1Cor 12:4-7 - Variety in Unity

4-7 Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; 5 and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; 6 and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. 7 To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.


The context is gifts of the Holy Spirit to true children of God, for use in the community of believers. Still laying down reprovals and correction and exhortation and right teaching about relationships within the church. Remembering that all right relationships find their power, and motivation in God’s love for His people, and teaching what the fruit of that love ought to look like in any believer and in any church.

If and when the members of the church demonstrate love one to another it is not a self-generated thing. It is a response in terms of being fruit of the Source as seen in the pinnacle of love’s expression - which is the giving of God’s Own Son for sin which was not His, and all that was entailed in that, the telling of which will take an eternity. We have not the faintest sense of what was given for us. We imagine that we do. We think that because we have a little conviction of our own sin, or some sense of the twistedness of the whole world that we have insight. Well, we do, but only as much as the faintest twinkling of some lone and unremarkable star among the blazing glory of the Milky Way seen in an unpolluted sky.

Love is expressed through the gifts of the Spirit - the love of God expressed in believers. God’s love is so selfless and so utterly outwardly directed that he rejoices in the expression of it through His creatures. Whenever a believer, walking in the Spirit, loves the family of God by using his gift(s) - even though the world and even, regrettably, the saint does not necessarily make the connection - it is God Who is showing forth His infinite love in mortal and finite vessels. We are sometimes blind to this. We have still within us the tendency to take the credit, to taste the glory for ourselves instead of glorying in the reality that it is Christ in us manifesting Himself by being the gift.

Now while God is both the Source and the Power of the Spiritual gifts in all believers, these gifts are empowered in us. It is through our wills and actions that these gifts find form and application in the world, and in the unique providences that the Father has ordained for each of us to walk in. God has made us willing. God is making us willing. There is prayer and the Word and preaching and worship and fellowship and, in this context, there are the actual gifts of the Spirit.

These gifts take many forms and appear in as many unique combinations as there are unique Christians. But all are given for the purpose of service - a service which is evident in activity. I say evident in activity; we must constantly train our minds to take the heavenly perspective on these things, which is to erase the sort of concept of activity that the world and the flesh taught us - and to replace that idea with the spiritual view. Activity is not what we do for God, but what God does in and through us by bringing about in us a response to His activity. Even after years of enlightenment, for some if not all of us, there always remains the spectre, the shadow, the vestige of self-justifying thoughts when we ought to be resting solely in God. We do what we do because we are accepted in the beloved and not in order to gain acceptance. And whatever good we are found doing was wrought in Christ and given to us. {Eph 2:8-10}