Years ago I had a long conversation with my friend Logan about the gift of healing. He asked God for the gift of healing plainly and persistently, and he told me he had watched someone be physically healed after God answered that prayer. But the part of that conversation I have carried the longest was not the healing he witnessed. It was that he kept turning the subject toward the healing of a soul, not just the physical healing. The physical healing was certainly amazing, but Logan kept wanting to see on the inside what he saw on the outside.
I have come to think he was right, and that a good deal of what the Spirit does with His power to heal never makes it into the category we file these four gifts under: deliverance from real bondage, freedom from a sin somebody has been losing to for twenty years, genuine resolution in a man or a woman that clinical counseling and ordinary pastoral care do not fully account for. I want to be careful here, because 1 Corinthians 12 is talking about bodies when it says gifts of healing, and I don’t think we get to quietly redefine that into something we find easier to believe.
But if we only look for the kind of encounter we read about in Acts, we can miss the Spirit doing something just as impossible in somebody’s soul.
So the last post on the gifts left four of them sitting on the table, and they happen to be the four that put most of us on one side of a line: healing, miracles, tongues, and the interpretation of tongues. Many of us learned what our churches do with these gifts long before we asked why.
Paul spends far more of his writing in the chapters referenced below regulating these gifts than defending them. He isn’t working to convince the Corinthians the gifts are real, and he isn’t trying to talk them out of them either. He’s telling them who is in charge of the gifts and who they’re for, and I think many of us, myself included, have lost track of both.
As He Wills
Paul closes the gift list with a sentence that governs everything after it: “All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills” (1 Corinthians 12:11).
The ESV’s cross-reference on that last clause points to Hebrews 2:4, which reads, “while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will.”
Hebrews 2:4 is one passage used to argue that these gifts have ceased. Signs and wonders bore witness, the argument runs, and the witness has been borne. That means these gifts cease. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad reading, but I’m not going to pretend the cross-reference settles it either. Notice what the two texts agree on, though: they use nearly the same words to say the Spirit distributes according to His will. And nobody else has a vote.
Both cessationists, who believe some gifts ended with the apostolic age, and continuationists, who believe they remain available, can pray expectantly for God to heal. Setting aside time for that prayer is good. Pastorally, the trouble comes when we dismiss a healing report before listening, or on the other side, promise an outcome before God has given it.
Healing and Miracles
Paul returns to these two gifts a few verses later, in the form of a question: “Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing?” (1 Corinthians 12:29-30). The answer he’s fishing for is no, which is his whole point about the body. These gifts belong within a body whose members need one another, and the Spirit decides who receives them.
The cross-reference on “the working of miracles” points somewhere you might not expect. Paul is arguing with the Galatians about the law, and mid-argument he refers to God as the one “who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you” (Galatians 3:5). He isn’t defending the claim. He’s using it as the settled premise of an argument about justification, in a letter to ordinary congregations who weren’t apostles and weren’t in Jerusalem!
And then there’s the one piece of procedure the New Testament gives a sick Christian, and it isn’t from Paul at all:
Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.
(James 5:14-16)
Look at how ordinary that is. The sick person makes the call, the elders come to them, and oil, prayer, and confessed sin sit right in the middle of it, suggesting James thinks healing and honesty travel together. No platform, no crowd. Just a sick person and a few elders.
James speaks with a confidence I find important, and it has challenged me in my own life and ministry. He tells the church to pray in faith and expect the Lord to act, and his conditional wording about sin gives us no permission to assume every illness is a judgment on a particular sin. But how do we hold that promise alongside faithful people who remain sick?
Maybe it’s helpful to go back to Paul.
Paul pleaded three times for his thorn to be removed, and the Lord answered him: “Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness’” (2 Corinthians 12:8-9). The same man who lists the working of miracles among the Spirit’s gifts wrote this near the end of his life: “Erastus remained at Corinth, and I left Trophimus, who was ill, at Miletus” (2 Timothy 4:20). He left him there. I don’t know a formula that makes those passages easy to hold together, but they give us no reason to treat continued suffering as proof of deficient faith.
Tongues and Interpretation
As if healing and miracles weren’t controversial enough, let’s dive into tongues and interpretation. Here the honest thing to say first is that the two main descriptions in the New Testament don’t obviously match.
At Pentecost, “they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 2:4), and the crowd from every nation under heaven says, “we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God” (Acts 2:11). That’s a gift of known human languages, aimed squarely at people who could understand them. But when Paul describes the gift in Corinth, he says nearly the reverse: “one who speaks in a tongue speaks not to men but to God; for no one understands him, but he utters mysteries in the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 14:2).
Careful readers have taken the relationship between those two in several different ways for a very long time…and I’d rather leave you standing in front of the difficulty than hand you a tidy answer I can’t defend.
What Paul does next is the part I think we often skip. He doesn’t forbid the gift, AND he doesn’t let it run wild. He regulates it, and the regulation is strict: “If any speak in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three, and each in turn, and let someone interpret…if there is no one to interpret, let each of them keep silent in church” (1 Corinthians 14:27-28).
That should hit us hard. Paul is willing to shut down a genuine gift of the Spirit in the assembly because it’s missing the other half. It has the same shape as the last post: something is given, and something else is given to make it usable, to “complete the circuit.” A gift with its second half missing does the church no good at all. I think that’s why he tells them to “strive to excel in building up the church” (14:12).
Paul is also completely unembarrassed and completely unimpressed, in two consecutive sentences: “I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you. Nevertheless, in church I would rather speak five words with my mind in order to instruct others, than ten thousand words in a tongue” (1 Corinthians 14:18-19). And when he wraps up the chapter, he gives two commands at once: “earnestly desire to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues” (14:39). Most of us are comfortable with exactly one of those as long as it’s bounded in the guise of prophesy we talked about earlier.
On a personal note, I want to take God’s word at face value and actually wrestled with this text for quite some time. At an elder retreat several years ago, during an extended time of worship, I was convicted that I hadn’t been obedient in asking for greater gifts. So I began to ask and pray for the gift of tongues.
I was caught up in the Spirit during worship and hoping something might happen. I felt words rising within me, but nothing came out. I shared that with some of the other elders, and I decided the gift simply wasn’t something the Spirit would dispense to me. I still look back and can say with integrity that I have earnestly desired to prophesy and speak in tongues, but it’s pretty clear the Spirit hasn’t granted me that grace. So I guess I’m a failure in the miraculous gifts…which means for some of my charismatic friends I might not even be full of the Spirit!
We Turn People Into Evidence
And speaking of that “tribe,” I do think there is a marked temptation that commences when we think about these miraculous manifestations. When a church needs a healing to prove its theology, or needs to dismiss one to protect it, the person in the middle of it all can become an exhibit. The woman with the diagnosis becomes proof that God still heals, or she becomes proof that people get carried away, and either way she has been recruited into an argument she never asked to join.
The signs in Hebrews really do bear witness to what God has done. But Paul also tells us what the manifestation of the Spirit is for: “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7). Whatever an experience tells us about God, the person in front of us still needs our care. For the common good…which means for her.
Which is what stayed with me about that conversation with Logan. He wasn’t building a case. He was asking God for something, and when he told me what he had seen, he spent most of the time on souls rather than the body, which isn’t what a man assembling an argument does with his best piece of evidence. It showed, instead, that he genuinely loved people as God loved them, and wanted desperately for their full and complete healing — body, mind, heart, and soul.
A Still More Excellent Way
Paul finishes the chapter with a sentence that reads like a door opening: “But earnestly desire the higher gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way” (1 Corinthians 12:31).
He isn’t changing the subject there, and he isn’t scolding them for wanting the gifts either…he tells them to want them, and then tells them there’s something better than getting what they want. That’s where this series goes next, and it’s the only honest place for a run of posts like this one to end.
Until then, I’d hold on to the clause we started with. He apportions to each one individually as He wills. We don’t schedule Him, we can’t switch Him off, and the gifts we’ve argued hardest about turn out to be the ones we control least…which may be the mercy hiding inside them.
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