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| Somewhere in California |
In 1 Corinthians 12:4-7 Paul writes:
4 Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; 5 and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; 6 and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. 7 To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.
Gordon Fee, in his brilliant commentary on First Corinthians, writes:
""Each one," standing in the emphatic first position as it does, is [Paul's] way of stressing diversity; indeed, this is how that diversity will be emphasized throughout the rest of the paragraph. He does not intend to stress that every last person in the community has his or her own gift... That is not Paul's concern. This pronoun is the distributive (stressing the individualized instances) of the immediately preceding collective ("in all people"), which emphasizes the many who make up the community as a whole." (589)
Fee writes that what "each one" was "given" was not a "gift," but a "manifestation of the Spirit." "Thus each "gift" is a "manifestation," a disclosure of the Spirit's activity in their midst... [Paul's] urgency, as vv. 8-10 make clear, is not that each person is "gifted," but that the Spirit is manifested in a great variety of ways. His way of saying this is, "to each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit."" (Ib.)
This is about the Spirit manifesting himself within the Jesus-community, not a statement about spiritual gifts being given to people once and for all. The early Jesus-followers were not locked into some spiritual gifts, while being shut out from other spiritual gifts.
In your Jesus-community (Church), desire the manifestations of the Spirit.
