Building up

Oh, to have routine broken. It's terrible. It's horrifying. It's, uh, broken.

This morning I headed to the PC to get That's Life in the bank. I write in the mornings because I run out of living gas soon afterwards. But to my shock, there was no way to get onto the Internet. It didn't work. It gave me a stop sign. It wouldn't allow me to get to my blog site, and since I'm old and my memory has been slowly but surely going away, I couldn't remember the site name so that even if I drove to the office and signed on there, I couldn't get to the blog to do my thing.

Oh, to have routine broken and the horrifying become reality.

Then I rebooted everything and green lights appeared and here we are. We're rebooted. We've been given new bodies of work. We're reborn, as it were.

I was reading chapter 14 of 1 Corinthians when the horrifying appeared. I was pondering the fifth verse of the chapter, a kind of ranking of spiritual gifts. Paul writes, "Now I would like all of you to speak in tongues, but even more to prophesy. One who prophesies is greater than one who speaks in tongues, unless someone interprets, so that the church may be built up."

What do you think "building up" of the church means? Maybe, just maybe the first verse of this chapter lets us in on some of the answers. "Pursue love and strive for the spiritual gifts, and especially that you may prophesy."

This pursuit of spiritual gifts is something I think we've lost effort on. We need to re-start that effort. If we were able to gain or loosen what we already have of spiritual gifts, perhaps we could indeed build up the church.

The formula is this: God gives spiritual gifts to everyone, according to scripture. Those gifts help us to build up the church.

Those gifts include tongues, encouraging, consoling, prophesying (preaching). Those gifts still exist today.

The idea is this...take what God has given and produce spiritual blessings from the spiritual gifts. Build up. Encourage. Pray for. Love on. Do what God has told us to do.

Even the terrifying becomes mundane when those gifts are used properly.

Let's start today.