Open with me, please, to 1 Corinthians, the 12th chapter.

1 Corinthians 12.

On Friday nights, we've been on a subject called the things of the spirit.

The things of the spirit.

And it's based on 1st Corinthians, chapter 12, 13, and 14.

We'll begin reading in verse 1 again, and we're reading in the Young's literal translation.

And as we've said repeatedly, a number of your modern translations just don't get it right

on these chapters. And it's because people's experience or lack of it and their doctrine comes

through. When you start talking about the gifts of the spirit, the very first thing here says,

he says, I don't want you to be ignorant about these things.

So if the Lord says, I don't want you to be ignorant about these things, what could you guess?

There's a whole lot of ignorance about these things.

And as he goes through talking about the nine different gifts and manifestations of the Holy Spirit,

people who've not accepted other parts of the Word being filled with the Spirit,

speaking in other tongues, they're not going to understand these things.

And so they try to make them natural instead of spiritual and try to explain why people don't

have an experience of these things.

But we must not water down the word to match our lack of experience.

We should believe God to elevate our experience to match the word.

If you'll be honest and humble, you'll always come across things in the word that you're not there yet.

Nobody has arrived at complete Christ-like perfection in this life yet.

Well, that means you need to come up higher.

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