“Are You A Spiritual Person

“Are You A Spiritual Person?”

Text: 1 Corinthians 12:1-11

© January 14, 2007 by C. Edward Bowen

Over in Asia is a country called Nepal. It’s a rather isolated little nation that’s probably best known for being the place where you find Mount Everest and the Himalayan Mountains. And mainly because of its rugged geography, for much of its history Nepal was pretty much cut off from the rest of the world. But in 1950 the first Christian missionaries were able to go there, and when they arrived, they found that there was not one Christian in all of Nepal.

But today, about 55 years later, there are more than 500,000 Christians in Nepal. How did that happen? How did it happen that they went from having no Christians in that country to having more than a half million Christians in such a relatively short span of time?

Well, it turns out that the overwhelming majority of Christians in Nepal say that they became believers because of healing miracles that happened in their lives or in the lives of people they know. More than 80% of the Christians in Nepal say that they are believers today because either they, or someone close to them, had some serious problem, and a Christian prayed for them, and a miracle happened and they were healed. And American and European doctors who have been to Nepal acknowledge that they have seen firsthand many, many cases where critically ill people got better when, from a medical point of view, there seemed to be no hope.[1]

In many respects, Christians in the poor and underdeveloped countries in the world, like you find in Nepal, in Africa, and in South America are teaching Christians like us, in the United States and in the other richer developed countries of the world, an important lesson. And that lesson is this: the Bible is not just a history book. The Bible is not just a book that tells us about how God’s Spirit moved about in the world and did amazing things long, long ago. No, the lesson that the Christians in many of the poor and underdeveloped countries are teaching us is that the Bible is also about the amazing kinds of things that God’s Spirit can continue to bring about in our world even today, including amazing things like miracles and healings.[2]

And so the question we’re confronted with is: are we willing to be open to the movement of the Holy Spirit in our lives? In essence, are we willing to be spiritual people?

But the simple fact is that, whether we realize it or not, we are all spiritual people. We are all people who were created with a spiritual dimension to us. That’s what we’re told in those first chapters of Genesis. When God created the first person, God took the physical – God took the dirt of the ground – and God breathed life into it. Or really it’s quite correct to say that God breathed spirit into it, because the same Hebrew word, nephesh, means spirit, breath, and life. And so, as far as the Bible is concerned, to be a human being means to be a spiritual being. To be a human being means not only to have a physical reality, but also to have a spiritual reality, a spiritual reality that has been put there by God.

And that’s basically what the apostle Paul is talking about here in this passage in 1 Corinthians. Paul is saying that when God created each of us, God endowed us with a spiritual nature – God gave each of us different spiritual gifts. And those spiritual gifts make it possible for different people to be able to do different things. For instance, God has given to some people the gift, the ability, to be missionaries – to take God’s Word into strange and different parts of the world and invite people to believe. Not everyone has been given the spiritual gift to be able to do that, but some people have.

Or for other people, God gives them the spiritual gift of being able to teach, or being able to lead groups of people. Or God gives some people the spiritual gift of healing. Or, even though some people might not think of it as a spiritual gift, Paul says that even being able to help others, in big or small ways, is a spiritual gift.

But as Paul was writing this letter to the Corinthian church, one spiritual gift, in particular, seemed to be the source of a considerable amount of controversy. And that spiritual gift is what we call “speaking in tongues.” Speaking in tongues means that when some people pray, they are given the spiritual gift where they start speaking a language that is not like any other language here on earth. If you didn’t know what speaking in tongues is, chances are if you saw someone doing it, you’d say that the person were babbling. And there’s no way to know what the person is saying who is speaking in tongues unless someone is there who has been given the spiritual gift to interpret tongues.

But apparently things were getting out of control in Corinth when it came to speaking in tongues. Apparently almost everyone at their worship services felt like they needed to speak in tongues to show that they were just as spiritual as everyone else. And it turned into such a chaotic mess there that Paul finally ordered them to knock it off. He told them to stop speaking in tongues, unless there was someone there who could interpret what was being said – and even then, he said after two or three people spoke in tongues and had their words interpreted, that was enough.

You see, instead of looking at the spiritual gifts that God gives us as gifts that are meant to be used to do God’s work – to show God’s love to people, to do God’s mission in the world – the Corinthians became spiritual thrill-seekers and allowed themselves to become obsessed with some of the spiritual gifts, and ended up forgetting about the reason they had been given those spiritual gifts in the first place.

It’s like even today in some remote Appalachian areas, there are churches that engage in snake-handling. You see, near the very end of the Gospel of Mark there is a rather strange verse where Jesus says, “These signs will accompany those who believe: by using my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues (that was what was going on in Corinth); and they will pick up snakes in their hands….” (Mark 16:17-18a). And so in those snake-handling churches they take that to mean that if you’re really a believer, if you’re really spiritual, then during a worship service you can pick up a poisonous snake, like a rattlesnake, and even if it bites you, you won’t die. Well, just about every year you read in the newspaper about one or more people who die from snake bites in those churches.

God doesn’t give us spiritual gifts to show off. God doesn’t give us spiritual gifts just for the personal thrill we might get out of it. No, God created us as spiritual beings and has equipped us with spiritual gifts so that we might have the ability to do what God wants us to do with our lives. God created us as spiritual beings and has equipped us with spiritual gifts so that each one of us might fulfill the mission that God has for us.

It has been said that there are two kinds of people in the world. On a windy day when the tree branches are flapping up and down, there are some who look at that and believe that it’s the trees that are moving the wind, and there are others who believe that it’s the wind that’s moving the trees.[3] There are those who believe that what is most important are the trees, the physical, and as far as they’re concerned, if there’s anything that happens in the world there’s some physical, tangible, earthly explanation for it. But then there are those who believe that what is most important is the wind, the spiritual, and that ultimately it’s that unseen, invisible power that’s the true power that’s at work in the world. Which kind of person are you? Do the trees move the wind, or does the wind move the trees?

We live in a world where so much of the emphasis is on the physical. So much of the emphasis is on what we look like, what we can own, what we can hold on to. But God invites us to look beyond the physical and to focus on what can’t be seen, to focus on the spiritual. God has created each one of us with a spiritual dimension, and God has equipped each of us with different spiritual gifts. So don’t ignore those gifts that you’ve been given, and at the same time don’t get overly proud or self-absorbed about those gifts. Rather, through prayer, through Bible reading, and through times of quiet, allow yourself to explore more fully what God’s Spirit is trying to accomplish through your life. Allow yourself to explore more fully what it means to be the spiritual person that God created you to be.