Reading time: 4 minutes
Paul meant what he said in 1 Corinthians 14
Paul doesn’t whisper it, he doesn’t suggest it as something worth considering when the mood strikes. He says pursue love, and, (don’t stop there – there’s more!) earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy. Earnestly. Especially. Those are strong words from a pedantic apostle who chose his words surgically, carefully.
Warning: This is an exasperated post that will land as passive legalism – but I think it has to be said!
Here’s the thing about 1 Corinthians 14. It is not a chapter written to a church that was overdoing it in a healthy direction. It’s corrective, yes, but the correction is about order, not about throttling back the gifts themselves. Paul never once says, calm down with all this spiritual stuff, it’s only for now, not for those in 2026. He says do it better. This is how. Do it more intelligibly. Do it so that the person who walks in off the street is built up rather than bewildered. Do it so that the Church engages God’s lavish grace in every sphere of life, knowing the tangible presence of the God who is everywhere but can’t be seen. Let them feel and know God’s there-ness in all the gritty circumstances of life.
He ends that bit of the parchment he is writing on by telling them not to forbid speaking in tongues. Just don’t do that! The wonder and mystery is to continue, not put back in the box.
So the position isn’t neutral. It never was. The default setting Paul hands the church is desire. Eagerly. He uses that word twice in short succession because he meant it twice. This isn’t a background feature of church life that a few enthusiastic types can carry for everyone else. It is a plural command aimed at a plural people.
And yet here we are.
Most churches across the city have a small handful of people who will step out. The rest observe. And observe. And observe. And the handful get tired, or self-conscious, or begin to wonder if they’re just filling a silence that everyone else has quietly decided to leave unfilled. It is an exhausting place to stand. Lonely, too. Meanwhile the text of 1 Corinthians 14 sits looking on as a majority choose to disagree with Paul!
What’s worth sitting with is why the reluctance exists. Because it isn’t usually unbelief in the gifts themselves. Many in charismatic or evangelical settings would say they believe the Spirit still moves, that the gifts are real and that God speaks. They believe it in the abstract. They just don’t act on it in the specific.
The gap between what we confess and what we do is where this conversation lives.
Fear is in there. The fear of being wrong or daft, of saying something that doesn’t land, of looking like the person who tried and missed. Which is understandable. Nobody wants to be that. But here’s what that fear is actually doing. It’s prioritising personal comfort over the edification of the body. Paul’s whole argument in chapter 14 is that the gifts are for building other people up. Your friends. Those worshipping with you in need of encouragement and God’s intervention in their lives. When we hold back to protect ourselves, the person sitting next to us goes home empty, without the thing God had for them through, well, through you or Mildred.
That’s worth taking seriously. It’s not accusation or passive legalism. It’s just what’s at stake.
The other thing worth naming is this. Stepping out in the gifts isn’t the same as being certain. The prophets in the New Testament didn’t function the way Old Testament prophets did. Paul tells the church to weigh what’s said. That structure only makes sense if the person speaking isn’t guaranteed to be perfectly precise. The model is not certainty first, then speak. It’s willingness first, community holds it together. Many times people may say, I know what you are meaning, and I’m thankful for the encouragement. Keep doing it.
You don’t have to be Elijah. You just have to show up. Please!
