Sermon Video - The Holy Spirit: "Jesus is Lord", 1 Corinthians 12:1-3

By way of introducing the topic that is contained in chapter 12, the gifts of the Holy Spirit for the Church, the Apostle Paul chooses to make clear to the Christians at the Church of Corinth that the Spirit of God only works in/through those who affirm that, "Jesus is Lord."  For the 1st Century Church, this meant that there was no path to God in the Greco-Roman paganism from whence they came, for they worshiped only "mute idols".  For the Church in the world today, this translates to a commitment to the exclusivity of the Gospel, the conviction that to "have life", as John makes explicit in 1 John 5:12, one must first "have the Son".  In practical terms this means that those individuals/churches/denominations/cults which reject that Jesus is the God/Man, the Son of God and Son of Man, have with that rejection also walked away from the Truth of Gospel.  Two primary examples of this failure would be the theology of the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons, both of whom proclaim a lesser version of Jesus as a created being who is like God, but certainly not "Lord" in the same sense that Paul here proclaims.  At the same time, the emphasis on the Spirit's presence wherever Jesus is proclaimed as Lord reminds us of our need to offer love and fellowship to Christians with whom we disagree upon things less crucial than this, for assuming there is evidence of the Spirit in their midst (i.e. lives transformed showing righteous deeds), God is as much there as he is here among people like us.

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