1 Corinthians 12:4-11 Matthew 25:14-30 Do you remember in your high school chemistry lab they had a gadget called a Bunsen burner? The pyromaniac in me used to love that gadget. It was a little gas jet that you would light and a flame would appear. As you would turn on the gas, it would become a hot blue flame. Then you would take a beaker of some kind of chemical that the teacher told you to put in and with a tweezer-like utensil, you would hold it over the flame. Finally there would be a little pop and it would turn out to be a different substance. Do you remember doing that in chemistry class? Today what I would like to do is “hold the flame” under you to inspire you to be on fire and pop with excitement over the possible spiritual gifts that are given to us by the Holy Spirit and that are spoken of in this morning's epistle. We are given spiritual gifts for multiple purposes. The first reason we are given spiritual gifts is to give glory to God. The second reason we are given spiritual gifts is to edify ourselves and to give ourselves self-esteem. When you have a gift and you use it, you feel good about yourself. Thirdly, we are given spiritual gifts in order to help others. Lastly, we are given spiritual gifts to build up the church.

Spiritual gifts are extremely important. The Biblical passage that we read this morning list some of these spiritual gifts but I know that you are aware as I am aware that there are many many more. The first one listed is the gift of wisdom. Our society doesn't value older people. Yet when I look out and see lots of you with gray hair and realize that's my fate to have gray hair as well& in fact, mine started turning gray when I was twenty seven&I like to think, as the Bible says, that it is a crown of wisdom. As people age, they generally become smarter. As they accumulate life experiences, they can become wise. In the ancient Biblical church of Judaism, the wise man was considered a very important person. He would sit at the community gate and dispense his wisdom to those who asked for it. He would make judgments for people in conflict and resolve problems. One of the things we need to recognize and learn to do is respect the wisdom of those who have accumulated years in their life and give them the respect that is their due.

The second gift listed in the Bible is the gift of knowledge. Knowledge comes with experience. Knowledge comes with study. You have to work at achieving knowledge. When you have an experience, whether it is a good experience or a bad experience, I want you to ask yourself, “What did I learn from this?” “What is the message in this experience for me?” If it is a bad experience, then there is probably some message in it about problem solving or how to not repeat that experience again. One of the great gifts that someone gave to me in my college years was to tell me that there was no such thing as failure. I had learning disabilities and I struggled with my studies. I had to have tutors and I got some famous “flags” on some of my report cards. I took calculus three times before I passed it. Those were things that were very uncomfortable for me in those days. Yet, someone said to me, “There is no such thing as failure. There are just outcomes. If you don't get the outcome that you want, figure out what you learned from the experience and then do it differently based on what you learned.” After two times of not doing very well in calculus, I finally mastered the subject and got a B in it the third time! I learned what I didn't do right or how I didn't succeed with it and was able to pass with flying colors on the third try. Like they always say, “The third time is the charm.” As you go through life, constantly look to increase your knowledge and study frequently. All of us Christians should delve into spiritual reading, not only reading the Bible but reading spiritual books where people have insights about the Bible. There are even spiritual novels which do quite an interesting and good job of explaining Biblical truths. So even spiritual novels are worth reading.

The Bible also lists healing as a spiritual gift. Some people are given the gift of healing. Those of you who serve in medical fields are given the gift of healing. The next gift listed is the gift of miraculous powers . Some of you may even be given that gift. It is not a very common gift but apparently it is a gift that is given, and it probably shows up more frequently than not in coordination with healing gifts. So we want to lift up and pray for and invite these gifts to appear in our congregation and to be used for one another.

The final gifts are gifts of distinguishing between spirits. Here we are looking at what is true doctrine and what is heresy, incorrect doctrine and how might Satan enter into corrupting our thoughts and our minds and how might we find what is true and real. Again, getting into the Bible would be essential but some people are just given the gift of discerning what is true, what is valuable, what to find and promote with other people as we go through our religious journey together.

Finally, it says the gift of tongues and the gift of interpreting tongues. Our church is not a tradition that fosters that gift but it is definitely a gift listed here in the Bible. I have attended worship services where people have prayed and sung in tongues and others have interpreted that gift. It is really an intensely spiritual experience to participate in and observe. It is not one of my gifts but it certainly is a gift that we need to recognize and value as alive and functioning in some denominations and parts of Christendom. So these are some of the gifts. We get on further into the passage of I Corinthians 13, moving out of 12, and we find that the more important gifts are faith, hope and love.

Faith, as we described it to the children this morning is belief in that which is not seen. It is really a gift to have certainty in what you believe. As you become more filled with knowledge and filled with wisdom, we are hoping that you increase in your faith and belief, and therefore, are able to connect more intimately with God in a personal way.

Hope. Hope is kind of like a wish. It is desiring something great in the future. When people give up hope, they usually don't survive. As long as people have hope and can believe that there will be something better for them, something greater in the future, then they can thrive. So as we seek the spiritual gift of hope, we are looking at how that can improve in our physical lives, in our lives here and now (What can I hope for?). Then also we are looking toward eternal life. We hope for eternal things, for the reward that our works have brought about and the reward of living a Christian life, living a good life. So we hope for eternal life more primarily than anything else.

Then, as Paul says, the greatest of all spiritual gifts is&say it together&Love. You got it. The greatest of these is love. As we seek spiritual gifts, Paul says we need to desire and pray for love, the ability to hope for the best for one another, to seek to enable the best in each other, to care for one anther, to reach out to one another, to be there for one another, to support one another, to encourage one another. All these things are a part of Christian love. Our word benevolence comes from the Latin word that translates love. Bene volo  I wish you well. I love you well. What is benevolence? Benevolence is giving of our financial wealth to support those in need. Why? Because we care about them. We are compassionate for them. We love them. So we are urged to have this as the highest of spiritual gifts.

This is the final sermon in the Discipleship Series. A disciple is a learner so we are learning to seek all these things. I am going to summarize the things that we've covered. A disciple is one who is seeking not only his salvation but the salvation of others and knows he/she is saved because of the depth of their own faith. A person who is a disciple is a person who is in Christ, and because they are in Christ, they have new life. When we have that new life, we are like the Bunsen burner test tube. We explode with enthusiasm. We are joyful. Christians should always be joyful and filled with the sense of gladness. Paul says, “Rejoice in the Lord always. I say it again, rejoice because the Lord is near.” Well, the Lord is most near when He dwells in our hearts. Disciples have the Lord dwelling within them. Disciples know the Bible. Disciples pray. Disciples are invested in fellowship in church. And disciples are witnesses. These are the traits of a true disciple. We want to become that.

This week I discovered two magnificent examples of contemporary disciples. One is a person named Josh McDowell. Maybe you have read some of his books. Josh McDowell came from a horrible family. His home situation was horrible. His dad was an alcoholic. He beat Josh's mother. Did you know that usually our first image of God as Father relates to how we see our earthly father? So guess what Josh McDowell's view of God was? God didn't exist. Josh was an atheist. He couldn't fathom the thought that there could be a God. He always heard God was like a father but he didn't know what a good father was because he didn't have one. Injured like this, he struggled through life. Then sometime in his college years, someone handed him a Bible and he began to read it. He began to see the witnessing faith of some of his classmates. It moved him. He began to say, “You know, I think there might be something to this.” As he delved into it, he on one occasion was moved to kneel down and give his life to Christ. “Please Jesus, dwell within me.” When he did that, he discovered that he was a new creation, that he could do things and think things that he never thought and did before. He went on then to become one of the 20th and now the 21st century's greatest apologists. Do you know what an apologist is? It is a defender of our faith. He has written over 111 books defending our faith. Who are these books aimed at? They are aimed primarily at college students. He has gone to colleges all over the world and spoken to young men and young women about our faith, proving to them why they should turn to Christ and why they should consider this book the Good News and read it frequently. He really has become a remarkable disciple of Christ, one that would be an example for all of us to follow.

I read this week, too, about a woman who had awful life circumstances. She really was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. She came from a fairly wealthy family and had everything she wanted growing up. Almost the total opposite of Josh McDowell. In high school, she was one of the most popular and one of the most beautiful young girls. In college, she was a cheerleader and had every date she could imagine. Life was going great. But then in her early 20's, she began to get frequent nose bleeds. The doctor didn't seem to be able to stop them. One time she came home from the hospital and was removing the packing in her nose, and discovered the packing was three yards long. It went way down into the back of her throat and it was very tight. She knew that something was drastically wrong, so she went to a specialist who took X-rays of her head and discovered that behind her nose was a tumor the size of a baseball. The doctor said that it was pressing on the lower part of her brain and if it got any bigger, it would kill her. They had to go in there immediately and operate. They told her it would destroy the appearance of her face because they were going to have to cut across the front of it, peel back the skin, crack the bones, go in and remove the tumor. This beautiful young woman ended up horribly disfigured and malformed. It was a terrible situation for her but they got all of the cancer. And it didn't reoccur. I suppose she went through some chemotherapy or radiation therapy. I don't recall reading about that. But now here was this woman who all of her life had lived great things and suddenly when she went out, people would look at her aghast. Little children would point at the awful appearance of her face and their parents would say, “Don't do that”. But she didn't let it defeat her. She realized that in this illness, God had given her gifts. The first gift was the gift of teaching, to be able to use her knowledge to reach others. She became a teacher of handicapped, injured and deformed children. Because she had totally overcome her disability and was able to exude warmth, love, caring and knowledge (the second gift), she inspired children all over the United States. She still does it today. Her name is Candy Woods. Candy married a man by the name of Woods and became the love of his life. He was able to never even notice her face because he discovered her heart. And her heart was right with God. Her heart was pure and it was most of all loving. So this woman became for all of us, no matter what befalls us, an example to follow; someone who can maximize the spiritual gift of love. That is what all of us are asked to do. Lent is coming up soon. We are going to spend our Wednesday nights studying the famous I Corinthians 13 passage on love. We invite you all to attend so that you can fathom the mysteries of love and how to live it even better as the Bible explains it.

Candy Woods had a motto. The motto came in her conversion. When she was a high school and college girl, she was rather loose morally. During her battle with cancer, she was given a Bible. She thought, “I don't even know where to start in this book so I will just open it up and point and see what it says for me.” She opened it up to the page that I have marked (Psalm 118) and discovered this line. “I will not die but live and I will proclaim the wonderful works of the Lord.” And that became her motto. Wouldn't that be a great motto for all of us? “I will not die but live and I will proclaim the wonderful works of the Lord.” I am going to keep that as one of my mottos and I hope you do to. When Jesus said, “I've come to give you life,” He meant it. To give life abundantly. As the Amplified Bible says, “overflowing life” that fills everything around us. So that is what we seek to live in the here and now and to make our love known to others as we live our gifts. The gifts of the spirit are not given for us to keep inside internally. The gifts of the spirit are for us to express externally.