Chapter Five: For the Common Good

"To each person the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the benefit of all." — 1 Corinthians 12:7 (NET)

For the benefit of all. Five words that settle a hundred disputes. No gift of the Spirit is given for the holder's enrichment, the holder's reputation, the holder's platform. The manifestation is given through you, but never finally to you. It is bread placed in your hands for the feeding of others, and the moment you begin to admire your hands, something has already gone wrong.

Paul's image for this is the body — the body of Christ, the whole company of believers as one living organism — and he chooses it because a body is the one organism in which prominence and importance come apart completely. The eye cannot say to the hand, I do not need you (1 Corinthians 12:21). The parts that seem weaker are indispensable. The unpresentable parts are treated with the greater honor. A body in which one member did all the visible work while the others watched would not be a glorious body. It would be a dying one.

This is also why a gift cannot be taught. It can be recognized, fanned into flame, matured, disciplined — Paul does all of these with Timothy. But it cannot be drilled into existence by repetition, because it is not a skill. It is the Spirit's own activity moving through a yielded member. Wherever the church has tried to manufacture by coaching what only the Spirit gives by choice, the result has been imitation — and imitation, however sincere, builds no one's faith.

Ephesians 4 adds the horizon: the gifts were given to equip the saints for the work of ministry, that is, to build up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God (Ephesians 4:12-13). Until. The little word carries the whole argument. The gifts run until the body of Christ reaches its full maturity in the knowledge of the Son — and look around: we are not there. The until is still running. The Giver has not recalled His gifts, because the work they were given for is not done.

E.M. Bounds, a nineteenth-century American pastor who rose before dawn for decades to pray in cold rooms in small towns, distilled the principle: the Spirit does not flow through methods but through persons. He anoints people, not plans. Not programs, not platforms, not techniques — people, ordinary and yielded, positioned next to other people who need what God wants to hand through them. And Andrew Murray completed the thought: the gifts exist for the mutual ministry of the body of Christ — believers serving believers — which requires distribution, not concentration. Every member equipped. Every member needed. Every member a steward of grace addressed, ultimately, to someone else.

If you want to know whether a gift is operating in the Spirit, watch which way it flows. The Spirit's gifts always flow outward and downward — toward the body of Christ, toward the weak, toward the building of someone else's faith — and they leave the glory traveling upward, past the steward, to the Giver. That is the signature. He signs everything the same way.