In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul is addressing the issue of what it means to be “spiritual people” (lit. “spirituals” in the original Greek text). For modern Christians, we may think that the most “spiritual” people are people who fast, pray, and lead worship particularly well, hear God’s voice, or have other characteristics that make them seem like they are closer to God than other people. The Corinthian Christians also thought about “spiritual” people in this way. They thought that the most spiritual people were the kind of people who speak in tongues and prophesy.

But it turns out that this thinking is wrong.

When Christians think this way, it is no different from Gentile idol worship. For Gentiles, the things that are “spiritual” are idols carved from wood and stone that they prepare and raise up as special channels for encountering the divine.

In fact, it is idolatry when we claim that certain pastors, parents, places, events, or buildings are specially designated by God as the ones he has chosen to consistently provide us with divine insight and direction. Similarly, it is idolatry to believe that God simply and directly gives each individual Christian all the personal direction they need, when they prepare themselves to be spiritual vessels.   

These ideas of ours die hard, as they did for the Corinthians as well! But Paul helped the Corinthians to avoid wrong perceptions of what is “spiritual” by giving them a proper understanding of Christ’s body.

Ever since Pentecost, all who are baptized into Christ’s body receive the fullness of God through the Holy Spirit; all have become prophets, just as Moses had wished back in Numbers 11. All those who confess “Jesus is Lord” in the Holy Spirit are “spiritual” (see 1 Corinthians 12:3). That is, in fact, what it means to be a spiritual person.

What it means that “the body is one and has many members” (1 Corinthians 12:12) is that all—not some—of the believers whom God has placed around us are spirit-filled gifts from God to aid in our growth in Christ—including the very ordinary Christians and even the Christians we do not like. This is why Paul says, “there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone.” (1 Corinthians 12:4-6).

Some preachers reduce this to meaning little more than God has equipped people in a local church with all the individual skills necessary to help run the church. They preach this scripture right before they hand out “spiritual gifts tests” to discover whether God has given them a gift for cooking, accounting, tithing, or ushering so that they can know where they should volunteer at the church. Such preachers say that exercising these gifts makes us the “hands and feet of Jesus” as we represent Christ to the world.

But this is wrong thinking. It is not that God manifests 10% of Himself through one Christian’s cleaning ability and 20% of Himself through another Christian’s preaching ability. God is not more or less present in certain Christians. And it is not the job of the church to do His work for Him, but our job is to witness to Christ who is always working through all things in the world to accomplish His purposes—even the things that we do not like or cannot intuit.

This means that we can receive anything from another Christian as a gift from God, however imperfectly it is given. We may not like it, and it may not make us feel good. But the gift is designed to turn us away from our preferences and preferred communication styles and toward God’s preferences and communication styles. And God’s preference is to work through many different types of people with a variety of characteristics so that we are always dependent upon him, not one or two “spiritual” people with whom we feel compatible.

For this reason, Paul claims even at the beginning of 1 Corinthians that the Corinthian believers are “not lacking in any gift” and subsequently appeals to them that “there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment” (1 Corinthians 1:7-10).

This is the theme of the entire letter to the Corinthians: God insists on spreading all of the gifts we need for our salvation throughout all the believers he has placed around us. We should not look for special individuals within that group to be the means that God always communicates with us. God’s purpose is to draw the whole body together in mutual interdependence such that all the members must rely on each other at all times.

We may bristle at the idea that our salvation depends on us receiving each believer around us as God’s gift for us. We think, “My salvation is between me and God!” But salvation is not only a one-time event, but an event with past, present, and future dimensions that extends throughout our whole Christian life, bringing us from where we are now to the second coming of Christ and the New Jerusalem.

The writer of Hebrews likens our salvation journey to the Israelites’ 40-year trek through the desert. On the journey we do not get to choose who we journey with or how we get help; God does. Paul said, “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you’” (1 Corinthians 12:21). It is God’s character that, sometimes, He will speak to us through the believers we do not like and in the places we view to be very unspiritual.

So as we gather around the Lord’s table, say this to yourself: “Those with whom I break bread today are those into whose hands the Lord has entrusted my salvation and my spiritual growth.”

Can we be humble enough to accept God’s way?