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Seed Church Vision 2018 – know God, experience freedom, discover your purpose, make a difference

What is this life we are called to that requires death?

On one level, it is a calculation of short term sacrifice for the long-term gain of eternal life, but there is more. We are called to live life to its fullest now, bring Christ’s kingdom to life in our lives now.

All this requires death. Death to vanity. Death to complacency. Death to busyness. Death to procrastination. Death to security. We must imitate Christ, not merely admire Him.

Are you willing to die in order to live, or are you living just to die.

Seed Church has iterated on the philosophy of our motto, “dying to live” and had developed four key themes that will be driving our work going forward: know God, experience freedom, discover your purpose, and make a difference.

Knowing God means through informational knowledge: through teaching, reading, study. We believe that the scriptures are the supreme authority for doctrine and conduct, and that they must be taught with care and intention. But simply informational knowledge is not sufficient. Plenty of unbelievers have plenty of that sort of knowledge.

So it also means relational knowledge, which Jesus describes in John 15. We are told that we are not merely God’s pupils, but His friends. In order to demonstrate His love, we must live in that love.

That then results in experiential knowledge, seeing and being Jesus throughout our life experiences.

Experiencing freedom, as it relates to being a Christian, is not immediately obvious. It is not about the secular freedom to say, do or think whatever we want. So what is the freedom Jesus offers? He spoke of it in Matthew 11, as a light burden and easy yoke. It is the freedom to follow the spirit of God, freedom from sin – both those we are forgiven for, and from the power of sin in our day to day lives. Aligning ourselves with the gospel moves us from living with sin and self to experiencing wholeness together with God.

Discovering our purpose: we do this as we see ourselves in the story of Jesus, and live out that story as commanded in Matthew 28, to spread that story to every people, nation and ethnicity. We will suffer as Christ did, and in that suffering, we will experience the sufficiency and supremacy of Christ. As we make much of Jesus in the world, it is inevitable that we will suffer in this way.

We must also make much of Jesus in the church, by living as His body and pursuing, identifying and using our gifts to live out the gospel.

Making a difference: as Christians, we are called to neither optimism nor pessimism, but rather a realistic hope and, more importantly, an understanding of our opportunity to make a difference ourselves even in seemingly small ways. We are to bring wholeness to others by living out the kingdom values of God, revealing Jesus by entering into suffering and serving in tangible ways. At Seed we do that both corporately, especially by supporting specific organizations, and individually, loving our neighbors in various ways.

This is the vision that will be guiding Seed Church going forward, both in old and new ways, with tangible ways that we can engage in knowing God, experiencing freedom, discovering our purpose and making a difference.

– Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, John Lehigh, Sean Tavern, Brian Bailey, Dave Lester, Jeff Krabach, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA, January 7, 2018

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Seeing and Loving – Matthew 9:35-38

In this passage, we get a picture of how the love of Christ works. When Jesus saw the crowds, he saw their pain. Truly seeing requires more attention than most of us give.

He sees them as three things: harassed, helpless and like sheep without a shepherd. They were harassed and troubled by life, poverty, oppression and disease. They were helpless against this suffering, and entirely without outside help to address it.

Unlike Jesus, we tend to wear blinders to suffering. When we pull up next to someone begging on a street corner, we tend to look straight ahead and hope the light changes. In our information age, we can get “disaster fatigue” as the sheer amount of data about suffering can numb us to it. We become so overwhelmed with what we can’t do that we can ignore the little that we can do.

In Luke, Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan as an example of seeing suffering and responding to it. Christ’s very presence on earth, through the incarnation, was a living example of compassion for humanity.

This love led him to respond in three ways listed here. He taught the people who God was. He called people into his kingdom, and he brought physical healing and fullness to the sick and broken.

We are called to both proclaim the love of God, and to be the mechanism of God’s love in this world.

But Jesus does not stop there. He sees the suffering, responds in compassion to alleviate that suffering, but then closes this section by bringing others into this process. This is God’s plan – for us to bring others into the active love of God. We are not called to be silent about what we are doing, but rather to bring more people into it.

There are many on need – “the harvest is plenty” – but too few who respond in the radical love of Christ.

Our focus should be on the wholeness of people, both physical and spiritual. There are three practical ways we can do this.

The first is through our affluence. Most of us in America are fantastically wealthy in a the global context. We can share this with those doing good work.

We can use our influence, in various different ways, whether on behalf of people or directly into their lives.

And finally, we can give our time.

At Advent, we celebrate the coming of God to restore humanity, and we seek to answer His call to join Him in that restoration: pointing people to Him, meeting their needs directly, and bringing others into this cycle of love.

– Sermon Notes, Jeff Krabach, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA, December 17, 2017

Matthew 9:35-38

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Bringing Shalom to Our City – Jeremiah 29:1-7

 

The nation of Israel has become corrupt. They take the outward signs of pious life, but in fact were just as bad as the pagans around them. Or worse, because as representatives of God, this behavior represented God to the world around them.

And so God uses Nebuchadnezzar to bring judgement on Jerusalem, bringing thousands of Jews to Babylon in exile. The land is taken, the temple is destroyed and the Law itself is upended.

So what does God say to do? Settle down, raise families, seek the peace of wherever you are. Prior to this, the concept of peace had been wrapped up in the direct rule of God over his chosen people in the Promised Land. But now the Law, the Temple and the land are gone, just as was promised in Deuteronomy would happen if they turned away.

But God doesn’t tell them to live separately or to isolate themselves from the culture around them. He tells them to plant gardens – the same word as “paradise”. They are called to bring a little piece of paradise into their new home. Babylon is also known for its gardens, so using this term rather than “vines” or “grain” implies an integration with the culture around them.

God also calls on them to, essentially, “be fruitful and multiply” – another callback to the Garden of Eden and the instruction given there. And again, it also appears to be an instruction toward intermarriage and integration, since the vast majority of the exiles were men.

He then instructs them to pray for Babylon, the city that just wiped them out. Not only that, but to seek the peace and prosperity of the city. The goal had changed from Israel being a hermetically sealed, isolated kingdom of peace that would eventually spread shalom to the gentiles. Their sin meant they had to spread out and seek to bring shalom into their neighborhoods and the city of their exile.

Then we come to Christ. The mission itself does not change – Jesus does not being back the earthly kingdom of Israel. Instead, he founds a new, spiritual kingdom, not based on rule following, but on a relationship with the rule-giver. Christ becomes the new law, the new temple and the new Kingdom.

Like Israel, we are in a moment of now-but-not-yet. We are, like Israel, spread among the world and called to bring peace to a broken world. God will eventually force the peace, but that will come with judgement. So in His mercy, God waits and uses us as His hands and feet to bring people to repentance.

We are called to bring the peace of God into the world around us drop by drop. We are called to citizenship, not to live in bunkers. We are called to fight against poverty and oppression, and to stand against abuse, especially when it comes from people who claim Christ.

We can look at early Christianity to see how this played out. The early church essentially invented the concept of charity. St. Basil invented the hospital in the 3rd century. During plagues, pagans would evacuate, while Christians would remain in the city and nurse the sick as best they could. These examples drew thousands to Christ.

Let us do the same. Let us spread this peace today, in our homes, neighborhoods, cities, countries and world.

– Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

Jeremiah 29:1-7

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Surprised by Authentic Joy – Luke 2:8-20

Why is authentic joy something Christians need to be concerned about? Why does it matter that we are happy?

The short answer is that God commands us to be joyful, throughout both the Old and New Testament. It is an earth shattering concept that we are commanded to feel a particular emotion. We do not have immediate control over our emotions. We can fake it, and often do, but we can’t just snap our fingers and become authentically happy. Those who struggle with depression understand this particularly well.

We can understand God calling us to do certain things, but the idea that we need to feel a certain way is hard. We are called to possess something that we cannot possess in our own power. We cannot produce our own joy, but it must be produced within us.

There is a joy that God offers us that is beyond our most joyful moments, but there is a threat to our joy that is also beyond our understanding.

But where does our Joy come from? It comes from a person: Jesus Christ. CS Lewis titled the story of his conversion “Surprised by Joy” because he was startled by the notion that there is a connection between God and joy. We cannot get that kind of joy from any other person, or any material thing. As Lewis writes:

Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first & we lose both first and second things. We never get, say, even the sensual pleasure of food at its best when we are being greedy.

Back to the passage: the shepherds are in the fields watching the sheep. An angel appears and, as people always do when they see an angel, they basically wet themselves. But the angel says not to be afraid – that it brings good news, “evangelion” – often used to describe a king returning victorious from a battle. And this news brings “great joy” – because “to you”, the shepherds themselves, is born a savior. And not just any savior, but the promised Anointed One.

Joy at this news permeates these first few chapters of Luke. Elizabeth, Zechariah and even the unborn John are joyful at the heralding of Christ. Simeon and Anna likewise rejoiced at seeing the infant king.

Why do we need a savior? What blocks us from joy? Sin, the separation from our creator, is the deepest and darkest fate possible. We live under a curse, exposed to and deserving of the wrath of God. The only one qualified to lift that curse is the one who God sent in the flesh, who lived the life we could not life and died the death we could not die.

In John 15-17, Jesus prays that the joy that exists between him and the Father would extend to his disciples. Joy is the emotion of salvation.

How do we then define authentic joy? Joy is the good feeling that is produced by the Holy Spirit that causes us to rest fully in Jesus’ life and death and resurrection and reign for our salvation.

– Sermon Notes, Chris Gorman, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

Luke 2:8-20

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The Hope of Redemption – Psalm 107

This Psalm, from David, recounts the steadfast love of God for the people of Israel – the word is חסד or hesed. It is a story of redemption.

The initial redemption, the foundational rescue event that served as a sign for all the future redemption events, was the rescue of the people of Israel from Egypt and being brought into the Promised Land. This is a common theme throughout the Old Testament, of remembering God’s goodness in and through that moment.

But Psalm 107 looks at a continual redemption, an ongoing story in which God acts as redeemer. David does this through four characters: the wanderer, the prisoner, the fool and the ship captain.

The wanderer calls back to the time the Israelites spent wandering on the wilderness. They had been redeemed out of Egypt, but rejected God’s plan for them to enter the Promised Land and spent 40 years wandering in a circle in the desert. It is us, too, when we wander in our own spiritual circles,

The Psalm says that the Lord will make the way of the wanderer straight, and bring him into the city where he can have rest and safety. David calls these wanderers to be thankful, when we are brought out of whatever wilderness we have wandered in.

Next, we have the prisoner, imprisoned and oppressed because of their own wicked deeds. Again, it calls back to the history of Israel, when rebellion against God would result in discipline through foreign conquerors. The discipline is not there to harm them, but to reorient their perspective and bring them back to God.

Again, this is like us, whether situations of literal imprisonment, or spiritual imprisonment by sin, God is there to forgive and save us from our distress when we cry out to him. Has this happened to us? David instructs us to be thankful.

Then there is the fool, entirely devoted to his own pleasure and desires, even to the extent that they forego food and drink. The fool goes beyond the wanderer and the prisoner in their complete abandonment to sin. But when they hit bottom and cry out to God, once again He comforts, heals and forgives their sin. And again, we who have been the fool are called in to be thankful.

Next, we have the ship captain. Unlike the others, he seems to have things together, and his vice isn’t rebellion or depravity. Instead, it is overconfidence and pride, a belief that they are self-sufficient and is able to chart their own course. This is many of us in our Christianity, trying to live good lives in our own strength, with our own plans and towards our own goals.

But God wants dependent worshipers who live in love and relationship with him. And so he sends mighty waves and storms to remind us that we ultimately cannot survive under our own power. We call out to him and he again redeems us from the storm. Once again, we are to live in gratitude to the Lord who rescues is.

Then in verse 32, David goes into all the ways God works to bring his people back to him – turning rivers into deserts and deserts into pools of water, doing whatever is needed to bring us to redemption. God customizes our redemption to exactly what he wants for us in exactly the ways we need.

For us, we also look back to an original redemption, the salvation brought to us by the death and resurrection of Christ. And we also see ongoing redemption and rescue throughout our lives, whether as wanderer, prisoner, fool or captain. But the rescue is not from our situation, but primarily from our own self-dependence and rebellion.

The rescue will look different for different people. The wanderer is left to their own fumbling devices for a long period of time. The prisoner must have their rebellion crushed and their lives restricted to turn then around. The fool must hit rock bottom before they turn their eyes heavenward. The ship captain must fail on their own so they will depend on God.

This multifaceted, steadfast love has no limits. There is not a set number of redemptions on a cosmic punch card. God’s redemption is bottomless and never ending. We are a forgetful people, and so constantly need reminding of this.

Or maybe we are frustrated and confused that we don’t seem to be moving forward spiritually. We may be moving backwards, and the shame or frustration of that may be keeping us from actually moving forward again. But our spiritual life is not and was never promised to be a steady upward climb. It is a constant forward and back motion, confession and repentance and returning to God. But we cannot wait until we are better to turn to God. We must turn to him before we can get better at all.

Or maybe we have never sought the redemption of God. Maybe we are turned off from it by the public face of Evangelical Christianity on the news and in social media. If you reject the ugly, false pictures of God and Christ being portrayed, then good for you. Seek the God of the scriptures and understand the true Christ and the redemption he offers.

Wherever we are in this story, whatever the reason we need rescue today, we should turn to God and throw ourselves on his mercy. God loves us more than we love ourselves, which means we have a mighty hope.

– Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, November 26, 2017

Psalm 107

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The Story of Us and Also Paul – 1 Corinthians 16:5-24

All of us are the lead characters in our own story. Sometimes our stories are driven by our decisions, sometimes by things outside of our control. We want to control how our stories are told (see Facebook) but also don’t generally consider our own stories to be particularly interesting. We don’t usually have epic adventures or amazing, exotic encounters.

Paul could certainly be considered to have had an amazing story – but the most important parts were not his shipwrecks and great speeches or even his conversion on the road to Damascus. They were his relationships, created by the Providence of God.

Priscilla and Acquila, businesspeople who become leaders under Paul’s training, and who went on to train Apollos, a Egyptian who went on to become a great leader as well. Timothy, Paul’s fearful Turkish/Jewish intern who was trained up into a pastor and saint. Even Stephanas, Fortunatas and Achaicus, who we know nothing about except that they were key characters in the early Church.

The key parts of Paul’s life were not the cinematic high points, but the impact he had on the people he came in contact with.

Paul believed two things about how God works: God plans things in His providence, and that we need to take every opportunity available to do God’s work.

Paul also understood that the work of God was not just dependent on him, but on the work of many others throughout the world. Those who he led to Christ now in turn refresh him. Paul didn’t just minister to others, but he also received ministry from those he led to Christ. That’s the kingdom of God on Earth.
He had to stay in Ephesus, but knew that the work of God continued elsewhere.

God is always at work. Through Providence, he puts particular people in our lives at particular times with particular purposes. Do we use those relationships only for our own good and own purposes? Or do we take the opportunities we are given to demonstrate the love of God in all its various facets? If we pass up these opportunities, God will still work His plan, but we will not be a part of that story.

We need each other to do the work of God. Not just the 20% who naturally get involved and do 80% of the work in most churches, but everyone. The health of a church can be indicated by the proportion of people engaged in the work of the body.

The beauty of the conclusion of this letter to the Corinthians is seeing all the connections that Paul made within the early church, the networks of servanthood and grace that stretched around the world. That is the same beauty we can be a part of every day as we love and serve each other and the world around us.

– Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

1 Corinthians 16:5-24

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The Discipline of Giving – 1 Corinthians 16:1-4

Some people hate money – not necessarily what money gives you, but the need for and the process of acquiring it. Others love money – not necessarily for what it gives them, but the process of managing it, earning it, etc.

But all of us have to deal with money. It is a prime source of stress, cause of divorce and so on. So it is not a surprise that the Bible has lots to say about money. Some on the best ways to use it (Proverbs), some on not worrying about it (Sermon on the Mount), but a lot also on giving it away.

Paul here, coming off a discussion of the Kingdom of God and the Holy Spirit and all that, as he wraps up, shifts to this very practical, material thing.

He is speaking to a church in a relatively wealthy city. The Greek provinces of Rome where Paul preached like Corinth, Ephesus and Colosse were generally wealthy urban areas. Jerusalem, where the Church began, was a much poorer city with much greater material needs.

At this time, there were only single churches in each city, and the churches were all part of a single seamless, if loose, organization – the “catholic” i.e., universal church. The leaders would come together in Presbyterian-style councils to make broad decisions and settle disputes. So the money being given here was not really for an external organization, but rather for the brothers and sisters within the church.

This section here sets forth a few important concepts about giving that we should keep in mind.

First, giving should be a habit – an ongoing habit, not something that you increase or decrease based on your satisfaction with the church at any one time. It is not supposed to go to specific things that you like or support – it is to go to the church and be distributed as needed. It is not natural – it is a spiritual discipline, just like reading the Bible or prayer. If any of these things are only done spontaneously, they will rarely be done at all.

Who should give? Anyone who is able. The amount should be in keeping with their income. Those without income, barely keeping their heads above water, getting meals from food banks, living in a van down by the river, who should be the ones on the receiving end, should not be the ones giving. Other than that, you should be giving.

Funnily enough, those with little money tend to be better at giving than those with much. Part of that is that those with little money tend to have more empathy for those with less. Part of it is that those who have money tend to have money because they are careful with it and don’t just give it away.

How much should we give? In the Old Testament, you were to give your “first fruits,” the first 10% of the earnings and crops that came in, done twice a year. The New Testament never specifically cites this number, but does keep the concept of “in keeping with your income.” We see widows giving a penny praised, and we see people going out and selling property in order to give more.

So the question is, why does God, who can do miracles and owns all “the cattle on a thousand hills, the wealth in every mine” have to have us give anything? There are lots of answers: we are the hands and feet of God and the mechanism by which He distributes that wealth.

The giving itself is also a mechanism for measuring our faith. When we have means but are stingy with our giving, we are saying that we do not trust God. If we say we love others and love God, the habit of giving is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate that.

It is also a way to strengthen our faith. When we live in dependence and give more than is comfortable, it gives us an opportunity to trust God in a new way.

The habit of giving also lets us practice grace. Giving to those you don’t like or that may not deserve it is an imitation of the grace of Christ. If we give only when we want to to those we think have earned it, there is no grace there. By willingly giving things up without maintaining control over the end use of that money, we are, in a small way, following the path of Christ who gave away his life, something of eternal value, for us who did not remotely deserve it.

If you think that the amount you have to give is too paltry, consider that God is not concerned with the dollar amount. He is concerned with the process, with the heart behind it. The economy of God is not the economy of man.

So, the habit of giving tests our faith, strengthens our faith and lets us practice grace. It is an opportunity presented to us by God to participate in His mighty work.

– Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

1 Corinthians 16:1-4

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The (Super) Nature of the Resurrection – 1 Corinthians 15:29-58

Last week, looking at the first part of 1 Corinthians 15, we covered the idea that humans were created to live in bodies. God Himself came in the form of a human body. But many early Christians struggled with this notion, because the physical world was seen as impure and lesser than the spiritual. The notion of the resurrection of the dead was hard to swallow.

Paul addresses that in chapter 15, beginning from the one thing they all agreed on – Jesus rose from the dead. But if resurrection is impossible then, Paul argues, Christ couldn’t have risen, the gospel is meaningless, faith is meaningless, the martyrs died for nothing, we’re all still under the curse, all believers are still in heel and being a Christian is the dumbest idea possible.

It is, in some ways, a call back to Ecclesiastes – life without Christ is meaningless. But because of the resurrection of Christ and of the dead, Paul has hope.

Then he moves on to a (loose) description of how the resurrection works. He uses the metaphor of the seed, which is an entirely different kinds of thing from the plant that it becomes. Transformations like this are a real thing in the world that we already understand, and if there is a world and dimension beyond this one, it is perfectly logical to imagine that there are transformations that we do not know about or understand.

Some of this brings up questions. Much of this talks about resurrection as a future event at the end times, which seems to contradict other things Paul wrote about regarding being “absent from the body, present with the Lord” and so forth.

There are a number of interpretations of this – maybe resurrection happens immediately but spiritually, or maybe we go to heaven with temporary bodies before the resurrection gets us our permanent ones. This is also where ideas like “soul sleep” and purgatory come in. Or, it may be that we do resurrect immediately, with our new body, because we move outside of time at that point, making questions of present versus future moot.

Regardless, we are told that the final resurrection will be one cosmic event, swallowing up sin and death with finality and transforming that flesh and blood into something new.

Paul here quotes two Old Testament prophecies that come in the context of God’s people Israel constantly rebelling and finally being rejected despite God’s great love for them, and served as a final promise that in the end, God would fully rescue them from the grave.

The fulfillment of this prophecy started with the death and resurrection of Christ, and will be completed with the resurrection of the dead.

This means that life does have meaning. It is the hope of a glorious future that gives us the strength and motivation to live for Christ today. We can push through the struggles because know that the future is glorious. Living the Christian life on earth is difficult if we are doing it right. But if we have just a small understanding of the rewards that will be coming to us in eternity, we can have a blessed hope that pulls us through.

– Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

1 Corinthians 15:29-58

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Over My Dead Body – 1 Corinthians 15:12-28

In the 19th century, there was a trend of fear of being buried alive, mistaken for being dead. An entire industry of “safety coffins” with bells and other mechanisms to avoid burying someone alive sprang up. This story is a window into our relationship with death.

What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be dead? Plato believed that it was a return to the pre-incarnate collective mind. Others believed in soul-sleep, annihilation or reincarnation. The two things all these views have in common is that your personhood is lost once your body dies, and that your body and soul are separate things.

Orthodox Christianity, though, teaches that God created humans to live forever in bodies. Unfortunately, much of these other concepts have crept into Christianity. We think more about “going to heaven” than we do about the resurrection of the dead. We think about a spiritual heaven, but usually with the implication of bodily things (taste, touch, emotions, etc.).

These sorts of confusions crept in early and helped lead to a number of early heresies about the nature of Christ’s relationship with God, including Adoptionism and Docetism. The latter in particular rejects the idea that Christ died and rose again. In this passage, Paul makes clear that Christ was in fact a man made of flesh and bone and DNA, a counterpart of Adam, who lived and died just like Adam, but who rose again to break Adam’s curse.

The Word became flesh, it did not just put on a layer of flesh. Christ then died, and did not just put on a dumb-show of death, and then truly raised.

The logical Corinthians believed this, but struggled with the notion that people themselves would physically resurrect. They were tempted by a philosophy that said their spirit would raise, not their bodies. But if a physical resurrection is illogical, then so is Christ’s physical resurrection. And if that didn’t happen, then we see all in trouble. All the apostles who saw Him were lying. If Christ didn’t rise, we have no proof that Christ’s sacrifice was accepted, and we are all still in our sins.

But that’s not what’s happening, Paul says. Christ’s resurrection, in fact, is the beginning of story, the “first fruits” of a much greater harvest, the remaking of creation into a new heaven and new earth, where we will live in resurrected bodies. Death and Satan will be destroyed, and everyone will acknowledge Christ as Lord.

The vision God has for our future is not that we can be free from our bodies and free from this corrupted earth, but that we will live forever in better bodies and a better earth.

What does this mean for us? It means we should treat our bodies well, because we are our bodies. They are not simply shells, but they are us. The female body (and male, for that matter) is not shameful. How we treat our bodies matters, and we can sin against our bodies. Who we are starts right now, both physically and spiritually. How we treat other people’s bodies also matters, so the work done to heal, rebuild, maintain and preserve bodies and health is a vital thing. The church, too often, has taken a gnostic view of the body, prioritizing the spiritual only and neglecting physical needs.

All this brings up lots of other questions, many of which we and Paul will address next week.

– Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

1 Corinthians 15:12-28

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Prophecy is for Everybody – 1 Corinthians 14:1-33

Starting in chapter 11, Paul has been working through prescriptions for ordered worship. It starts with discussions of the Lord’s Supper, then moves into spiritual gifts, and then veers briefly into an examination of love – which should underpin all of this – before moving on to this chapter where he discusses prophecy.

Tongues are also mentioned, but primarily as a negative comparison. (Short version: if there is no interpreter, don’t do it.) The main point is how prophecy should be used in the service.

What is prophecy? It’s a spiritual gift of revelation given to all believers. It’s something that Paul cites as something we should pursue, and with vigor. Everyone in the church can and should prophesy.

Prophecy is below scripture in its authority. This is not the same as Old Testament prophecy that was specifically called out as the word of God, spoken with his authority, and canonized as scripture. In the New Testament, this particular role was filled by the apostles, while all of us are still called to prophecy, which must fit below the authority of scripture.It thus must be tested by scripture.

The purpose of prophecy in the church service is to build up the church, clearly stated by Paul in verse 26. This means that the classic foretelling of the future-type prophecy does not fall into this context and would not be appropriate within the context of the church service. (To say nothing of the vague imagery and numerology that are sometimes used in churches as essentially Christian fortune-telling.)

Order is a value here, and that order and organization springs from love. It is not loving to interrupt, to dominate the conversation or otherwise disrupt. There is a reason this part Congress right after the discussion of love in chapter 13.

The specifics of how this plays out may differ in different contexts. At Seed, we work hard to practice this by opening the floor for conversation, questions and discussion, and Paul’s instruction here is a big reason why we do that. It is not a particularly strange or spooky experience – just believers sharing what the Lord has put on our hearts and building each other up.

One objection to this practice is that people are going to say crazy things in church. But consider this – Paul was telling this to, easily, the most messed-up church described in the New Testament. If this instruction had been given to the Ephesians or Philippians or some other relatively healthy churches, this might be an argument. But it is clear that the Corinthians were going to say crazy things, and yet Paul still called them to prophesy.

A second objection is that it will be too weird for outsiders. But consider how weird the teaching of the church already is: an incarnated God-man who washes is in His blood? Paul calls it a “stumbling block” to those who don’t believe. Prophecy is a minor thing compared to this, and in fact can be used to draw people closer to God’s truth.

A third objection is basically tradition and what people are used to. We have inherited traditions that diverged from Paul’s teaching and the early church practice a long time ago. Many churches have worked to get back to it, but many haven’t. However, the spirit within each believer is crying out to share in this way, even if a particular congregation is not used to that particular structure.

A fourth argument is that a church is too big for this. But if your church is too big to follow scriptural instructions about prophecy, maybe it’s too big? Or perhaps you just need to be creative about making it work.

All of us are called to prophesy. Paul puts no restrictions on prophecy the way he does on other things. Experienced or new, old or young, male or female, everyone is specifically encouraged to seek this gift.

If you have been in a church where this is practiced, you will have seen first-hand the reason for this – regularly, you will hear a pastor say, after a sharing moment after a sermon, “you just said in 30 seconds what I spent the last 45 minutes saying, and did it worse than you did.”

As Paul says elsewhere, we are part of Christ’s body and each of us will be used by the Spirit in different ways to minister to and edify the church.

– Sermon Notes, Sean McGillivray, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

1 Corinthians 14:1-33

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