The second paragraph in Romans 12 is in three obvious parts:
1. An exhortation - vs. 3 - to sober self-assessment
2. An observation - vs. 4-5 - on our interdependence
3. An application - vs. 6-8 - to practical service
Paul opens with an exhortation to self-assessment - how we are to rate ourselves. This, remember, grows directly out of what he has just said about the mercies of God calling for the proper surrender of ourselves to Him as living sacrifices. He has three things to say here:
1. We are not to over-rate ourselves.
2. We are to rate ourselves "according to the measure of faith God has assigned to each."
3. We are to do so because of "the grace given to Paul".
i. Paul's embargo on over-rating ourselves needs little comment. People in our churches who are full of their own importance are a pain to everyone. In the Passion Narrative, where I always look first to see how various types of people related to the Lord, the 'big-heads' were Herod, and Caiaphas with his brood of priests. Between them, they put Him on the Cross. It makes pomposity a sick attitude for a Christian to strike. The phrase 'every one of you' needs underlining; Paul wants the attitude never to raise its head.
ii. The last clause in the verse presents a difficulty. What does Paul mean by "the measure of faith God has assigned to him"? Does he mean we are to rate ourselves on a scale of faith ... so if your faith registers higher on the scale than mine, I am to look up to you, but if your faith measures lower on the scale than mine, I may look down on you? That would create a huge problem because Paul says our faith-rating is determined by God! (the measure of faith assigned by God) ... which would mean that I can look down on you with divine sanction!
It is not what Paul meant to say, of course. In fact he uses a play on words to make his point which is not easy to render into English from the Greek - the nearest I can get to it is: "Don't be big-headed; rather be level-headed." The last thing he wants us to do is to put on airs and graces and compete with each other in faith ratings. In II Cor. 10:12 he wrote: "We don't dare include ourselves in the same class as those who write their own testimonials, or even compare ourselves with them! When they measure themselves against one another, all they do is demonstrate their foolishness." Paul was not wrapt with the idea of comparisons at all. So he cannot have meant "the amount of faith God has assigned to each."
What then did he mean by "the measure of faith which God has assigned to each"? There are two words we need to be sure about if we are to understand him rightly, the word 'measure' and the word 'assigned'.
1. The word translated 'measure' is metron (so 'metronome').
It is used often enough in the New Testament. For the sake of brevity and simplicity take just two examples - Jesus first, then Paul.
i. Jesus:Luke 6:28 - "Give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."
ii. Paul:Eph. 4:16 "... we are in all things to grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its measured work."
The word means 'an allotted portion', almost 'a standard ration'.
2. The word 'assigned' ('apportioned' or 'distributed') - "according to the measure of faith God has assigned to each."
Does Paul means that God 'assigns' a more generous allocation of faith to some than to others? Look at a passage where Paul uses much the same sort of language: 1 Cor. 7:17 - "Each one should retain the place in life that the Lord assigned to him and to which God has called him. This is the rule I lay down in all the churches."
In context, this meant, "If God has gifted you to be married, don't despise yourself and wish you were celibate; and if God has gifted you to be celibate, don't imagine you have to marry. Similarly, if you were a slave when you became a Christian, don't imagine you have to gain your freedom - be a Christian slave; and if you were a free man when you were converted, don't imagine you can only be a humble Christian by becoming a slave."
By 'assigned' here Paul means 'your lot in life', the 'line of duty God has marked out for you.' That makes it clear that by referring to faith as something 'assigned' to us by God, he means faith 'in the line of Christian duty.' He means the responsibility of faith that God has appointed to every Christian, not the degree of faith they may or may not have. The faith God has 'assigned to each' is the same for all. It is simply saving faith, which, as Paul reminds us in Eph. 2:8, is the gift of God; that is all Paul means by 'assigned to each.' He does not have in mind some special brand of faith, like the sort needed to work miracles. Where saving faith is concerned, we are all on the same level; none is above or beneath another. We all have to have that faith to be Christians at all. So when Paul says we are to rate ourselves "with sober judgment, each according to the faith God has assigned to each" he is not suggesting any standards of comparison - the very opposite in fact. He is saying: "There is no way we can any of us rate ourselves above or beneath another on the grounds that God has gifted us with this or that. We are all sinners, none of whom deserves any sort of precedence over others at all. We have a place in the body of Christ, not for any merits of our own, but simply because God in His grace has been pleased to give it to us - on no other grounds and for no other reason. So don't fancy yourself, my brother, because God has gifted you to preach and others only to keep the books. Don't give yourself airs, my sister, because you can sing, and others can only type. There'd be no preachers, or treasurers, or singers, or typists in the Body of Christ at all if it had not pleased God in His improbable grace to have mercy on all our unworthy souls."
That is why we are none of us to rate ourselves above or below another. We are to rate ourselves realistically by divine, not human 'measures'.
iii. And that ties in with the thing Paul said at the beginning of the sentence: "By the grace given to me, I bid every one among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think."
"I don't deserve a place in the body," he is saying. "I know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ to me: I was His enemy - and it pleased Him to respond to my hostility by calling me to be an apostle. That was hardly to my credit; it is to God's credit."
That is why we are not to rate ourselves above others - because the only level on which any of us can stand at all is the ground of grace. God's lunacy in loving us is the only boast any of us can possibly have! If we think we should be favoured above another because we can play better, or sing better, or preach better, or because we have more money to give, it is we who are really mad!
"Don't be big-headed, be level-headed. You may be a Luciano Pavaroti or a Joan Sutherland, but apart from God's grace you are a nothing."
In vs. 4-5, Paul sketches in a familiar picture of our relationships with one another in the church, that of a physical body, to illustrate how we are to relate rightly to each other. Only in mutual dependence on one another can we function as a fellowship the way God means us to function. Christ is building a church, not a bunch of solo performers. He is interested in our personal development, yes - but as it contributes to the bigger thing He is doing, which is developing a community. He is interested in making a saint out of me, not just for my sake but for the value to the fellowship I shall be when I am one. He is not interested in you becoming an accomplished organist or a fine soloist or an effective preacher or a good teacher for your benefit alone - He is interested in you becoming an accomplished organist, a fine soloist, an effective preacher or a good teacher for the benefit you will be to the rest.
And that means we have to exercise our gift always with a view to what serves the best interests of the church, not to what serves our own best interests. If we cannot play, sing, type, preach or teach in a spirit of genuine humility - so we build harmony into the fellowship and build everybody up - then it is better we do not exercise our gift at all. A church with people in it who insist on their gift being given constant recognition is like a body one of whose members insists on doing its thing all the time, without any regard for what the other members of the body should be doing. If you are a foot for example, then you will insist on the body walking ... all the time! That is your gift, and you are jolly well going to exercise it. So never mind if the brain says to the body, "It's time to sit." You are a foot, and a foot is for walking, and you are going to have the body walk! So you will walk it to death, and have it blundering about all over the place like a bull in a china shop. There is a time - foot or no foot - when you do not walk. You quit on your gift, or you make a monkey of the body you belong to - yourself included, since you are a part of it!
An orchestra, all of whose members insist on playing all of the time, will produce nothing but a cacophony. Every instrumentalist, to play his part properly, has to observe periods of inactivity; such times of inactivity are part of the proper exercise of his gift.
Translation makes Paul sound guilty of tautology here ... the apparently pointless repetitions: "if service, in our serving; he who teaches in his teaching; he who exhorts in his exhortation." Perhaps J. B. Phillips gets as near as anyone to the meaning Paul intended to convey: "If our gift is serving others let us concentrate on our serving; if it is teaching let us give all we have to our teaching; if it is the gift of stimulating the faith of others, let us address ourselves to it with a will." Emphasis falls on the last verb in each phrase: "If serving, let him serve." In other words, work at it. *
Good motive alone is not enough to qualify a Christian to do anything in the church - as though good intentions are sufficient qualification. They are not. Bad teachers do children a lot of mischief, in church or out. A Sunday School teacher owes it to his or her children to be good at their job - and they owe it to Christ to do their job well. They will be judged on how they did it, as we shall all be judged.
Paul's list of gifts here is one of three or four scattered through his epistles, so it is not an exhaustive list, but a representative one. Prophecy and teaching are up-front ministries, for example, whilst the ministry of helps and acts of mercy are not; they are a quiet work done in the ranks, and giving is for the most part a secret ministry.
But it is worth looking briefly at the ministries he does specify.
1. Prophecy is preaching, but of a different kind from teaching.
Prophecy is the kind of preaching that brings eternal truth to bear on a particular, concrete situation in time. It speaks for God directly to the point.
When Savanarola in Italy explained to his congregation their obligation to give regularly and in proportion to their income, he was being a teacher. When he challenged the bejewelled women in his congregation to come forward there and then in church and lay their jewels on the altar as gifts to God to relieve poverty in the slums of Florence, he was being a prophet.
Prophecy was a highly esteemed ministry in the New Testament church. The prophets gave the teaching 'bite'.
But what Paul counsels here is interesting. The verse reads, "The prophet is to prophesy in proportion to his faith." Poor translation here makes it sound as though one prophet's faith may give him better inspiration, or better visions than another! Paul did not mean that. He said that prophets were to exercise their prophetic ministry in proportion, not to their faith, but to the faith. In other words, the prophet is to say nothing that is out of harmony with the Word of Faith embodied in Scripture. Prophecy, because it is a matter of inspiration, exposes the prophet to a particular temptation: to let his excitement run away with him, and 'mouth off' in ways that take him beyond the bounds of Scripture. No prophecy, so-called, is to be heeded, however 'inspired' its utterance may seem to be, unless it is true to what Paul called in Rom. 6:13 "the standard of teaching to which you were committed." The prophet is to prophesy 'in agreement with the faith.'
2. Service, Paul's second category, has to be something different from 'giving aid' and 'doing acts of mercy' because they get a separate mention further on. The word is in fact diakonia, from which our word 'deacon' comes. It means practical ministry as distinct from vocal ministry in the church: pastoral or administrative work rather than pulpit work.
3. Teaching is the kind of ministry that builds people up in their faith. It instructs people in the Word of God - not just to meet a particular situation at the time, but in such a way that they have a mind to tackle any situation at any time with the 'mind of Christ.' Teaching is bread and butter stuff, prophecy is jam ... or mustard!
4. Exhortation hardly refers to pulpit ministry at all. It is the ministry of encouragement, which any member can give to any other member at any time.
A member missionary of my congregation who served in Nigeria felt herself consciously called to it. I have good reason to thank God for it: she encouraged me. She kept her ear to the ground, and she made it her business to write and encourage in the Lord any whom she judged could do with it. She was surprisingly perceptive in the issues she addressed. There were times I needed it when she lifted me; she even did it from Nigeria!
It matters how we talk about each other to each other. A regulation in the standing orders of the Royal Navy that applies to all officers reads:
'No officer shall speak discouragingly to any other officer about any undertaking in which he is engaged.'
That ought to be in the Rule Book of every Church in Christendom. Criticism is like a running sore in the body of the Church - the body bleeds through it, and is weakened. Would we rather people remembered us for the good we did them or the hurt we did them?
The women-folk in the Day Fellowship of one of my pastorates had a feature which is exactly the sort of thing Paul is talking about here - a 'Forget-me-not' scheme. At the beginning of each year, members were secretly given the names of other members and charged to be watchful of their needs, taking any steps in their power to help, encourage and cheer them. So women facing an operation or experiencing bereavement got a 'Forget-me-not' card and appropriate offers of help to reassure them that they were remembered and prayed for. It was a real ministry.
5. Giving. Let the one who contributes do it with ... 'simplicity' is the best word. You just do it - from the heart - with simple generosity. You do not do it to be thought well of, or to get the upper hand in the way the church spends its money, or to feel good, or to buy God's favour. You just do it because it needs to be done, and you can do it.
6. He who gives aid.
The word almost always describes people in leadership.
1 Thess 5:12 - Now we ask you, brothers, to
respect those who ... are 'over you' in the Lord.
1 Tim. 5:17 - The elders who 'direct the affairs' of the church well
are worthy of double pay, especially those whose work is preaching
and teaching.
1 Tim. 3:12 - A deacon must 'manage' (or rule) his children and his
household well.
"If yours is a leadership rôle," Paul says, "lead with diligence" ... so your heart is in it, so you can be relied on, absolutely.
I remember a night in 1963 when the snow had been falling for three weeks in England. The streets were lined with mountain chains of white. Once you got home from work you stayed home. The night of the weekly prayer meeting I really did not expect a soul to turn out, and I very nearly did not bother to go myself - a bitterly cold wind was blowing. There were two people there that night, a woman who lived only a few doors up the road from the church, and the duty deacon that week, responsible to open and close the premises. Hail, snow, or ice he was there. I have never forgotten it ... just two people, one because he was on duty roster that night.
7. He who does acts of mercy.
Paul means those whose special responsibility, on behalf of the congregation, was to tend the sick (there were no hospitals then), to relieve the poor (all the New Testament Churches had a 'Fellowship Fund' - a carry-over from the Jewish 'Basket') out of which the widows and the orphaned in their congregations were maintained (they had no welfare state) and to care for the aged and the disabled. "Let them do it cheerfully," Paul says.
Outside a thatched Meeting House in Bedfordshire, a little plaque on the wall reads:
"A Friendly Word, a Kindly Smile, A Helpful Act, and Life's Worthwhile"!
Of the seven 'gracings' (charismata) Paul lists here, four are concerned with practical assistance to those who in one way or another were in need of help and sympathy. The members of the church in Rome were almost all of them poor, yet they helped each other. The picture this paragraph conjures up is not one of a congregation in rows of pews listening to a preacher, but of a beehive, every member busy on the job.
The word translated 'spiritual gifts' in the Greek is charismata. It is made up of three parts:
1. charis = grace; and ...
2. the suffix ma = the effect of
3. the suffix ta = plural ending.
So the word may be rendered 'the varying effects of grace.'
A most helpful way of understanding it is suggested by Michael Green. As the grace of God is conveyed to us it 'refracts' through our human personalities, as light does through a prism.
This is helpful, because it enables us to see that that the charismata may be 'creature' gifts (taking their colour from what we are by nature) or 'new creature' gifts (taking their colour from what we are by our new birth. This is why some gifts are 'ordinary,' like administrations, or helps, 12:28, and some extraordinary, like healings and tongues. They are all grace-gifts, for whatever endowments we receive, whether by nature or by regeneration, are gifts of God's grace. Call them 'gracings.'
* There is no contradiction here with the counsel that we not insist on the exercise of our gift. Paul means the sort of thing he said to Timothy, II Tim 2:15, "Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth."
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