How do we know when something that appears spiritual is truly the work of the Holy Spirit? As Paul begins addressing spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12, that question matters because the Corinthians were a remarkably gifted church whose thinking had become shaped by carnality. Throughout the letter, they repeatedly possessed what God had given them—His wisdom, Christian liberty, the Lord’s Table, and now spiritual gifts—yet failed to think and live according to those truths. Their gifts were real, but they were using what God had given them in ways that increasingly became platforms for self-exaltation rather than service.
Paul therefore reminds them of what had shaped their lives before Christ. They had once been “carried away” to idols, and the ideas of spirituality they learned in pagan worship had not completely disappeared from their thinking. The problem was not simply that they misunderstood individual gifts; they were beginning to evaluate Christian spirituality by the same kinds of experience, excitement, and religious sensation that had characterized their former lives. That is why Paul immediately brings the discussion back to Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit will never author something that diminishes Christ, because His ministry is to reveal and magnify Him. Experience cannot become the measure of truth; truth must govern how experience is understood.
This makes Paul’s correction deeply practical for believers today. Spiritual gifts are divine enablements given by God’s grace so that believers may serve in the power of the Holy Spirit for the glory of God. Giftedness itself is not proof of spiritual maturity, and ministry ceases to fulfill its proper purpose when attention moves from Christ to the person who has been gifted. The greatest evidence of the Spirit’s work is not simply that someone has had an impressive spiritual experience, but that he or she is being brought into greater submission to and admiration of Jesus Christ. What God gives His people is meant to make much of Christ.