The LAST Month of 2025 Reading!

Day 336 – Reading – 1 Corinthians 12 – 14

Read and believe in Jesus!

I Corinthians 12.

Paul scolds the Corinthians on the misuse of the Holy Spirit’s Spiritual gifts.  He knows that a lot of pagan practices have been going on in Corinth that offer “power” to the user. (Such as sorcery, but also included drunkenness, orgies, frenzied chants, etc.) 

He tells them that the Spiritual Gifts God gives are for the good of His church, to build up the church as a whole and not the individual, and to help the Gospel be proclaimed near and far.  And that NO ONE speaking in the Spirit of God could EVER say “Jesus is accursed!!!”

Paul names a few of the gifts of the Holy Spirit here (and in his other letters):

• Utterances of wisdom and knowledge
• Extraordinary faith
• Gifts of healing
• Working of miracles
• Prophecy (forthtelling of God’s Word)
• Discernment of Spirits
• Various tongues
• Interpretation of tongues

All these are empowered by the one and same Spirit, who gives to each individual as HE wills.

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1 Corinthians 13.

LOVE is the lotion, the grease, that helps the gifts to be used for the Glory of God and the strengthening and enlargement of the church. (Apply it generously.)  All the grandiose things you can say or do “for” God result in just a lot of noise and are useless unless LOVE guides them.  (LOVE is a fruit of the Holy Spirit too, we read in Galatians 5.)

Sometimes, verses 4-8a, and 13 are used at weddings or with Valentine messages. They truly inspire a relationship between man and wife.  But read them again in connection with the body of Christ, the church.

• Love is patient and kind;
• Love does not envy or boast;
• It is not arrogant or rude.
• It does not insist on its own way;
• It is not irritable or resentful;
• It does not rejoice in wrong doing, but rejoices in the truth,
• Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
• Love never ends.
• So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

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1 Corinthians 14.

And in their individual churches, Paul (along with God) calls for decency and order, not mayhem. May they always look away from self-aggrandizement, and to their fellow believers, striving to encourage and build them up. Use the gift of prophecy more than the gift of “tongues.”  And if that gift is used, there must always be the gift of “interpretation of tongues” in operation.

• Since you are eager for manifestations of the Spirit, strive to excel in building up the church.

And (sigh), Paul firmly states that in ALL the churches, the women should keep silent, and not to “speak” (with authority) in the services. (See his elaboration and reason in 1 Timothy 2:11-14)  Paul gets a lot of “flak” for this today, and he probably did then, too. He says that if women would like to learn, they are to ask their husbands at home. (Can you feel the ire rising?)  This was Paul’s solution to the free-for-all in the services. 

• “All things should be done decently and in order.”

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