The Bible teaches that the variety of gifts God gives to His church are each for “the common good”. This means our abilities are not for our own glory, but to produce something in which we all share. When we focus on this shared purpose, we can rejoice together in what the Spirit of God is doing in our midst, creating a blessing for the whole community.

Automatically Generated Transcript

[00:00:00] During the week we had on Thursday night one of our what used to be called apologetics club now called the theology club so a bit broader than just apologetics but we were looking at the question of spiritual gifts. I have to admit it’s one of the nights that I think I succeeded least in getting through to the point I was really wanting to make because we had some really good discussion about whether gifts are spiritual or whether they’re natural or whether you shouldn’t make that distinction. We didn’t actually conclude that that night but there is one verse in the passage that is about the gifts in corinthians i think it is 1 corinthians 12 and verse 7 that says something about the varied giftednesses that god gives to his church and a part of the

[00:01:01] purpose that i want to underline we’ll still await another night at the theology club to work out about spiritual or natural or shouldn’t make the distinction but there’s something here about the varied giftedness as a god puts in his church i want you to see to each is given the manifestation of the spirit for the common good and it’s that statement that the reason why there’s a variety of abilities and gifts that people have whether you see them in their human or whether you see them in what the spirit does through them that is for the purpose of the common good and when we take our attention away from that which we have or don’t have it’s a great help to put our attention on this statement that the Bible is making that the variation of abilities that is in his body, the body of Christ

[00:02:05] is for a common good. Now that’s just that particular translation for a common good. But if you track it down what it’s saying is it’s not so much what the spirit does in specialty with one person as different from another person. That is a true differentiation you can look at. But where I think God wants our attention to be is the things that is produced that we all share in. And the idea of the common good isn’t just that the contributions all add up to a collectiveness that’s good for everybody. But that the very events that are happening by the use of the different abilities, the different gifts produce something in which we all share. I learned something when I was at school a long time ago 60 years ago or whatever at high school in Adelaide

[00:03:05] and I learned something from the way that the cricket was organised we had, it was a school where the people of the school were very aware of how they were the upper echelon of this and that and it was a school where people went off to become politicians and off to be you know, thinking they were doing well in business my best friend became a very great architect around Australia as an example of where some of those people were heading and because of that the sporting arena was one where the school thought it was so necessary that they should be a success Normally that school won the head of the river each year or they tried to. And they had cricket and football teams and there was a sort of, I think, a little bit of conceit in it

[00:03:57] because if you played cricket or AFL football it was, then you’re considered to be doing really well. But if you’re a wiki, they let you do basketball or tennis. And that was a very silly thing to do. I had a bad attitude because of how the school did it. I’d never had it questioned that those two sports, basketball and tennis, were really just second rate. We have here with us a good friend of mine, Peter. Give a wave, Peter, sitting there. He’s very good at tennis. But in my opinion that was always a second rate sport to be good in. And I was only coming up to Brisbane that I realised how wonderful were the sports of basketball and tennis. But the school wanted to be known around the reaches of all the other schools that we had to play in the sports, how well we did, the school did.

[00:04:51] And the fellow who was in charge of the cricket, for example, had training in the army and at Duntroon College, if you know anything about that, a big tall man with a booming voice and a man of great command. And he was in charge of cricket. And when I arrived in the high school, there were two young people coming in in grade eight who could bowl pretty well. I was one and there was another. But the other one came from an uppity type of family. And he was given to the first grade team. It would be developed all the way through the five years of high school. and I was put in the second-rate team, that was how I could tell he looked at me, you know. I felt a sort of, I don’t know whether I should have done, but a sense of, you know, not really regarded as as good as the other fella.

[00:05:42] And anyway, as time went on, and actually they gave to be the coach of the B team. This is under 13 Bs, you get the story. And it didn’t sound very uppity, did it? And the fella who was the coach was probably the teacher who was not wanted to be respected very much. He was the school chaplain. He was my French teacher and he was a Christian. He happened to be the chairman of the Bible college at which my dad was the principal, a return missionary. You can get the quality of the man spiritually but they made him in terms of teams of sport to be the coach of the under 13 Bs. but something happened to that team and they actually used to get the same fellow the fellow who was our coach to give the announcements on the Monday morning as all the school came together and they heard the results

[00:06:37] but this fellow got somehow a great boost out of the fact that our team seemed to win nearly every week and it won because of a certain factor I had been made the captain but it wasn’t because I was good at all the things you have to do in cricket as a matter of fact the only thing I could do well was my bowling and because I was the captain I made myself the final person to bat because I was pretty hopeless and would get out pretty quick, it didn’t really matter because we had others who did the other things well anyway what happened in that team that team came together We kept the same formula all the way through school. But it worked. I only needed to be doing my thing, but our team members knew because of the different things that people did that we had a winning formula. My bowling was pretty simple.

[00:07:40] The first ball was meant to bounce near the head of the kids. The second ball was aimed at their legs or the other way around sometimes and the third one was aimed at the stumps and I got wickets after wicket because the kids we played were pretty wiki kids just like we were meant to be in the B team from all the other schools and the formula worked. And our team, those players knew how to fit in and we actually achieved something as a group that was a tremendous thing. The common good was how we could stand on Monday mornings and hear our coach tell the scoring results. And the good wasn’t just for any one person. There was something all of us shared. We actually kept the formula all the way through the five years of school, very little changes, but nonetheless it’s something that worked

[00:08:34] because we found a common good. And the Bible tells us about the church that there’s a great variation in the abilities that God has given, whether you see them as spiritual ones or see them as involved in the spirituality of how God made us and our humanity. It doesn’t really change the meaning of what’s being said here that you’ve got to recognise that the differentiation amongst us is for a common good. And what that means is that you can rejoice And there ought to be something that happens amongst us when we have our worship. It already is. Where there are some people who have some gift in singing and gift in music. It varies from week to week. We have quite a lot of different people who participate as far as the worship is concerned. But I want to tell you that there’s something to rejoice in together

[00:09:27] in the worship. It’s one of the things that I’ve been really happy about of our church that when, you know, almost 19 years I think ago when we came, there was good music in this church. I want to tell you some very people known about their music and stuff used to be doing things in this church. But when you sat in it, you realise everything that was happening was coming from the front. One of the things that’s been happening to us in recent days is that when the worship’s happening, it isn’t only what’s coming from the front. It’s something that’s coming from the people. There is a common good. I don’t know about you, but when we come here and the service is led, usually led so well as, I just mean that there’s a terrific thing that is happening in our church in terms of how things are led,

[00:10:26] but the thing that’s got me rejoicing is to hear the throb of the worship that comes from the people. It’s the common good that we want to be led into by God. The same is true when you discover something that God gives a special gift to you. You set up something that other people can join in and participate. That happened in a time in the church down where I first met Peter and he and I were friends in this church. We used to go to different things together including youth meetings but also we used to go to what was called a Christian endeavour, intermediate Christian endeavour and it was a funny sort of thing to train young people up by making them do papers and have joint prayers and whatever. It actually trained people pretty well but I didn’t respect it very much

[00:11:25] and we had a leader but then he got taken at his job to another state and we were left on our own and there were all these committees set up. I was made to be in charge of a committee, a silly mistake for someone made back then because I knew nothing about organisational things and apparently our committee I reported each time the group of leaders met. They’d say, what’s happening in your committee? And I’d say, we haven’t met yet. Well, I didn’t know as the chairman, me, he should have been calling it and I didn’t know to do that and we never met as far as I could remember. And so we, you know, when there was no leader at all, the fellow who was the oldest amongst us drew us together to have a prayer meeting and he had some ideas of his own and something began to happen.

[00:12:14] He read us books where God was at work and he challenged us about the work of the Spirit and we got challenged to sort of fit in with this and there came a visiting speaker. I’ve told this story before in this church but I don’t mind repeating it again. The visiting speaker came from having been a missionary in Pakistan and a missionary in India and he was a man of the Spirit, a man very powerful in his presence, a man who preached and when he preached you knew God’s voice was coming and he came and they thought he was too charismatic. It was a Baptist church trying to be very Baptist and back in the days, we’re talking 60 years ago, to be Baptist usually meant don’t be charismatic. I heard some laughter. You know what I’m talking about.

[00:13:02] And anyway, because he was someone where when he preached things happened, the church leaders were a bit suspicious. And so because he became, he actually followed my dad being the principal of the Bible college. My dad went to another state, another place to the Baptist college, actually in Adelaide. But this fellow became the principal of Adelaide Bible Institute. and because he was in such position and it was situated fairly near to the church that he ended up being invited to come and speak. But when he got there on the Sunday morning they were too suspicious of him to let him preach to the normal congregation. They sort of got out of it by saying we’ll send you to the Christian Endeavour. That’s the one that I went to. But he spoke about the things of the Spirit

[00:13:50] and he challenged us to believe that God would use it. And I can remember that day taking up his challenge at the end when he talked about the promise where Jesus is he who believes in me out of his person, out of his body shall flow rivers out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water. And he said put your finger on the word believe and then believe it and then he said something that staggered me because I’m used to hearing preachers. He says then you can forget about it. And when he said you can forget about it And he said, it’s because it won’t depend on you. Rivers don’t need to have pumps, they just flow. Rivers of living water, believe Jesus for something to happen that will be his doing, you can forget about it. And he had me with my finger on the word believe. And I believed it would happen.

[00:14:47] And as he said, I forgot about it. Well, amongst us, we’re all high school students. There was one couple, they were boyfriend and girlfriend, as it turns out, who were at university. I think that’s the case, or was the girl still at school anyway. These two were spiritual people as well. And they decided to call us to come together for prayer. But instead of being a normal committee meeting, thank goodness, I’m not good in committees and stuff like that. And he made it a spiritual moment. And he had some Bible verses to take. And he had a book, a little book on revivals. And he began to read it. Then, because the book was talking about revivals, often are characterized by people confessing their sins. He says, now, it was rather funny, actually, because usually in real revivals, big revivals,

[00:15:41] you don’t have to make it happen. It does happen. But he had the idea, well, that’s how you get revivals to happen. You confess your sins. He says, well, start over here. And he picked and says, well, go around the room. You have to confess your sins. I don’t know whether you’ve ever been put on the spot like that by someone who wants you to open up. Generally, what I don’t do is tell everything too much, especially about my difficulties and sins. But thank the Lord, where he picked was the other side of the door. Why that was good was it meant that it went around that way and I had time to think about what am I going to say. It went around the room and people began to say things that were amazing or open. There were tears. And when it got around to me, what was the conviction I’d been growing

[00:16:41] because I admire what this other fellow had done at taking the lead about something spiritual? And I confessed that I was annoyed at him for making himself the leader because I thought I should be. And I confessed and prayed. And in that little room, something happened that day. That’s probably three-quarters of the reason why I stand here this morning, having been led of the Lord ever since. I’d forgotten about it. But there sprang a river of water. So things began to happen in that part of the church that was represented by young people of that age. The gifts that are given are for the common good. And I’ve been talking about that experience in that church ever since. When we used to be in Tasmania touring around the different churches, I had a series of messages on the Holy Spirit.

[00:17:58] And this was this moment that I’m describing for you about that was one of them. And there were all sorts of events that happened when I tried to encourage people to trust in the promise of Jesus for the Holy Spirit to come. It was from John chapter 7. We won’t go to that verse now. Because that which I’m wanting to point out this morning is about that the purpose of the gifts is for there to be a common good. And it doesn’t mean just that everybody has their little thing to shine in. That’s how we think naturally. It is that what God does through these gifts is something that’s created that is that you share communally in. And when God’s Spirit moves in a church like he did in that group, we all shared it. There’s something that happened. And when we let the Spirit of God dictate as to what he does

[00:19:00] and when we open ourselves to be the tools for him so to use, it won’t be just that we find a place for us. It is that something’s created that you join in in the blessing of it with everybody. There’s something you share together. Just like our cricket team could gloat even though we were the B team and they kept us the B team all five years. But we got to be, have a rejoicing because we learned I didn’t have to be the best batsman. I didn’t have to be anything. There were some little skills I had and did and they had their skills and they did. But it made a common good. I don’t know whether you can get the picture of it that God wants you to find something to do but it’s not for you. One of the difficulties that happens in Christian work and particularly in youth work because the young people are young

[00:19:59] and because they’ve still got to be broken a bit and not realising that when they do get opportunities it’s not for them to give a great hooray and everybody pat them on the back. It’s for the common good. Some of the wonderful things that have been the, I don’t know whether you ever sit down and work out and think back through the years if I’ve got trouble going to sleep at night sometimes I get active in the day and it’s time to be going to sleep but I’m there lying there thinking and I think through, often I go right through my life thinking about what has happened and there’s all sorts of things and they’re things that were so much, created such a memory that I can’t put them aside, I remember them, some of them were beach missions in the beach mission you pay your money to Scripture Union

[00:20:56] to be able to be a member on the beach mission team you have to pay for going there and then you work like slaves from early in the morning to late at night and you get dead tired and go home and have to recover for a week or so but they have memories I still have of beach missions where something happened and the fellowship, not only as we work with the children but sometimes lying in half-made beds or whatever at night time and talking and the fellowship with fellow Christians in those occasions are the things that I still can remember the very little details down about because there’s something happened that was for the common good I wonder whether your experience in our church thus far has not got things that were great high points to remember in the church where God has worked

[00:21:54] and that happens amongst the leadership a little bit because we rejoice at something God has done and recently in times you know we’ve done a little bit of a different you’ve probably noticed we don’t take the offering up in this church we do want there to be offerings but we don’t take it up and what we don’t do is often to be experienced in other places in Brisbane where I’ve been told by people and now the church they go to they have two sermons and I said what is that about, two sermons I don’t want on one occasion more than one sermon you don’t need more than one actually but why do other churches have two sermons and then they explain well one is the one at the end of the service and the one in the middle of the service is usually when they’re taking up the offering and I saw the epitome of that

[00:22:47] in one travelling preacher who came through Brisbane and he had three sermons and one was for healing and one was the sermon at the end I don’t think he put it in the middle. And then the third one was a sermon for healing. So he had, what did I say? Anyway, one was for healing, one was for the offerings, and one was the salvation message. He actually gave a good salvation message, that travelling bridge. I won’t say his name. But I really disrespected the fact that he gave so much of whipping up people to give. And I don’t think you ought to be getting a sermon on being whipped up for giving. I think there’s a place to learn from the scriptures that we are to give, and we have to work out how to teach our people about giving. But I want you not to be like churches I saw in England

[00:23:44] when Michelle and I were over there, and we were amazed, one, at how few people went to church, but two, how many churches there were not to go to. Big buildings, and they’d have signs out the front. Please give. Our roof is falling down. We need people to give to keep the church up, meaning, you know, the roof. There’s God’s church. It’s advertising to the world that it’s bankrupt. I don’t think we should be telling people that God needs your money. He owns the cattle on a thousand hills. He doesn’t need yours. He can take it from you any time he wants. He can bless you if he chooses. He has his hands on the economy. He’s God. What he does want is for you to learn that he is the author of salvation, that he is the master of every destiny, that he’s a supplier of every need,

[00:24:56] that he’s the one that wants to give to you. There was a moment, I’ve said this before, around the back in the hall, one of those dinners we had where there were some people from outside the church who came along, sitting at the same table I was. I was rather pleased at the fact of our being able to draw in every now and then people who don’t know the Lord and just come out of curiosity. Sometimes they hear our music and come and join us. These people once, and then someone from the church thought that the offering hadn’t been taken up properly or didn’t want them at all, I was in the process of trying to get away from making the offering a big deal. They thought they’d correct that and came around with the offering bag to the tables and shook it a bit and the newcomers were people that were new

[00:25:55] and they tried to get them to give. I was so ashamed. Ashamed that we should present ourselves as needing people outside to give to our work when we have such a great God who said that he’d supply all our needs. So we don’t take up the offering but we do allow people to give and often, as mentioned this morning, we encourage people that it is very possible so to do. But it’s not because we want you here for your money. We don’t want to give that to the people outside that that’s what the church is all about. Just, you know, we’re here as another business. We’re not here as a business. At least, not our business. We’re here because there’s someone whose business it is who owns the cattle in a thousand hills and the wealth in every mine and we are not poverty stricken when we have that God

[00:27:05] and if you find how to do the will of God you won’t need to go and be, you know, trying to find the money for it. He’ll support his own work. Now we’ve had the great blessing in this church. I don’t know who’s here and who’s not. I should have looked around. Is Cameron here? Because I want to talk about him if he’s not. But he’s been a gift to our church. He’s our treasurer. But he’s, you know, we’ve had some good treasurers and he’s one too and his role is not just to see that there’s, to get you squeezed for your money out of you. His role is to spend it and trust God for it and he helps us take on projects and we’ve had those fixing up of the toilets. We’ve had other things that he’s behind him pushing for there to be some more and the thing that you want a treasurer to do is someone that knows

[00:28:11] that in the common good there’s a Lord who’s going to supply. What you don’t want is someone who restricts you from spending is the only way to keep the books. You want someone with faith and Cameron is. And I want you all to be like that. Someone who trusts God and believes him. Now sometimes churches make mistakes by trying to do a project bigger than what the Lord’s leading in and every now and then you do hear of a church that decides to have a project and they get into debt for an awful lot of money but then money doesn’t turn up. There is a spiritual principle. If you follow the Lord and you do something because he leads you in it then he pays the bills. I went overseas to study and going overseas I did it because I thought the Lord led me to and I discovered when I went there and strengthened my bank card

[00:29:08] and I bought the tickets I had a little bit of money but I ran out of funds for food along the way but money kept turning up and there were people who sent me letters and I didn’t expect them but the letters had money and the Lord told one person that they were in the bus and the Lord told them to send a gift to Jim. I got letters from US cities where I knew nobody, but they sent me gifts. I came to the end of my study in the first university. I wanted to go to another one. I had nothing left. I only had a car that I hadn’t yet sold. And do you know something? Someone sent me through the mail, a scholarship, to go to a six-week conference. I said, oh, well, there’s the next six weeks of food. But I didn’t have any… I had a car, but not the money to drive there.

[00:30:00] Another student told me that he’d been given the same scholarship and he wants to drive with me. I want to ride with you, he said, and I’ll pay for the gas. And when we got there, he wanted to go back home to Alabama, but he says, I’ll see you later, Jim. And I thought, well, he doesn’t realise this. I’m here with a car and the six weeks is finishing. I’ve got nowhere to go and I haven’t any money to go nowhere. But someone put 50 US dollars under the door. And I said, where can I drive for 50 US dollars? This is back when it got a fair distance. I said, I can get to Chicago. And I knew of the evangelism thing that the Graham organisation had set up with Wheaton College. So I drove there and I booked myself in as a student. I had no money to pay for the fees. I said, that would be the Lord’s problem.

[00:30:53] And the dean called me in and he called me in and says, we know who you are and we want to send you back to Australia with the Billy Graham team and you’ll be there as a learning thing for you. You’ll be your now, you know, I was their student, but learning from that. And that’s how I got home again. I won’t go and tell you the rest of the story, but I want to say that when you’re doing something, because God leads you in it. He says he’ll pay the bills. But don’t do it just because you thought it’s a good idea because he’ll leave you to pay your own. Oh, wow. That is something to learn the hard way when you do some things that I’ve done, some things that were more my ideas than the Lord’s and I guess he left me to suffer the result. But you trust him. Look for the common good and it won’t be just about you.

[00:31:51] It will be involving others and there’s something of the joy that you have when you with a group of Christian people have had the hand of God upon that which you’ve been led to do and be involved in. Find something in the church to give and don’t expect anything from it but in the good that you’re involved in you’ll be blessed a thousand times and with all other people’s doings as well there’s nothing more wonderful that when someone includes you and is in a Christian movement, I reckon Beach Missions, I think that what’s about to happen with SMAD, that’s song, music, art, dance and drama, or drama and dance, I think you dance at the end. Anyway, SMAD, the scripture union camp about using the performative arts in Christian things is such a wonderful thing. It’s coming up in a few weeks.

[00:32:43] This very Saturday night, I was down in the church here and I heard noises, and when I hear noises, I usually go and find, where are those noises coming from? I looked everywhere and couldn’t find the people, but I still hear noises in the hall upstairs, and there were people preparing for SMAD and getting stuff ready for what would be their core thing to do. Get involved with things where what the aim is is for the community, the group to experience the hand of God. Look for those places where the common good, see your contribution as contributing to what everybody joins in as. That’s what the verse is about. 4 verse 8, It is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom. Another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit. To another faith by the same Spirit,

[00:33:40] a sense of being able to believe God for things that he’s promising to lead you in. To another gifts of healing by the one Spirit. Another the working of miracles, another prophecy. This is talking about God at work in a church, and it’s always a miracle. In the long run, it’s a miracle what God can do through a community who are prepared to leave it with the Spirit to lead that’s a lesson in this passage sometimes we get so caught up whether you’re charismatic or non-charismatic do you know that Christianity is to be charismatic it doesn’t mean that you should be all having gifts of tongues it doesn’t mean that you should be all having you know a big hep thing that you’re looking for the next unexplicable miracle happening. To be charismatic means that you’ve got something that’s come by grace

[00:34:35] and the word charis means come by grace. And charismatic, the ma part or charis-ma, ma part just means something. And the charis means it’s come by grace. So when there’s something that comes by grace, that makes you charismatic. And do you know one verse that speaks, and I’m repeating now a little bit of what we did last Thursday night, but you know one thing that makes you charismatic is that you enjoy eternal life, for this is the gift of God that we know eternal life. And the word for eternal life is life that is charismatic. The charisma of God is eternal life. To be a Christian is to be charismatic. If say you’re a Christian but all you’ve got is being trained up in nice living or being trained up in how to come and sing the hymns or someone who’s just taken on board the believing about God

[00:35:33] that makes you someone who’s a theist but it doesn’t make you a Christian. To be charismatic is that you’ve come into the experience of the Spirit. Where does that begin? It begins the moment that you come to Jesus. and you come to him as the saviour of your soul you say Jesus I need your forgiveness please take me as yours please let me allow you to be the Lord of my life as you really are the total Lord anyway and when you receive Christ Jesus as Lord and saviour do you know what happens? One you get the forgiveness of sins and two you get the gift of the spirit now the word gift there’s probably the word Dora It means gift, but you get the Spirit by coming to Jesus for the forgiveness of sins. The Spirit of God comes into your heart. He brings the presence of Jesus. He brings the leadership of Jesus.

[00:36:32] He brings the power of Jesus by the Holy Spirit. He brings the power of Jesus just as the Lord himself spoke. He who believes in me, out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water. And that is flowing, is that which comes by your being charismatic in the sense that you’ve got the gift that comes by grace and that the heart of the gift that comes by grace is the person of Jesus. There is no more exact revelation of the grace of God than the person of Jesus. And when you let him take over your life, that’s what makes you increasingly charismatic in the real proper sense of the word that you’re taken over by the Spirit of God. Well, I’ve had a lot of other things I was going to say today, but I think I’ve said enough. And if I’ve underlined for us the fact that the consequence

[00:37:38] of the differentiation of our gifts is not for each of us just to have a turn, not for each of us to have our little kingdom in one thing and ignore the rest. Just the reverse is for us to participate in something created by the Spirit of God in the fellowship of his people and in the outworking of the plan of God amongst us. It’s for the common good. More than just you get a bit and they get a bit and it all adds together. But it is for there to be things that we share together of the work of the Spirit amongst us. That, I believe, can be something that becomes a revival. Who knows if we were to have God does those revival works in times of his choosing. There’s a sovereignty of God as to when he steps in in revival. But if that were to happen in our church, who knows how far the influence could spread.

[00:38:42] The common good might be more than just our church. That’s what I believe is always possible. If we would believe God for his Spirit to work amongst us, who knows where that could flow to. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, I do give you thanks this morning for the passage and I thank you for this emphasis that it has, the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. Lord, how we love those times when you step in. How we love the work of your Holy Spirit. We thank you, Jesus, for the promise that he who believes in me, out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water. We believe you for that. Please, let your rivers flow in our church, we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.