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Faith: the Root and Trait of All Spiritual Gifts
The following message is by Pastor John Piper. More information from Desiring God Ministries is available at www.desiringgod.org. Let's pray together. Would you join me? When we come to the cross in our minds, Lord, and linger there, two things come very, very clear if the Holy Spirit is at work. One, we discover that we are great sinners. Else, there would be no need for such a horrific slaughter of the Son of God. And the other is that we have a great Savior and are prompted to say, "Hallelujah, what a Savior." So I thank you for the cross because it teaches me who I am in my corruption and pride. Rebellion, lust, greed, fear, bitterness, resentfulness, self-centeredness. And it reveals that I have a great Savior who forgives all my sins, heals all my diseases, brings me home to everlasting joy when the appointed days here are done. Lord, make yourself known now as you have been in these glorious songs that we've been singing. Continue to manifest yourself and help me to be faithful to your revealed Word for the upbuilding of your people and the engathering of your elect and all the good things that you designed for your Word. In Jesus' name I pray, Amen. So today we're going to move beyond verse 3 where we've been lingering for two weeks and move into by building a bridge, verses 4 through 6. Let's read those again. For as in one body we have many members and the members do not have the same function. So we though many are one body in Christ and individually members one of another. Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them if prophecy in proportion to our faith, we'll stop there. Now the bridge I want to build from verse 3 into this passage is by giving a fourth answer to the question that we've been answering for the last two weeks. Let me state the question again, summarize the three answers we've already given and then build a bridge with answer number 4. The question is back in verse 3 we need to read that perhaps. Look at it with me. "For by grace given to me I say to every one among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think." This is about pride. "Don't think more highly than you ought to think, but alternative, think with sober judgment about yourself." How? By what standard, Paul? Answer. "Each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned." And the question we asked was, "Paul, why do you make faith and its God-given measure to each person the standard by which we are to assess ourselves, define ourselves, think about ourselves?" And I have given three answers. Number one, because there's something unique about faith. It turns outward. It goes away from self and embraces the worth and the beauty and the all-sufficiency of Christ as its treasure and is satisfied there. So that when you make that act, the definition of this being the self, a really interesting definition emerges. My value as a person consists in my valuing Jesus, or to be very precise thinking of people who are not yet saved, for example, my potential valuing of Jesus. The meaning and the value of human personhood resides in my esteeming, valuing, and treasuring of Christ. That's why I exist to make much of him. That was answer number one, as to why faith is made the standard by which we assess and measure ourselves. Answer number two was that faith is a gift. The God-appointed measure of faith, and you can't boast in a gift, and therefore making faith the standard by which you assess yourself eliminates all boasting. Answer number three was that we are given faith in varying degrees, which turns the body of Christ, the Bethlehem expression of it, for example, into an assembly, a fellowship of people who are tremendously interdependent in their varying measures of faith, so that a unity is crafted, which is more difficult to perform and more glorifying of Jesus Christ and more beautiful than if we all had exactly the same measures of faith and maturity. Those were the three answers, and if you would like to hear those unpacked, then you need to go to DesiringGod.org and either read them or listen to them again, but we're not going to go there. We're going to give the fourth answer now, which builds the bridge into the rest of this text. So here's my fourth answer to the question. Paul, why do you make faith the standard of my thinking about myself? Answer number four, because faith is the root of all spiritual gifts, and the trait that turns natural abilities into spiritual gifts, so that all gifts, no matter how small or how big, redound to the glory of Christ and not to us. That's why he makes faith the standard by which we should think about ourselves, in particular, our gifts, this time, because faith is the root of all those gifts, and faith is the trait of every one of them, which makes the difference between it being a natural ability and a spiritual gift, and the effect of all of that is that in the body, all the gifts, no matter how big or little, bring glory to Christ, not to us. Now, my plan is this. I'd like to spend a few minutes explaining that, and then the last few minutes justifying it from the text. So first, I'm just going to explain what I mean by root and trait, and then we'll go to the text and see three places where I got it. So first, an effort at an explanation, root. Faith is the root of all spiritual gifts, which means that when you're about to exercise some spiritual gift, and there are all kinds, the Bible only gives samplings. What you do at that moment is, by faith, reach - let's use this image since we got root here - reach down into the river, the inexhaustible subterranean river of God's grace, and lay hold on it, trust in it, and draw it up, draw grace up into the tree of the gift, and then bear the fruit of it in sharing that grace with others. That's a picture of a gift. A gift, a spiritual gift, is a human action, could be word, could be deed, which by faith is drawing on grace and extending that grace to others so that they are helped in some way to glorify Christ by the grace that you've just extended into their lives. That transmission of grace is a spiritual gift. Let me read it to you from 1 Peter, so you'll see a confirmation of this explanation. 1 Peter 4, 10 goes like this, "As each has received a gift, each," you do have at least one, "and they come, they go, they rise, they fall, they change, as each has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God's varied grace." Faith, I'm saying, reaches down into grace, says, "I despair of myself, I bank on you, Jesus, and all your grace, I draw it up into my life, and now, as I try to help somebody, count on you to flow through me to bless them." Gifts are the stewarding of grace, gifts are the embodiment of grace being extended from God to other people, which means we don't, at Bethlehem, do gift inventories, provide a gift to 35 gifts, a list of 35 gifts, and then have you do some kind of self-assessment and check off, "I've got these three, and now, I'll do those." What we say is start loving each other like crazy with the person you are, and you'll find you're good at some things and really bad at other things. Sometimes you will try to extend grace to somebody by using one means of your gift, you think, and they will say, "Thank you so much. It got me through the hard time." And other times, they won't call back because you blew it. That was not your gift. And by a process of elimination, you discover who you are in the body of Christ. That's the way it works. Just start loving people. Don't hang around in front of the mirror saying, "Show me a gift. I need to see a gift here, or I can't bless anybody." It does not work that way. You just start loving people saying, "I'm going to walk into this day, Lord Jesus, starting with prayer and the word, and I'm going to draw down some grace because I don't have anything to give of any value in me, but I'm going to draw down some grace, and I'm going to now find a way just to bless somebody today." You do that often enough, you're going to discover what blesses people through you and what doesn't. And then you'll hopefully do that a lot, and that will make the church a really happy and strong place. That's what I mean by root. Here's what I mean by trait. That faith is the trait that turns a natural ability into a spiritual gift. I don't know if that sounds a little odd to you, maybe you've asked like I have for years, what's the relationship between just my natural giftedness? Even before I was a Christian, I could do certain things pretty good and other things really bad, and now I'm a Christian, and so what's the difference? I mean, is it just that? You know, use that. Let's just take teaching for an example. That's kind of a real easy gift to get your hand around. There are unbelievers really good at teaching, really good, right? We pay them millions of dollars to come into our corporate offices and explain things and make them make the whole thing work. And what what it means if you have a God, everything is God-given, right? To unbelievers and believers. If you're an unbeliever and you're good at something, God gave you that. That's not a spiritual gift yet. So if you've got the God-given talent of teaching, what's going to happen is everything you take up to explain people get, they should get it. And lights go on and it gets practical and they say, "He's really good. He makes everything so clear." And then they'll start paying you money to do that, whether it's in school or in the office or something, because when you explain something, people get it. It's clear. It's just wonderful. What happens when a competent teacher undertakes to take a complicated thing and sort it out and help people get a hold of it? That's not a spiritual gift, not even when you do it with the Bible. A spiritual gift is when that is now converted. The person believes in Jesus. They're filled with the Holy Spirit or they have the Holy Spirit. And now they begin to pray, "Father, I despair of this talent lest I function in the flesh. I turn away from reliance on this giftedness. And by faith, I turn to grace and mercy toward me as a sinner. And I ask that you would fill me with something precious that would help and bless people. And it isn't about me and the demonstration of this thing. It's about grace being moved through me. So Lord, please have mercy upon me in my sinfulness and give me the gift of explanation so that grace happens. Salvation happens. Sanctification happens. Christ exalting hearts are created. No natural ability can produce that. No matter how excellent it is, that's the difference. The difference is the faith that is laying hold on God's grace to turn a natural ability into a moment of supernatural transmission of something that changes lives which a natural ability never could. Unless I give you the impression that the only spiritual gifts are things you're really good at before you are a Christian, don't lock me into that. I have used that as an illustration, but God can come on a new believer with a totally new competency which he never even dreamed he or she would be good at before they were saved. So don't push on my illustration as though that's the only way it happens. That's one way it happens and then God can take a new believer and cause them to do things they never dreamed they would do. They might make a phone call and pray with somebody. That would have been off the charts of boldness. That they would even talk to somebody. They're so introverted and suddenly that person calls back in the next day and says everything has changed because of that phone call. One woman came to me last night. She was just on cloud nine because of a little venture she had made in praying for a sick person in her office this week and the person when she was done said thank you. And she kind of said no. It's always good to pray for people. He said no. I mean I'm really better. Thank you. She was floating like grace, supernatural, powerful grace flowed through that little effort to bless somebody in her office. And she doesn't know if she has a gift of healing or not. Maybe she does. Maybe she doesn't. She did then. That's my explanation and now we need to turn to the text and see where you're getting this. Is this in the Bible, this sort of grace, faith, flow, transmit that picture you've just painted for us? Is that here? So let's start. I got three observations from the text. One is verse six at the beginning, goes like this, having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us. So there's a kind of picture of what I see, gifts, grace. You see them put beside each other there? In fact, if you could read Greek, which all of you can in this case because you know these words, they're right. Anybody in this room has never heard the word charismatic. Okay, that's here. Carismata is what is the Greek word for gifts. Having carismata, gifts. And then I know I can look right at the person. Some of you have daughters named Caris, and others are named Caris. And if I had 10 daughters, I'd name one of them Caris. Deborah and Lydia and Mary and Elizabeth. I love the word Caris. It means grace. Now, do you hear how the Caris, Mata, and Caris relate? Having carismata, carismata, that differ according to the Caris. So gifts differ because grace flowing through those gifts differs. You need trucks. If you want to get tomatoes somewhere, you need a modem if you want information somewhere. Gifts differ because different graces flow. We got to have different graces. We need truck people and we need modem people. We need big tankers that carry oil and draw about a thousand tons of water to get it from Saudi Arabia to Duluth. And we need satellites to get pictures of what's happening around the world. Gifts are transmitters of grace. And as grace differs, gifts differ. Don't try to be what you're not. Just link into grace by faith and love somebody. And it'll show whether you're a tanker or a satellite. My second observation, oh, I just noticed here most stuff out of verse I wanted to quote. All I'm adding to verse 6 there when it links grace and gift is that the way you tap into grace is faith. Let me read Romans 1, 11, and 12. You can look at it if you want. This is Paul illustrating by his own example of what I'm saying about faith. Romans 1, 11, "I long to see you," he says to the church, "how long to see you that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you." And then he stops and says it another way. He says, "That is that we may be mutually encouraged by each other's faith." The illegals on top of each other and you see what I'm trying to get at with this root trait business. I want to impart to you a spiritual gift. I want to be used in my unique apostolic way to bless you. That is that we might be mutually strengthened and encouraged by each other's faith. So now when I lay those two on top of each other, I say, okay, the faith is what is laying hold on the grace of Romans 12, 6, and channeling it through Paul's unique giftedness into the church at Rome. And that's what should happen right here all the time. Small groups, while you walk around afterwards, even as you're sitting there, some of you have an extraordinary gift of praying for me during services. Don't fail to use it. Second observation. That was the first one, chapter 12, verse 6, first half of the verse, having gifts that differ according to grace. Now here's the second one. Let's go back up to verse 3. That may seem an odd order to do things in, but you'll see why I think. The first phrase in verse 3, "For by the grace," sound familiar, "by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you." Now all this is is Paul modeling verse 6. Grace comes, gifts get used. Now Paul is saying, "I've got an apostolic gift here. I'm writing the book. I provide as an apostle the foundation on which the church is built. I am called. I have a unique authority to teach foundational truth. None of us are apostles in this sense. We build on what the apostles teach, Ephesians 220. The apostles provide foundation. We provide application. We try to understand what they say and preach it, teach it, live it, love it, pray it into reality in this culture, in this church. Now Paul knows, therefore, he has a tremendous authority. And he says to deflect attention from his self, he says, look at it, verse 3, "For by the grace given to me." I don't deserve this. I was the chief of sinners. I was a murderer, a persecutor. You're not looking at somebody who sort of pulled himself up by his bootstraps and worked my way up the ladder into this apostolic position. I am all here speaking by grace. That's an illustration of what I meant by despair of yourself, despair of your natural powers. He was a Pharisee. He probably was very competent at teaching and writing before he was converted. But now he's so despairing of anything but grace. I am writing Romans, I'm saying, so that every blessing that comes through the book of Romans, now and for 2,000 years, will be a tribute to grace. Not Paul. And yet he had a gift, an unusual apostolic Roman's writing gift. So that's another illustration. And again, all I'm saying is what I'm adding to that is faith is the means by which Paul laid hold on grace to write Romans. Now we need a text, one more, where that's made explicit, where my linking faith with grace is made explicit. And that's at the end of verse 6. So let's read verse 6 again, "Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them." And now he gives, he starts with prophecy. We'll come back. I'm not going to talk about what prophecy is. We'll be back to these things in the weeks to come. I just want to show you that prophecy as one gift is linked to faith, as illustrative of all the others, I believe. So he says, "If prophecy, in proportion to our faith." So he got the gift of prophecy, use it, not in any kind of self-exaltation or self-reliance, but in proportion to your trusting Jesus, in proportion to the faith that you have. This is not unique to prophecy. It would be totally wrong to say, "Oh, he's going to say teaching." That doesn't have to be in proportion to your faith. That can be out of proportion to your faith, or giving, or serving, or administration. Those don't have to be in proportion to your faith. That's not what he's saying. He's just giving prophecy here as the beginning, illustrative example, and mentioning faith. Now he's got other things to say that you should do with your gifts besides do them in proportion to your faith, but this one is clear. Now, link that little phrase in proportion to your faith at the end of verse 6 with the phrase at the end of verse 3. You'll see why I'm saying what I'm saying. Verse 3, "Think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith." God has a sign to each. And lay on top of that, use your gift in proportion to your faith. Now you've got in proportion to faith in verse 6, and according to the measure of your faith in verse 3, those are, in my judgment, the same thing. Not different things. As God grants different measures of faith to people, their gifts, verse 6, are supposed to be exercised in proportion to that differing measure of faith. So what in the world does that mean? What is Paul saying? Let me try to state it, then illustrate it. I think he's saying, I'm going to generalize now from prophecy to all the gifts, I think he's saying use your gift in proportion to your faith means don't fake it. It is so easy to fake spiritual gifts. They can be learned behaviors. Tons can be faked. Prophecy can be faked. Teaching can be faked. Giving can be faked. Mercy can be faked. And what is a fake mercy and a fake teaching and a fake prophecy? One that does not act out of faith in proportion to what you have. No more. So let me try to illustrate now real concretely. I gave myself, Lord, practically, what's that looked like? How do the exercises of gifts vary with varied measures of faith? What's that looked like? And here are six illustrations. They're just sentences. Number one, as your faith increases, your clarity of seeing Christ increases. That's one of the things that faith is and does. It is more clearly viewing Jesus. Strong faith has a clearer view of Jesus. Weak faith has a picture of Jesus, but he's sort of muddy and not as clear in your mind. But when he arrives with powerful clarity, faith is stronger. The effect that has on a gift is that Christ comes through more clearly. Let Christ shine with a clearness through your words in proportion to the clearness that you have of him. Second, when your faith increases, your treasuring of Christ's worth increases. That's the meaning of faith. As your faith rises and the proportion is higher, the measure is greater, your treasuring of his worth gets stronger, which means now as you bend that out and apply it to your exercise of gifts, there will be more passion. In other words, don't fake passion. Let it be in proportion to your faith. If you see his worth such that your zeal and your affections are rising, let the exercise of your gift show that. But no more, unless you be a hypocrite. Third, as your faith increases, you will trust more fully in his promises for help. Sometimes our sense of confidence in his promises to help us is weak and sometimes our sense is very strong. And then when you undertake to do a spiritual gift, at the moment when it's very strong, you know what's going to mark those gifts? Courage, boldness. You just can't fake it. Remember John Bunyan tried to answer the question, "When should you stay in prison and when should you get out if you can get out?" He stayed 12 years. He could have gotten out any time he wanted to if he just promised not to preach. He had a blind little girl. She needed him. That's a tough call. And so he asked the question, "When should you flee persecution and when should you stay and die?" Paul sometimes fled in a basket out of Damascus. Sometimes he walked right into persecution. They had to grab him, pull him away. What's with this guy? Can he be consistent? In proportion to your faith, no more, no less, no point in flaking it. Those are not easy. There's not a nice, crisp, clear answer when a missionary should come home and when they should stay. You get an email from a bunch of why we have crazy kids in India surrounded by a mob, and the email says, "Pray for us, we think we should stay." That's a call. I bet their parents felt differently. I don't know the answer. I just say, according to your faith, act. Fourth, illustration. When your faith increases in the exercise of your gifts, you will more clearly see and more deeply trust in the constancy and faithfulness of Christ over time so that what will mark your gifts in this case is perseverance, not as many ups and downs. If you have a gift and your faith is strong in this sense, you will break through and you will not have big highs and big lows. You'll just be a rock solid constant user of that gift and people will bless. There won't be a lot of highs. There won't be a lot of lows. You've just seen and gloried in the constancy of Jesus Christ, and according to that proportion of faith, your life and the exercise of your gift has taken on a beautiful constancy. Fifth illustration. When your faith increases, you will see Christ's mercy more clearly and your own unworthiness more clearly, which means when you exercise your gifts at this level of faith, there will be a greater felt meekness about you, a greater loneliness about you because your faith has just seen more clearly than ever how merciful he is to you and how unworthy of his mercy you are, and this day is an unusual day in which you're just so sensible of how precious the mercy is, how unworthy you are, and when you try to exercise your gift on that day in proportion with that faith, you will come across so meek, so lowly. Don't fake that. Don't fake that. Finally, illustration number six. When your faith increases, you see the greatness of Christ in his all-satisfying beauty more fully so that there's a contentment, a restfulness, and a joy that is bigger than other days, and when you exercise your gift in the core of that faith and proportion to that faith, you'll be very happy servant, which launches you toward the end of the text about let those who give give cheerfully. That's just another way of saying give in proportion to your faith as you've seen how true it is, blessed are those who give rather than receive. So let me sum it all up and we'll be done. We're given a fourth answer to the question, Paul, why do you make such a big deal out of faith as the measure of who I am? Answer because faith is the root of all your spiritual gifts and faith is the trait of your gifts so that you should despair of your own native abilities and bank wholly on grace and draw on it by faith so that all the gifts that are used at Bethlehem become a tribute to Jesus and not to ourselves. And we've seen it in three places. First, half of verse six, having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us. So grace is flowing through gifts. We saw it in verse three, by grace given to me, I say, so Paul simply illustrates verse six in his own experience. And then we saw it at the end of verse six, use your gifts in proportion to your faith. And very practically, I think that means Bethlehem be real. Oh, how many people? This is so sad. How many people devote energy to building a facade instead of building faith? You got some energy to invest in your facade? Don't waste it on your facade. That blesses nobody. You may think looking good, perfect hair, perfect face, perfect figure, perfect strength, perfect suit, really blesses people. Got news for you. Nobody's blessed that way. That may be an overstatement. I always make an overstatement. I'll get a letter about that. It won't be a big blessing. How about that? It won't be a spiritual blessing. You want to devote some energies, build faith. Because when faith grows, then people get blessed like crazy through your life. And that's what you want your life to count for, not cutting a swab. They could look a certain way or can fake a certain spirituality. You want people to be blessed. You want to be help become stronger. You want them to like having you around, not because you look a certain way, but because they get stronger around you. Christ is exalted when you're around. That's what we want as a church. Let's pray. Father, make us that way. I pray. We need you and we want more faith. I want greater faith as a pastor in this church. And I know that the vast majority of folks in this room are hungry for those six illustrations to mark their spiritual gifts. So Lord, show us how to love people with our unique personality. That is, show us what our gifts are. And then, Grant, I pray that our faith would grow so that when we exercise these gifts in proportion to our faith, people would be maximally helped in their pilgrimage toward heaven. Thank you for listening to this message by John Piper, pastor for preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Feel free to make copies of this message to give to others, but please do not charge for those copies or alter the content in any way without permission. We invite you to visit Desiring God Online at www.desiringgod.org. There you'll find hundreds of sermons, articles, radio broadcasts, and much more, all available to you at no charge. Our online store carries all of Pastor John's books, audio, and video resources. You can also stay up to date on what's new at Desiring God. Again, our website is www.desiringgod.org, or call us toll free at 1-888-346-4700. Our mailing address is Desiring God 20601 East Franklin Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55406. Desiring God exists to help you make God your treasure, because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.
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