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Today's Pathway: I Corinthians 14:01 Follow after charity, and desire spiritual gifts, but rather that ye may prophesy.

Paul has completed his discussion of the superiority of charity over spiritual gifts. However, since all the gifts, including the revelatory ones, were still active when he was writing, he now wants to give some instruction on their proper place and use. He opens by showing the priority of prophecy. He starts by telling the church members that they should be pursuing charity, which is the logical application of his remarks in chapter 13. He then tells them to desire that which is spiritual. As occurred in I Corinthians 12:1, the word "gifts" is in italics in this verse, and thus was supplied by the King James Version translators to aid in reading and understanding. It is probable that what Paul is saying is that the church members in Corinth should desire to be loving and should also desire to be spiritual. As we have noted before, a person receives their spiritual gifts at salvation, and thus there seems to be no point in desiring more. Some have commented that perhaps Paul is not instructing the individual members to desire gifts, but is telling the church as a whole that they should desire to be a gifted church. While this is a possibility, since I Corinthians 1:7 tells us that the church was already a gifted church, it seems that this is probably not what Paul had in mind. So, he is telling the church that they need to be spiritual people, and not just gifted people.

At the end of verse 1 he begins a comparison between the gift of prophecy and the gift of speaking in tongues. Apparently, tongues were considered to be very important in the Corinthians church, similar to how they are important in the charismatic movement of today. People had great respect for those who spoke in tongues, and desired to have that gift themselves, and possibly even pretended to have that gift so that they could receive recognition and praise. It would certainly be possible to "fake" having the gift of tongues by simply speaking some gibberish and then sitting down. Of course, there was supposed to be an interpreter (which did not always occur according to I Corinthians 14:28), but that would also be something that could be faked. Many years ago I heard the testimony of a pastor who had come out of the charismatic movement. He had attended a Pentecostal Bible college. After the chapel preaching each day the student body would sit and wait for someone to get a revelation from God and speak in tongues. One of the students would eventually stand up and say something that no one understood. Then another member of the group who had the "gift of interpretation" would stand and tell the students the message. The pastor said that the interpretation was normally the same: that the students needed to stop wasting so much time and put more effort into their studies. The pastor and his roommate were discussing this one day, and the roommate mentioned that he could recite the Lord's Prayer in Yiddish. So, they decided to test the interpreter. The following day in chapel after the message the roommate stood and recited the Lord's Prayer in Yiddish and sat down. After a few moments the "interpreter" stood and declared that the message from God was that the students should quit wasting time and put more effort into their studies. Within a few days the pastor and his roommate had not only left college, but they had left Pentecostalism.

The point of that story is this: many people in Pentecostal churches today desire the applause that comes from speaking in tongues. The believers in Corinth undoubtedly felt the same way. Paul says in verse 1 that the most important things are charity and spirituality, and that prophecy was a much more valuable gift than speaking in tongues. Tongues may have been more "impressive", but prophecy was more profitable. We will look at that in more detail tomorrow.

One thing we should remember for today is this: spiritual gifts do not equal spirituality.