1 Cor 12: not about spiritual gifts tests or volunteering at church

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Pastor Foley

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?

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Today is the Day for Gospel Ministry to North Korea!

Posted on January 21, 2025 by Pastor Foley

God gave the Apostle Paul the responsibility of spreading the gospel to the Gentiles. But then in God’s wisdom, God decided that Paul would spend his most important years of that ministry in prison. If we were Paul, we might cry out to God, “Why would you give me this task but not give me the freedom to complete it?”

North Korean women listening to the North Korean Bible on MP3 devices.

But the New Testament never records Paul complaining about the time he spent in prison. In fact, when Paul writes the church in Philippi, he says his imprisonment is actually advancing the spread of the gospel!

God put Paul in chains so that the gospel would go to all the world. That is a very difficult thing for us modern believers in Korea and the West to understand.

Since the time of Christ, governments around the world have banned or restricted the practice of the Christian faith. Even today, in more than 70 countries around the world, governments restrict Christianity. They control when and where and under what circumstances Christians can practice their faith.

They put Christianity in chains.

There are some countries like North Korea where the government declares that there are no circumstances under which Christianity can be practiced in their country. We think of such countries as “closed”. That is why often when I come to a church or conference in South Korea to preach, Christians will come to me with tears in their eyes and tell me that they are praying night and day for North Korea to open to the gospel.

Until that day comes, they say, they will do all they can to “sow the seed”. They will pray. They will plan and set aside money for missions for when North Korea opens. They will support Christian medical or humanitarian or educational projects to North Korea. They hope that this will give North Koreans a good impression of Christianity which may cause them to be more “open” to Christianity, or maybe the missionary might somehow get the opportunity to secretly share the gospel with a North Korean.

These are well-meaning thoughts and prayers. But in reply to all of these thoughts and prayers, the Apostle Paul gently corrects us in 2 Timothy 2:9 by saying, “But God’s word is not chained.”

Scripture shows us that God is not limited to working through his servants. It is of course true that God invites his servants to carry out his work. But when they don’t, this does not stop him; he simply works through his enemies. That is because God’s enemies are his servants too, whether they want to be or not. Even when they seek to destroy his work, they can only end up completing it.

This is why Joseph says to his brothers who tried to kill him and then sold him into slavery, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”

In the book of Esther, Haman sets up a plan to kill all the Jews. Esther has miraculously become the queen of Persia. Mordecai, Esther’s cousin and guardian, sends her this message: “Do not think that because you are in the king’s house you alone of all the Jews will escape.  For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?”

In other words, Mordecai has no doubt that God will rescue the Jews. But Mordecai doesn’t beg Esther to be the one to rescue them, even though she is in the most obvious position to help. Mordecai knows that God will always be faithful to his promises, even when his own people are not.

The message of Scripture is clear: The enemy can put God’s people (like Paul) in chains. God’s own people, in their ignorance, can even reject him and his work. But no one can stop his plan.

Always, God’s plan is carried out by his word. In the beginning, when God creates the heavens and the earth, he does so through his word. In Isaiah 55, God says, “As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,  so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”

In Acts 16:6, the Holy Spirit stops Paul from preaching the gospel in the province of Asia. But Acts does not say that Paul came to this conclusion because the authorities stopped him from preaching. In fact, throughout the book of Acts, many different authorities try to stop the Apostles from preaching the gospel. But unless the Holy Spirit directs the Apostles to stop, they keep preaching.

This does not mean that Christians are free to break the law. Romans 13:1 says, “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities”. But God does not permit us to submit to authorities’ efforts to put his word in chains. We must instead preach the whole gospel of Christ, in whatever place Christ commands us to preach it, to whomever Christ commands us to preach it, and we must do so whether or authorities grant us a “right” to preach.

At the same time, we must always remain subject to the penalties and punishments the authorities lay upon us for refusing their chaining of the word. We must always preach boldly but then go to prison willingly, even joyfully. As the global founder of Voice of the Martyrs, the Rev. Richard Wurmbrand, explained with regard to the Romanian Communists who imprisoned him, “We reached an understanding. We would preach, and then they would beat us. In this way we were both happy.”

In many ways, the situation in North Korea today is no different than when Christianity first came to Chosun 140 years ago: There was a complete and total ban on all foreign religion. Anyone found possessing a Bible or having made contact with a missionary would be killed.

Even the first Western missionaries to Chosun—Allen, Appenzeller, and Underwood—worried about the ban on foreign religions. It was not possible for missionaries to plant a church or to preach in public. They were not permitted to come to Chosun as religious workers. They could only come as men who could bring from the West the skills necessary for Chosun to modernize. Chosun was completely “closed” to Christianity.

But it’s important to remember that the first Chosun Christians did not become Christian through contact with Appenzeller, Underwood, or Allen. Instead, the first Chosun Christians came from the northern part of Chosun. They became Christian through reading the Bible on their own—a Bible they had to acquire secretly from a smuggler. They could not meet together with missionaries or other Chosun Christians for worship or discipleship. They had access to no Christian materials other than the Bible. They had access to no Christian teachers to help them understand that book other than the Holy Spirit.

So before Appenzeller, Underwood, and Allen had even come to Chosun, there were already Christians there. It was the result of the Holy Spirit working through the ministry of Missionary John Ross. By the time the first Western missionaries arrived, somewhere between 15,000 and 50,000 copies of Ross’ translation of books of the New Testament had already been smuggled into Chosun—even though Chosun was at that time regarded as the most closed country on earth—a “hermit kingdom”.

Missionary John Ross

“That’s because the word of God is not chained,” the Apostle Paul would say.

Ross was the first translator of the Bible into the Chosun language. Ross had never been trained in Bible translation. And his fellow translators from Chosun were not even Christian. They were merchants from Chosun whose businesses had all gone bad. Some were ill or struggling with alcohol or other addictions. They got involved with Ross for one reason: they were desperate for some way—any way—to make money.

How did they become Christian? Through the process of translating the Bible.

This was the core of John Ross’s missionary strategy: introduce people to Christ by giving them only the word of God, since Christ is fully present in his word. Nothing else was needed.

In 1882, these new Chosun Christians risked their lives to smuggle the first ever copies of the Chosun language version of the scriptures from China inside of what is today North Korea. Imagine the surprise of the first Western missionaries to Chosun when shortly after their arrival, hundreds of Chosun Christians appeared at their door asking to be baptized. When the missionaries asked these Chosun people how they would even know about baptism, they showed their copies of the Gospel of Luke. The missionaries were certain that the Chosun people could not possibly understand Christian doctrine enough to be baptized, so they gave them a doctrinal examination. Most of them passed easily.

The missionaries agreed to baptize the Chosun believers, but they were so concerned about violating the ban on religion that they insisted that the baptisms had to be done in secret, far away from the city.

Chosun was the place where the word of God came before missionaries arrived.

And what about today? There is a common misconception among Korean Christians that gospel ministry to North Korea is still a future event, that North Korea is “closed” to the gospel. But God is not waiting for a future date for North Korea to open. God is continuing to bring his word inside North Korea today. And despite the life-threatening consequences of being caught, more North Koreans are reading the Bible and being transformed by it today than any other time in history.

North Korean defectors in South Korea updating the original John Ross Bible.

Voice of the Martyrs Korea delivers more than 40,000 Bibles into North Korea annually via land, sea, and air. In addition, we broadcast four daily shortwave radio programs into North Korea.

But is it working? Is the word of God truly “unchained” inside North Korea?

Database Center for North Korean Human Rights is an independent data-gathering NGO. They have been conducting an ongoing study about various aspects of life inside North Korea. One of the questions they ask is, “Have you ever seen a Bible with your own eyes inside of North Korea?” In the first year of their study, in the year 2000, they found that effectively 0% of people inside North Korea had ever seen a Bible with their own eyes. However, they have continued to update that study. At the end of 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, they determined that nearly 8% of people inside of North Korea have now seen a Bible with their own eyes.

To all those who have been praying night and day for North Korea to open to the gospel, give thanks to the Lord! He is already answering your prayer! By every objective measurement, North Koreans are hearing the word of God today in greater numbers than ever before, despite every effort that is still being made to restrain it.

“That is because the word of God cannot be chained.”

And that is why today is the day for gospel ministry to North Korea.

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What is the “good work” of Philippians 1:6?

Posted on January 7, 2025 by Pastor Foley

When my wife and I first got married, I bought her what is called a “Mizpah necklace”. It has Genesis 31:49 written across it: “The LORD watch between you and me, when we are out of one another’s sight.” It is in the shape of a heart, divided in half so that each spouse receives half the heart and half the verse. I bought it at the time because it sounded romantic. But, when you look at the context, it is not romantic at all. It is something which Laban says to Jacob after repeated conflicts, mistrust, and cheating!

We Christians do this a lot with scripture verses. We take them out of context because they sound better independent of the context! When we read them in context, we realize they mean something entirely different than what we were intending to use them for.

“And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” (Philippians 1:6)

In the case of Philippians 1:6, we usually interpret this as saying something like, we are pretty messed up now but one day Jesus will help us not to be such bad people anymore. But this way of reading the scripture is as out-of-context as the Mizpah necklace.

It is difficult for us to hear what Paul is actually saying here because we are so focused on ourselves. We may not necessarily be focused on ourselves because we think we are so great, but we may even be fixated on our own sin or shortcomings.

In order to understand what Paul is talking about, we need to remember the situation which Paul was in when he was writing Philippians. When Paul wrote, he was in prison in Rome. He had actually been in several different prisons for several years on the way to going to Rome. We read this story in Acts.

First, Paul is arrested in Jerusalem because there was a riot in which the crowd wanted to kill him. He is arrested in Jerusalem and gets moved around to different prisons in Israel. And he gets forgotten for years in some prisons. After this, on the way to being moved to prison in Rome, the ship he was on was shipwrecked and he and the other people on the boat ended up on an island.

After getting to prison in Rome, he is cold and lonely, he doesn’t have his coat, and most of his helpers have abandoned him. It is during this time that he said it would be better for him to be dead (and thus with the Lord) than to be in this situation.

What Paul was waiting for was the determination of his court case. He is not able to move around freely. And the people who can move around freely are ‘super-apostles’ who go around to the churches which Paul founded and try to convince them that Paul was wrong and that faith in Jesus should be accompanied by various ritual and ethical rules and should result in worldly benefits and success, rather than what Paul is experiencing.

When Paul wrote the letter to the Philippians, the Philippians were being persecuted, had infighting, and would possibly soon be visited by the super-apostles.

So all of this is on Paul’s mind as he writes. Thus Paul doesn’t write with the attitude, “Forget all of these situations. How are you doing in your personal spiritual journey? Aww, you’re having a hard time. But don’t worry. Everything is going to turn out okay!”. This verse is not primarily intended to be a verse of comfort for your individual spiritual life.

How do we know?

First, when it says, “He who began a good work a good work in you”, the “you” here is plural. (The word “in” is also better rendered “among”, too.) Paul is referring to the Philippian church collectively. And he says that the work will be completed at the day of Christ Jesus. “The day of Christ Jesus” here refers to the “Day of the Lord”, that is, Judgment Day–Christ’s second coming.

The “good work” is not just only or primarily Christ’s work in the life of each individual. The “good work” is God’s work of calling the gentiles through faith in Christ Jesus.

The people of Israel were called in the Old Testament to be a light to the nations so that the word of God could go to all nations. Some among Israel had the wrong idea from the promises of the Old Testament that people from all nations would stream into Jerusalem as God raised the Israelites up, smashed their enemies, and blessed them in every way above all people. Because they would be so rich, wise, healthy, successful, and free, other nations would say, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Let’s go to Israel.”

But then Jesus comes in the New Testament and says, “Actually, it’s a bit different from that. I am going to take upon myself all of the responsibilities of Israel because Israel has not been faithful. People from the nations will be drawn to me as I am raised up on the cross.” And so Christ dies and is raised from the dead and begins to gather all people to himself as the inheritance promised by his Father.

When Jesus is resurrected, before His ascension, the disciples ask him, “Is now the time for the kingdom to be restored to Israel?” But Jesus says, “That’s not for you to know; but know this: this is the time where you go out.” So they go out into all nations and people from all nations stream into Jesus, because His body is the new temple and the gateway to the new Jerusalem. So Christ is working through Peter, Philip, and, later and primarily, Paul to accomplish this “ingathering” into Christ from all the nations.

This is the “good work” which God has began and will bring to completion at the day of Christ Jesus. When Paul says that it “began in you”, he is saying that this work of gentile ingathering was begun in Philippi–as well as Thessalonica and Galatia and Ephesus and Rome and the other places about which we read in Paul’s letters where Paul had planted these fellowships of Jewish and gentile believers.

Paul is not looking inside of you for a “good work” in Philippians 1:6. Paul is looking around the world and seeing the “good work” of God bringing many gentiles into the new temple who is Christ. Even though Paul is in prison and about to have his head cut off, even though the Philippian church is facing persecution without and division within, Paul is confident that God will continue this work of reaching out and gathering his people from all peoples. Nothing can stop it or delay it.

That is still true today. We should never talk about nations “closed” to the gospel. As Paul tells Timothy (in 2 Timothy 2:9), Paul may be in chains, but chaining or restraining the word of God is impossible. Political miracles need not precede spiritual ones. Even today, God does some of his best work when all of his human messengers are detained or restrained.

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