1 Corinthians 11-14

The Text:

Have loving regard for each other.

Order your clothing and your conduct in worship to honor God (chapter 11).  Maintain natural gender identity in worship.  Eat and drink at Communion together, remembering the body of Christ on the cross, and recognizing the body of Christ sitting around you and with you.

Work together like a body with different parts that need each other (12).  The same Spirit gifts each one of us uniquely.

All the work and sacrifice in the world doesn’t mean anything without love (13).  Other gifts will fade in importance over time (tongues, knowledge, etc.) but love is the reason why we have regard for each other.  Love is your future destination.

Use your gifts to help others, not show off how great you are (14).  Don’t use the worship service to show off in any way.  The presenting issue is tongues, but this would apply to a preacher showing off knowledge, flashy clothing and more.

Christ in the text

Jesus laid down His physical body sacrificially to establish and strengthen His spiritual body, the Church.  His Incarnation, ministry, atonement, resurrection, current reign, and future return – each of these He does specifically for His people, in an orderly fashion and not chaotically (ch 14), without showboating (ch 12, 14), or disregarding us (ch 11).

Doctrinal application

Some of these gifts Paul discusses have passed away.  They were signs of apostolic authority (2 Cor. 12:12), or of a new phase of revelation from God, as with Moses and Elijah.  God continues to heal people miraculously, but does not ordinarily vest specific people with the gift to do so.  (I’m willing to consider anomalies and exceptions to this.)

Personal application

But the principle remains: use the gifts the Lord has given you to help others, not to advance your own ego or reputation.  The Corinthians had a real problem with this, and we do today, also.

Cultural application

We have institutionalized and celebrated it, with Madison Avenue’s branding of the self.  It’s a fine line between getting people aware of you in the marketplace, and vaunting pride.  Confident announcement, or shameless self-promotion?  One way to tell is to ask yourself, “Where’s the love?”  You can do what you do to show others how great you are out of self-love, or you can do what you do to help others out of love for them.  Knowing that much of our vocation is oriented to providing for yourself and your family, it is still true that the most successful people balance that with a genuine motivation to provide value to others in their work, using their gifts.  Christian love is the only real desire fueling that motivation.

1 Corinthians 11:3-16 cuts against the grain of our culture's gender fluid push today.  Cultures may express it differently, but there is a built-in-to-nature creational difference between men and women.  More on this another time.