The devotional - 1057 - Foot steps in First Corinthians, ongoing

The Devotional – 1057 – Foot steps in First Corinthians, ongoing

Yesterday’s story today! While I was serving on surface ships, I had the collateral duty of Master-at-Arms, which was in those days a policing group of four or five men who maintained civil and military law aboard ship. In today’s Navy this duty is a “permanent pay rate”. My first encounter with the demonic activity described by Dr. Constable’s note yesterday, was that of a young sailor who decided that it was his mission in life to kill the captain of our ship. When we approached the man, he was speaking what I thought was “jibber” but another man in our group said he was “speaking in tongues”. At the time I did not know what that meant, but I did understand that the words our assailant was speaking were sometimes a word sounding like “god” and even the name of Jesus from time to time. Finally the corpsman gave him a shot of something that almost immediately rendered the man unconscious and then we handcuffed him and placed him in our brig.

CHALLENGES & COMMENTS – 1 Corinthians 12:1-11

The events above may seem extreme, but it is not an isolated case, at least two other times in my career in the service, people have done similar things. Much of what the world sees is that these folks have gone crazy and maybe in some ways they have. The world is too willing to shut this sort of thing out of mind and blame in on societies lack of “gun control” or some other damaging parental upbringing. Yet, if we study intently Romans 1:18-32 we will see that the message of the apostle is “individual responsibility” regarding all unrighteous activity. Today this activity abides in many churches of our LORD, the recorded attempts like Acts 8:14-25 and Acts 16:16-24 prove to show you and me that demonic activity sought to infiltrate the church from the very beginning. Why should we think less of it today? 

Many are fearful in that we are too willing to subdue all spiritual activity within the church in order to maintain a feeling of security and soundness of mind. In this I believe personally that we miss a lot of blessing intended by God. Now I am not saying that I have all the answers to this, that would be absurd and spiritually damaging, but I am saying that in the two thousand years of church history we have moved away from: the same Spirit, the same LORD and the same God in the matters of spirituality within the local church, as the apostle Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 12:4-6. We have move the pendulum off center. 

It is of my opinion again that all of us who believe, initially have three gifts. Faith, Hope and Love. It is these three gifts that abide in us – 1 Corinthians 13:13 and the gifts described in 1 Corinthians 12:8-11 which belong to the CHURCH of Jesus Christ are temporal gifts. So when a person says; “what is my spiritual gift” we can honestly say that he or she has “three” at the moment of salvation and someone has said in my past that these three gifts include 36 permanent purposes in Christ completed in us the moment we were saved. Ephesians 1:1-14 is a list of several of these purposes and this whole section reveals “love, working to increase our faith and hope in Christ our LORD (Ephesians 1:4).

We will be looking at the unity of the church of Jesus Christ and the diversity of each saint beginning on Monday – tomorrow we will briefly look at those 36 purposes that God has given to us in Christ. God’s redemption plan for us is major, yet many of us are still in the minor leagues when it comes to spiritual understanding, this I see as spiritual (collateral) damage to the local churches across the nation today.