“³⁹Therefore, my brethren, desire earnestly to prophesy, and do not forbid to speak in tongues. ⁴⁰But all things must be done properly and in an orderly manner.”

Concluding his teaching on spiritual gifts, the apostle Paul circles back to his earlier statement, “But earnestly desire the greater gifts” (1 Cor. 12:31). Between these “desire earnestly” statements lies an entire chapter on the “more excellent way” of love (1 Cor. 13) and an extensive correction on the Corinthians’ inverted priorities relative to spiritual gifts. While Eastern religions attempt to remove all desire for ultimate perfection, in Christian faith the effort is to redirect desire in a good direction motivated by genuine love for others.

At the root, when we stray from the centrality of God’s love for us as seen in Christ and Him crucified, the cravings of our hearts become trained on self-absorption of all that is good—spiritual gifts meant for us to use in building up others become a means of satisfying our need of affirmation, pride, and significance. In so doing, we lose focus of our greatest need for God Himself.

The “man after God’s own heart” (Acts 13:2), King David, wrote, “Delight yourself in the Lord; and He will give you the desires of your heart” (Ps. 37:4). If we delight ourselves in Christ (that is, desire Him above all else), then our desires will be for what He desires. In the context of spiritual gifts and roles in the church, then, our desires will be for the greatest gifts done in the greatest of ways—namely speaking into people’s lives the Word of God. Paul is exhorting believers to uplift prophecy in the local church because it is God’s desire to speak into our lives.

This means we must do things in the church as God has ordered, including the gender roles Paul so recently addressed. There is to be an order for worship; it must not be a free-for-all where each does his own thing as a means of self-fulfillment or self-actualization, nor should it be a power struggle energized by a male or female seeking to dominate or control others. Rather we desire what God has set in place as “proper and in an orderly manner.” Paul rejoins in his instructions to Timothy: “I write so that you will know how one ought to conduct himself in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and support of the truth” (1 Tim 2:11-14, 3:15b). The NT has relatively little description of how a church gathering is to be structured, but what it does say should be the focus of our individual and church-wide priorities.

Lord, let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Your sight (Ps.19:14).