Inter-Varsity Press

Contents

Introduction

1. True spirituality focuses on Christ’s cross, not on human wisdom

2. True spirituality respects faithful leaders, not flashy ones

3. True spirituality demands holiness, not moral permissiveness

4. True spirituality affirms both marriage and singleness, but not asceticism

5. True spirituality promotes spiritual concern, not unfettered freedom

6. True spirituality affirms gender differences, but not social divisions

7. True spirituality prioritizes love, not spiritual gifts

8. True spirituality focuses on a physical future, not just the spiritual present

Epilogue

Introduction

A spiritual crisis

The first major crisis in my Christian life came about a year after my conversion. I had come to Christ shortly before leaving school, simply through reading Matthew’s Gospel. It was as if the Lord Jesus walked off the pages and into my life, filling me with a deep assurance of forgiveness and a conviction that I could never be the same again. In those early months I grew rapidly in understanding my new faith and strove hard to live it out. It was a honeymoon period in which I enjoyed a peace and joy I had never known before; but then came the crisis.

Shortly after leaving school I went as a volunteer helper to a holiday centre for the disabled. There I met two Christians who were roughly the same age as me. It was the first time I had got to know believers from very different backgrounds from mine, and I delighted in the fellowship we enjoyed as we prayed together and tried to witness to the guests and other volunteers. All went well until my new friends began to describe some experiences they had received and urged me to ask God to do the same for me. They told me that I had received Christ, but that the Holy Spirit was still not living in my life. If only I would open myself up to him, then I would be able to know a far greater power in my Christian life and a closer walk with Christ.

I was confused by what they said but I certainly did not want to miss out on anything from God, so I prayed earnestly to receive the experiences they had told me about. When nothing happened I prayed again, but still with no effect. The joy I had previously known deserted me, and I was filled with spiritual insecurity. Was it true that I had never received the Holy Spirit? Was there a whole plane of Christian experience that I was missing out on? If so, was that because God did not love me as much as he loved my friends? Had I not been praying earnestly enough? Or was it possible that my friends were misguided and were pointing me in the wrong direction?

How could I tell?

True spirituality: a contemporary issue

The questions I was grappling with were a particular manifestation of an issue that has an urgent relevance: what is the nature of true spirituality? Perhaps no other subject causes greater confusion and, sadly, division among Christians today.

What does it mean to be a truly spiritual Christian? New trends frequently sweep through the Christian world, which can give the impression that those who do not embrace their teaching and practices are second-class disciples. None of us wants to miss out on all that God is doing, so our ears prick up when we hear of some movement, teaching or personality claiming to offer a new work of God’s Spirit. But how can we discern what is really from God?

I am very grateful to an older Christian who came alongside me during my spiritual crisis and pointed me in the right direction. He told me not to focus on dramatic experiences, clever arguments or the personalities of my friends, although they were undoubtedly sincere and passionate, but rather to look to the teaching of the Bible. Taking his advice, I read the whole New Testament and measured what I had been told against it. The result was both reassuring and challenging. I saw no evidence in the New Testament that there are two classes of Christians, spiritual and unspiritual, or that some believers have progressed into a different sphere of spirituality through a particular experience. It became clear to me that all people are spiritually dead by nature and can only become Christians, or stay Christians, by the miraculous life-giving work of the Holy Spirit within them. All Christians are spiritual because, as Paul puts it, ‘If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ’ (Romans 8:9).

Paul’s letter to the Colossians was especially helpful to me. The apostle counters those in Colosse who claimed that it was not enough simply to know Christ and taught that there was a deeper knowledge of God that could be enjoyed by those who also embraced extra revelation, experiences and practices. These words in particular leapt out at me and gave me great reassurance: ‘For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness’ (Colossians 2:9–10). If, by coming to Christ, I had already entered into a relationship with the One who is the fullness of God, how could there be more of God to be received from some other source? But along with the encouragement came a profound challenge: I had received so much from God in Christ by the Spirit, but was I living in the light of all that I had received? Was I keeping ‘in step with the Spirit’ (Galatians 5:25), delighting in fellowship with Christ, resisting sin, walking in holiness and taking every opportunity to build up others and point unbelievers to Christ?

True spirituality: a Corinthian issue

The goal of this book is to help Christians who are seeking to discern the nature of true spirituality, by applying the advice my mentor gave to me and looking to the Bible for answers.

We will be focusing on Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, because it directly addresses our subject. Paul had been used by God to establish a church in Corinth, which was a major port and commercial centre in what is now southern Greece, during his eighteen-month stay there in his second missionary journey in the early 50s AD (see Acts 18). He wrote 1 Corinthians about two or three years after his departure to respond to developments in the church that were causing concern. It seems that the Corinthians prided themselves on being very ‘spiritual’ (a word that appears twelve times in the letter, more than in the rest of the New Testament put together). Other words that are often repeated also seem to be qualities they admired and believed they possessed: ‘wisdom’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘power’.

The Corinthians really thought they had arrived in these areas and that they had left Paul behind. In contrast to them, he was unspiritual, ignorant, weak and foolish. The apostle writes a strongly corrective letter, not simply to defend his reputation but also to restore them to true Christian faith. He picks up the words they use themselves and is basically saying, ‘The knowledge, power and wisdom you claim to have are not the real thing. What you call spirituality isn’t spirituality at all, it’s worldly. You’re being directed by the mind-set and principles of the non-Christian world around you rather than by the Holy Spirit.’

That challenge is not just for the Corinthians; it also has a direct application to Christians today. It is striking how very Corinthian the twenty-first-century church is. The buzzwords that had such currency in Corinth still appear frequently in book blurbs and conference brochures today. We value exactly the same qualities and yet we often have very inadequate understandings of them. Paul’s appeal to the Corinthians is God’s appeal to us. We also need to repent of inadequate and worldly understandings of what it means to live by the Spirit, and instead embrace true spirituality.

A challenge for today

The approach I adopt as we study 1 Corinthians is expository rather than topical. By that I mean that I am not, first and foremost, coming to the text with a fixed set of questions on particular contemporary topics and looking to see what answers it gives. I am rather starting with the text and seeing what issues and questions it raises for us, which may differ from the ones with which we began. To understand what the Holy Spirit is saying to us through this letter in the twenty-first century, we must begin by asking what he was saying through Paul to the Corinthians in the first century. That will require us to study the text carefully. There will not be space for a detailed discussion of every verse, but I am aiming to draw out the major themes. (For a more detailed look at the text I would especially recommend David Jackman’s Let’s Study 1 Corinthians, or the longer commentary by David Garland.)

You will gain most from this book if you read the relevant section of 1 Corinthians before each chapter and then keep it open. The Bible study questions at the end of each chapter are designed to help you individually and in groups to look more deeply into the passages and think further about how they apply today.

Some of the issues Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians, such as whether or not to eat food sacrificed to idols, may seem alien to us, but the principles are profoundly relevant. The sovereign God, who by his Holy Spirit ensured the Bible writers wrote exactly what he wanted them to write, always intended that Paul’s letter to a particular group of Christians in one particular place and time would be his living word for all generations. As we study 1 Corinthians, we will hear God’s word to us today, bringing both encouragement and challenge, whether our temptation is towards a super-spirituality which claims more from God than we should expect, or a sub-spirituality which is so nervous of excess that it contents itself with far less than God wants to give us. In our desire to be spiritual, we too are in danger of substituting the vibrant heart of our faith with a pale echo of the world. In correcting the Corinthians, Paul challenges us too and calls us back to true spirituality.