Spirit of Torah; part 6
The Gifts of the Holy Spirit
By MMin Kevin “Oriyan” Phipps

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was unformed and void, darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God hovered over the surface of the water. Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. [B’resheet/Genesis 1:1-3]

The words of Kohelet the son of David, king in Yerushalayim: Pointless! Pointless! — says Kohelet — Utterly meaningless! Nothing matters! What does a person gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? Generations come, generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises, the sun sets; then it speeds to its place and rises there. The wind blows south, then it turns north; the wind blows all around and keeps returning to its rounds. All the rivers flow to the sea, yet the sea is not full; to the place where the rivers flow, there they keep on flowing. Everything is wearisome, more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, the ear not filled up with hearing. What has been is what will be, what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. [Kohelet/Ecclesiastes 1:1-9]

 These might be unlikely verses to start out a teaching on the gifts of the Holy Spirit. My teaching today will not be on the gifts themselves. For the most part, they are self explanatory. Most any Bible encyclopedia or book on the Holy Spirit can tell you what the various gifts are. Here, I want to give more of a background on what the gifts are for and how they help each Believer to accomplish God’s Will in the world today.
 I now work in two of the most beautiful and prestigious office complexes in Spokane. Much craftsmanship and artistic architecture went into their construction. During the week, a few thousand employees fill these office buildings to do their various jobs. In the course of the day, these business men and women work hard, and while they do so, they generate an enormous amount of trash. They also walk on the floors, which gets them dirty and use the bathrooms, making them dirty as well. Since I work second shift, I am there when a second shift of workers arrive at these office buildings, whose sole purpose is to clean up after the people who work during the day and make two or three times as much as they do.  
 Let’s say the housekeepers stopped showing up. The trash would build and build. The floors and bathrooms would get dirtier and dirtier. Eventually the building would start to smell. Nobody would see the beauty of the buildings through the dirt. Eventually nobody would want to work there, and there would be so much trash, people would have a difficult time functioning.
 We see in Creation, that out of void, God created all things. In the midst of darkness, God created light. God brought order to disorder. He created life where there was desolation. His creation was good, beautiful, and brought Him glory just for existing. Mankind was made in His image and had perfect relationship with Him. When sin entered the world, however, the perfect Creation was tainted. Mud covered God’s masterpiece. Mankind became separated from the source of life, love, and light. Since then, the earth has become more and more corrupt. It has been desecrated by Ha Satan. If we allow ourselves to look at the world through God’s eyes, we see a world full of death, decay, filth, hatred, and lies. We live in a garbage dump of a planet, in which we are fed sludge every day and deceived into thinking it is chocolate pudding!

Moreover, understand this: in the acharit-hayamim will come trying times. People will be self-loving, money-loving, proud, arrogant, insulting, disobedient to parents, ungrateful,, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, uncontrolled, brutal, hateful of good, traitorous, headstrong, swollen with conceit, loving pleasure rather than God, as they retain the outer form of religion but deny its power. Stay away from these people! [2Timothy 3:1-5]

 We read in Ecclesiastes that all is vanity, a meaningless chasing after wind. This commentary on the world came from the mind of the most successful human that ever lived! So as good as our world gets is a vapor in the midst of a vast universe which is here today and gone tomorrow.

You will hear the noise of wars nearby and the news of wars far off; see to it that you don't become frightened. Such things must happen, but the end is yet to come. For peoples will fight each other, nations will fight each other, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various parts of the world; all this is but the beginning of the 'birth-pains.' At that time you will be arrested and handed over to be punished and put to death, and all peoples will hate you because of me. At that time many will be trapped into betraying and hating each other, many false prophets will appear and fool many people; and many people's love will grow cold because of increased distance from Torah. But whoever holds out till the end will be delivered. And this Good News about the Kingdom will be announced throughout the whole world as a witness to all the Goyim. It is then that the end will come. [Mattityahu/Matthew 24:6-14]

 I know this is all not very uplifting and encouraging. For that you will have to go to church. When I see the ministries of people like Shaul and Kefa, the men served God unceasingly. Even in prison, the Apostles sang praises to God. When given legal orders to stop proclaiming the Gospel, they could not do it. What compelled them forward with such zeal? I think it was because their mission was not just to save people from their sin, but they knew and experienced, the filth of the Adversary in a culture which was so twisted they watched people torn apart by wild animals for entertainment. Early Believers would be killed and their bodies hung on posts and lit on fire to light the streets at night!

… they have become futile in their thinking; and their undiscerning hearts have become darkened.  Claiming to be wise, they have become fools! In fact, they have exchanged the glory of the immortal God for mere images, like a mortal human being, or like birds, animals or reptiles! This is why God has given them up to the vileness of their hearts' lusts, to the shameful misuse of each other's bodies. They have exchanged the truth of God for falsehood, by worshipping and serving created things, rather than the Creator — praised be he for ever. Amen. This is why God has given them up to degrading passions; so that their women exchange natural sexual relations for unnatural; and likewise the men, giving up natural relations with the opposite sex, burn with passion for one another, men committing shameful acts with other men and receiving in their own persons the penalty appropriate to their perversion. In other words, since they have not considered God worth knowing, God has given them up to worthless ways of thinking; so that they do improper things. They are filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and vice; stuffed with jealousy, murder, quarrelling, dishonesty and ill-will; they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God; they are insolent, arrogant and boastful; they plan evil schemes; they disobey their parents; they are brainless, faithless, heartless and ruthless. They know well enough God's righteous decree that people who do such things deserve to die; yet not only do they keep doing them, but they applaud others who do the same.  [Romans 1:21-32]

However, let’s rewind the tape and see what Shaul told these Roman believers before this passage.

Brothers, I want you to know that although I have been prevented from visiting you until now, I have often planned to do so, in order that I might have some fruit among you, just as I have among the other Gentiles.  I owe a debt to both civilized Greeks and uncivilized people, to both the educated and the ignorant; therefore I am eager to proclaim the Good News also to you who live in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the Good News, since it is God's powerful means of bringing salvation to everyone who keeps on trusting, to the Jew especially, but equally to the Gentile. For in it is revealed how God makes people righteous in his sight; and from beginning to end it is through trust — as the Tanakh puts it, "But the person who is righteous will live his life by trust." [Romans 1:13-17]

Shaul lived in the midst of an evil generation and hurt people. He had even participated in some of it himself. Now, his life had been transformed by the truth of the Messiah, and filled with the Spirit of God. He lived in the light and God lived in the light. He knew life like he had never known it before. What drew him and others forward was knowing from the center of their being that the world was sick and they had the medicine. The world was lost and they knew the way. The world was full of filth and the Holy Spirit had given them the tools to clean it up! As Believers they had been able to see the world around them in the same way as God saw the dark void of the universe before Creation. Now His Spirit dwelled in each of them, and the same power that made the moon and stars now worked through them to create light in darkness, create order in disorder, life amongst death, truth in the midst of lies, healing where there is brokenness, goodness where there is only evil.

But, brothers, I do not want you to go on being ignorant about the things of the Spirit. You know that when you were pagans, no matter how you felt you were being led, you were being led astray to idols, which can't speak at all. Therefore, I want to make it clear to you that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says, "Yeshua is cursed!" and no one can say, "Yeshua is Lord," except by the Ruach HaKodesh. Now there are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit gives them. Also there are different ways of serving, but it is the same Lord being served. And there are different modes of working, but it is the same God working them all in everyone. Moreover, to each person is given the particular manifestation of the Spirit that will be for the common good. To one, through the Spirit, is given a word of wisdom; to another, a word of knowledge, in accordance with the same Spirit; to another, faith, by the same Spirit; and to another, gifts of healing, by the one Spirit; to another, the working of miracles; to another, prophecy; to another, the ability to judge between spirits; to another, the ability to speak in different kinds of tongues; and to yet another, the ability to interpret tongues. One and the same Spirit is at work in all these things, distributing to each person as he chooses. [1Corinthians 12-1-11]

If you read carefully, it sounds like the making of a band superheroes, which I’ve talked about before. There is darkness and evil in our world, and the God of the universe dwells in each person who puts their faith in Messiah Yeshua and lives according to His ways. The more of God’s Word was put in our life, the more of God’s power is able to flow through us to the world around us. Each person who has the Spirit of God is specially gifted to combat evil and create life and light in our world in a specific way. The list above was a list of gifts God gave to His Body to give them what was needed for their culture in their day. Most but perhaps not all apply to today, but there may be gifts available today that were not then. The important things for us to know is that God has gifted each of us in special ways to enable us to perform His Will in our world, and with God, anything is possible.
We do have guidelines. The gifts are distributed by the Holy Spirit as He chooses. The gifts are given to bring glory to God, not Man. They are to enable Believers to perform God’s will, not ours. Everything about the gifts are about God, not us.
When we consider the immensity of the filth that has filled our world, and the task we have been given to go into all the world and clean it up, the task can be as intimidating as trying to move a mountain with a spoon. God tells us, however, that the faith of a mustard seed is all that is needed to move mountains. This is because it is not we who move the mountain, but God. The work God has given us to do is His work, but instead of doing it Himself, He has chosen to allow us to join Him in creating, loving, rebuilding, rededicating, healing, and otherwise experiencing God’s work, with Him. The Spirit of God gives us the ability to transform lives, to take the void of people’s hearts and fill it with the love, joy, and peace of God, to let His light shine from us into a dark world as a beacon of His truth and glory, and take the brokenness of the world and bring wholeness. If this does not excite you, you probably do not have a heartbeat.   

The angel speaking with me had a gold measuring-rod with which to measure the city, its gates and its wall. The city is laid out in a square, its length equal to its width. With his rod he measured the city at 1,500 miles, with length, width and height the same. He measured its wall at 216 feet by human standards of measurement, which the angel was using. The wall was made of diamond and the city of pure gold resembling pure glass. The foundations of the city wall were decorated with all kinds of precious stones — the first foundation stone was diamond, the second sapphire, the third chalcedony, the fourth emerald,  the fifth sardonyx, the sixth carnelian, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase, the eleventh turquoise and the twelfth amethyst.  The twelve gates were twelve pearls, with each gate made of a single pearl. The city's main street was pure gold, transparent as glass. I saw no Temple in the city, for Adonai, God of heaven's armies, is its Temple, as is the Lamb. The city has no need for the sun or the moon to shine on it, because God's Sh'khinah gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. Its gates will never close, they stay open all day because night will not exist there, and the honor and splendor of the nations will be brought into it. Nothing impure may enter it, nor anyone who does shameful things or lies; the only ones who may enter are those whose names are written in the Lamb's Book of Life. [Revelation 21:15-27]

 This is glory and beauty beyond human comprehension. This is a world completely void of evil, filth, sin, death, sickness, and most of all Ha Satan. This is the glory that we strive for in our world as we serve our King through His Spirit that live and works through us.