpiece comes through.

And the intelligibility of the music is what moves our hearts, it moves our emotions, that tells the story that the music is trying to tell.

You see, prophecy is the notes being played in proper order, time and key to create these beautiful pieces of art.

It is the intelligibility of the instruments that the create the beauty of the music.

It's not just the instruments themselves.

Because in fact, if each instrument just did what they wanted to do, did their own thing, we'd have no beauty.

We would just have chaos.

But it's when they discipline themselves and they work in love to a common end goal that does the distinctness of their instrument come through to support the beauty of the masterpiece.

Paul says that we, like the Corinthians, should be eager for manifestations of the Spirit.

But if we're going to strive toward something, it should be toward the building up of the church.

And so this, I would say this intelligibility always supersedes impressiveness.

Intelligibility always supersedes impressiveness.

You see, tongues is a much more impressive gift, especially to the Corinthian church.

As they were exercising this gift, they were showing off how special they were to God, how how favored they were by God because he had given them this gift, this knowledge that's even beyond my own language and understanding.

What a spiritual transcendent knowledge have I obtained.

But Paul is working to help us understand.

No, no, no.

Intelligibility always supersedes impressiveness.

It is through intelligibility we fortify the church, not through impressive demonstration.

It is through intelligibility that we fortify the church, not through impressive demonstration.

Verses 13 through 19, we can see this that we can use good God gifts for personal purpose.

We can use good God gifts for personal purpose.

Paul starts off, therefore, one who speaks in a tongue should pray that he may interpret.

For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful.

Well, what am I to do?

I will pray with my spirit, but I'll pray with my mind also.

I will sing praise with my spirit, but I will sing with my mind also.

Notice here that Paul doesn't say private prayer tongues is completely unfruitful, but that the mind distinctly is unfruitful.

Even with this reality, Paul follows up this statement with an insistence that he will continue to pray and sing in tongues.

He will leverage both tongues prayer and intelligent prayer, because both are beneficial to spiritual health.

We have to draw attention to Paul's switching of use and means of the gift of tongues here.

We have moved from a public use of tongues to a private use of tongues, uninterpreted and remaining in unintelligibility, tongue speech must be obtained from use in the assembly, but is encouraged for use in private.

Yet still in private prayer, Paul says we are to pray intelligibly for the interpretation so that the mind may be edified.

So here's what I'm saying is that Paul gives us freedom.

What he's saying is that this gift, this gift of tongues uninterpreted, should not ever be used in the assembly.

Because it doesn't work to the end goal of all the gifts working in and among the church to build it up.

It actually is detrimental to that end goal.

But he doesn't throw out the gift completely.

He switches it to a use of private.

And he says, Look, while uninterpreted tongues is unfruitful to the mind, he makes an argument that it's not completely unfruitful at all.

He says, Well, so what will I do?

Even though I might not have the interpretation, I still will continue to pray and sing in tongues, but I will also pray and sing intelligibly, so that my mind might be fruitful.

But it doesn't mean that it is fruitless to pray or to sing in tongues even without interpretation completely.

He then goes on to say, otherwise, if you give thanks with your spirit, how can anyone in the position of an outsider say amen?

Here's what we have to understand the outsider that Paul speaks of here is not an unbeliever.

So when we first read that, we're kind of could think, oh, well, he's talking about somebody who's not a part of the church.

He's going to get to that in this in next week's text.

But this week, what he's doing is that the outsider is being created by the person who's speaking in tongues without interpretation.

So the outsider that Paul speaks of here is not an unbeliever, but a person who has been placed on the outside due to the misuse of uninterpreted tongues.

If intelligible speech would have been used, its natural implication would be to bring the person near.

Note the expectation that Paul has of that person, amening, what is said.

And the expectation of the person to be built up by that language.

Paul again reemphasizes both his gratitude and use of the gift of tongues, but works to keep it in its proper place.

The gift of the Spirit, when used among the assembly, must be with the end goal of edification.

And Paul says this last phrase, refrain.

He would rather use five words of intelligibility than 10,000 of impressiveness.

Five words of intelligibility is greater to the end of building up the church than 10,000 words of impressiveness.

And so sometimes what Paul is helping us understand is that when we use the gifts unintelligibly, we create outsiders.

We move people to the fringes.

Where if we actually use the gifts of the Spirit properly through the building up of the church, we bring them intimately near where they're encouraged, where they're built up, where they're consoled.

So here's our main idea this morning.

Love demands we pursue intelligibility over impressiveness.

Love demands that we pursue intelligibility over impressiveness.

This is what we're coming out of that great love chapter, right?

Paul didn't, here's something to kind of ponder.

Paul did not write that chapter to the Corinthians to have at weddings 2,000 years later.

It's not that that doesn't really support and you can't use it there rightly.

That's fine.

But why did Paul just labor through an entire chapter defining what love is and then come right out of that into this section where he's saying prophecy versus tongues because of this?

Love demands that we as the church pursue intelligibility over impressiveness.

This is why prophecy is propped up as a greater gift than tongues.

Tongues uninterpreted lacks love.

Tongues uninterpreted lacks love.

So if we find ourselves in a church culture where we're allowing the chaos of uninterpreted tongues to flood throughout the assembly, what we are doing is operating in an unloving way.

I think that's clear from the text.

I think it supports the end goal of the gifts of the Spirit.

Because tongue gives no benefit to the receiver.

Too often we see our gifts as ways to benefit self rather than to benefit others.

This isn't isolated to prophecy in tongues, but all gifts can be discerned through this intelligibility versus impressiveness juxtaposition.

Let's look at the gift of hospitality, right?

The gift of hospitality, quoted as a spiritual gift within the Corinthian letter, uh, but what happens when we invite someone over and we use foreign customs, right?

We we introduce all these weird foreign customs that if you're gonna come over to our house, well, here's how we're going to do this and do that.

And it's like people are just looking like, that's not normal, right?

Bragging about our fine goods.

Oh, you ever gone to somebody's house and they, oh, well, you know, this here I got this, and uh they just go through this long story of how they uh acquired this fine good, right?

Or offering food and drink that your guest is actually uncomfortable with, right?

You might have freedom, but but but they don't.

Or sometimes we're like, well, I don't care if you're vegetarian, we're gonna be cooking all the meats tonight.

Whatever category of meat we can have, we're gonna have in you.

I don't know, we've got salad.

You know, you're gonna have to suck it up.

No.

What would hospitality be?

Hospitality would be, hey, you're vegetarian, we're gonna be vegetarians tonight too, because I can be all things to all people for their good.

And that hurts me to say in my heart.

But the use of foreign customs bragging about fine goods or offering food and drink that your guest is uncomfortable with, that doesn't demonstrate hospitality.

That's an unintelligible practice of a spirit gift.

Pursuing impressiveness rather than intelligibility.

Let's look at teaching.

Using language and vocabulary to impress, not working to help others understand, but instead working to outsmart them or shame them.

You ever been around a teacher or someone who claims to be a teacher who kind of does that all the time?

Like, bro, I don't even know if you know what that word means specifically, but I don't know what it means, so I'm just gonna sit here and act like we both know what it means, and we're gonna keep on with the conversation.

Right?

Or they don't really get on your level to try and help you understand.

As we do our elder assessments, we we really focus in, okay, pretend I'm so-and-so, right?

Under, maybe I'm undereducated, maybe I'm more of a different class of society, maybe I have whatever, whatever.

Now tell me that in a way that I would understand.

Basically, preach the gospel to a five-year-old.

Because sometimes to be good teachers, to exercise intelligibility rather than impressiveness of a spirit-empowered gift, we have to be not trying to seek up to build ourselves up, but to build up the other person in front of us.

You see, when we take a gift from the intelligibility to the impressive, we have stripped it of love fundamentally.

And so, what's our story?

Some of us we pursue the unintelligible to experience the impressive.

We pursue the unintelligible to experience the impressive.

And this is something that I got saved in.

This is something that I kind of spiritually grew up in was this pursuit of the unintelligible simply to experience the impressive.

And and this is what was weird about that as I look back, is that um often in the church world, experiences and unintelligibility go hand in hand.

Actually, the more impressive the experience, the more unintelligible was the road to get there.

Because, see, intrinsically, people desire experiences.

We want to experience God, we want to experience the transcendent, we want to experience the supernatural.

And so from this road of the charismatic or from the road of undisciplined gifts of the spirit, it was a pursuit of the unintelligible so that we might experience the impressive.

And when there were these great moves of the Holy Spirit, and and and kind of put that in quotations, moves of the Holy Spirit, it was followed by great and drastic unintelligibility.

And so it became new teaching and new words and new revelation so that we could experience more of God and be impressed by it.

Right?

I remember watching a video back uh in the early 2000s coming out of the Toronto Blessing.

It was this uh move of God in the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church.

And I remember watching a man who was uh sitting at a table on this video eating strawberries, talking about how he was getting drunk by the spirit off of eating these strawberries.

And people were just amazed.

I wish I could eat strawberries and get drunk in the spirit.

Wouldn't that be amazing?

But how unintel that's completely unintelligible.

And looking back at this, like that was just foolishness.

But man, it was propped up as impressive.

I remember the barnyard anointing.

And there was literally people in revival movements that said they had the barnyard and mourning, they would get down on all fours and make animal noises.

What does that mean?

Someone please help me understand.

But the pursuit of impressiveness often is built by the road of unintelligibility.

It's not simply just in the charismatic movement, though, I would say.

I would charge that it was also done to create impressive experiences.

The gospel has become not only unintelligible in the American Church, but has become absent of the for the accommodation of the impressive.

Let me say that again without all the stumbling.

The gospel has become not only unintelligible in the American Church, but it has become absent for the accommodation of the impressive.

Think about it.

In churches all across America, they're trying to be as impressive as they possibly can.

In fact, we have churches that won't reopen because they can't be as impressive as they once were with the restrictions and the things that we have.

And so they be they pursue impressiveness.

And here is a fundamental philosophical thought process of that pursuit that the gospel has to become unintelligible for the accommodation of the impressive.

We downplay the things of God, the doctrines of the faith, things like sin in hell and repentance.

We don't just downplay them, we outright chuck them out the window.

And the gospel itself becomes unintelligible because if we don't understand the bad news of our state of sin, we will never understand the good news of the redemption and victory of Christ.

And therefore, we pursue the impressive sacred mission.

May we preach the gospel in radically unimpressive ways.

Others of us, we abuse intelligible gifts by motivation of being impressive.

We abuse intelligible gifts by motivation of being impressive.

We use the gifts to build ourselves up rather than to build up others.

We want to make a name for ourselves.

We need a brand, right?

Why does, and this is something I'm just telling you, I'm being like human here for a second and honest.

It's something I've fought with so many times.

Like every pastor has to have their own brand, right?

And they have to have their own brand and they have to have viral videos and like their own logo, and then you and and I I like trip out when I see pastors quoting themselves and then they put their own name under.

It's like, brother, everybody knows this is your social media fade.

You don't have to put your name on the quote that you put on there three times because you reposted it from your own Twitter account and now it's on somewhere else.

Like I it's just their names everywhere, right?

And there's just this reality where we want to make a name for ourselves.

We need a brand.

Everybody can be an influencer, right?

You can you can be a brand and of yourself, and you get to influence culture and you can make a name for yourself, right?

People who were nobodies now somehow like can be these huge uh movements in our culture because of the tools that are given to us.

We all deep down want to be known for something.

And we take what was meant to be used for building up others and we use it to build ourselves so that we can appear impressive.

Man, what would it look like if we just radically were unimpressive?

But we served faithfully with the gifts that God has given us to build up the church.

What humility would be demonstrated within the body?

What selflessness would be demonstrated in the body?

Where you didn't worry about how you ended up on the other side of this transaction of gifts.

But we so often do, right?

We get we get mad if if if if something happens up on the side.

I used to worship lead lead music in worship for a long time.

I can't tell you how many times I would get so upset if something went wrong in the music.

Because you know why?

Because it made me look bad.

That's why.

Fundamentally, like how goofy is that?

And like I was just a jerk about it a lot of times too.

Mean and angry.

Right?

Or or or when we don't get the recognition.

We were talking about this in our mission group this week about um, I used to go to a uh church a long time ago, and uh, we would never put uh the who the song, what the title of the song was, or who it was written by.

We would never put that on the screen except when this one worship leader wrote that song.

And then on the screen, real big, words of music by so-and-so, right?

It's like, hold on a second.

We never do that any other time.

Why do we do it when it's your song?

That's kind of crazy, in my opinion.

But what's the hope of the gospel for us?

It's this that Jesus died in an agonizingly unimpressive way.

Jesus died in an agonizingly unimpressive way.

The death of Jesus was atrocious to his followers and those who thought that he was the promised coming Messiah.

It was hopeless.

They thought he was going to be this ruler.

This conquering king who would come in and save them from the oppression of Rome, who would rebuild a Jerusalem to its glory, who would reinstate God's people to the position of prominence that they had been promised.

His death was agonizingly unimpressive.

This is what you have for us, God.

This is the Messiah that you gave to us.

Stripped naked and hung to a cross, dying a cursed death by the hand of our oppressor.

But what they don't understand is that he came to pour himself out as an offering in his death, to build the church through the shedding of his blood.

And in his death, burial, and resurrection, he gave to us saving intelligibility.

In Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection, he gave to us saving intelligibility.

Here's what I mean by that.

There is no other religion that has such a clear and intelligible faith.

Christ Jesus came to save sinners.

Summarize any world faith with such simplicity, with such intelligibility.

You can't.

There were impressive realities to the work and ministry of Jesus here on earth.

But when we look at the final act, when we look at the end scene of his earthly ministry, wow, how radically unimpressive.

But he did it to give us an intelligible faith.

So what would we do if we believed this, if we aligned our lives to this truth?

I think we would do three things.

Number one, we would pursue what is intelligible to be built up.

Personally, we would pursue what is intelligible to be built up.

Don't chase after the impressive.

Don't chase after the experiences, the signs, right?

And that everybody is in that right now.

I'm just gonna put something to rest real quick.

If you look at your Facebook feed, there's probably all kinds of things of is this the end times?

Is this the mark of the beast?

Is this the the, is this the is this the right?

We're just looking for sign after sign after sign.

Here, let me tell you something.

For the last two millennia, every time a plague or a virus or a war or a conquering uh empire came in, Christians thought the same thing.

For 2,000 years, they thought the same thing.

Is this the end?

And what I'm not saying is don't act like this might not be the end.

I'm just saying, realize that for the last 2,000 years, Christians have been asking the same thing when a certain incident happens in their life and culture.

So, how should we do this?

Well, we should live as if Jesus is coming back tomorrow.

That's actually what the Bible calls us to do.

Stop looking for signs, stop looking for the unintelligible, stop pursuing the experiences, and start living in radical obedience to the revelation of which we have, which is the revealed word of God as found in the Bible.

And live as if Jesus is coming back tomorrow.

Because here's the beauty of this: even if he doesn't come back tomorrow, there are potentially people in your life that didn't meet the second coming of Jesus, but perished and went to meet Jesus themselves.

And therefore, either reality being true, Jesus comes back or your loved ones go to meet him.

Let us preach the gospel intelligibly in unimpressive ways to the people around us.

When we pursue these things, when we pursue the impressive, the experiences, the signs, they too often leave us more confused than when we started.

The most intelligible gift we have been given is God's word.

And basics are beneficial.

Basics are beneficial.

This is what you look at any sports team.

There is not one athlete, no matter how accomplished they are, no matter how successful they are, that misses practicing the basics.

Why?

Because basics are beneficial.

Don't move beyond the gospel.

Don't move beyond God's word.

Don't move beyond getting on your face before Him in prayer.

Basics are beneficial, but we don't want to do that.

We want to leave them behind and chase after the impressive, and we get out in fields and places that we didn't expect to be more confused and lost than when we started.

Number two, practice what is intelligible to build up others.

So the first one's pursue what is intelligible to be built up.

Second one is practice what is intelligible to build up others.

Ask yourself this how your gift is working to build up others.

How are you using your gift to build up others?

Assess if you are seeking to be served because of your gift or if you're seeking to serve others with your gift.

And be overzealous to meet people where they are with your gift.

Work to know the person or people and assess how your gift would best serve them.

All of us are gifted by the Spirit.

Every single one in this room.

Are we gifted identically?

No.

We're gifted diversely.

And each and every one of us, if we have the Holy Spirit in our lives, has also been gifted.

And we have an obligation and responsibility to serve the church, to build her up with that gift.

Now, we should desire all the gifts.

We should desire the higher gifts that Paul tells us to.

But we have to understand that sovereignly, that's up to the Spirit if he gives it to us or not.

We have an obligation to not pursue the gift as if it's obtainable by our own merit, but to pursue love, which affects and forms the demonstration of every gift within the church.

Lastly, operate in the gifts through love to a watching world.

Operate in the gifts through love.

Listen, the world is watching us.

The world is watching us.

We're the ones that say we have hope.

We're the ones that say we have truth.

We're the ones that we say uh uh have it right, and they're watching us in a time where they're looking left, right, up and down, and everything they once had hope in is just crumbling around them.

If we're operating in selfishness, if we're operating in ways, and I I wish I had more time.

If we're operating in selfishness, if we're abusing that which the Holy Spirit is giving us, what do you think a watching world is gonna walk away with?

Well, there's no hope there either.

They're just cannibalistic like the world is, they're hypocritical, like our politicians are.

They have no truth or hope or goodness for us, so we'll keep searching.

Church, the world is watching.

They're watching every post you make about a mask, every post you make about a political leader, every post you make about whatever.

They're watching the way that you engage with others who claim the faith, they're watching the ways in which you serve, and they're building a theology off of that.

Sometimes, to their detriment, they're walking away hopeless.

Let's operate in the gifts through love to a watching world.

Let's pray.