1 Corinthians 12:8–11:

“For one person is given through the Spirit the message of wisdom, and another the message of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, and to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another performance of miracles, to another prophecy, and to another discernment of spirits, to another different kinds of tongues, and to another the interpretation of tongues. It is one and the same Spirit distributing as He decides to each person, who produces all these things.”

I want to begin a series on the gifts of the Spirit, and I just want to have a preface that goes like this:

Paul did not give definitions for the gifts of the Spirit here. So whatever I am going to say is going to be my very best guess, my very best estimation of what each of these items means.

But he wrote in verse 1: “Now with regard to spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed.” So it was like a quick information, a quick rundown to let you know that, when it comes to being Christians, there are operations of the gifts of the Spirit, and you should not be uninformed about them as a Christian.

This is something you should be aware of. At first he started talking about being led astray to speechless idols. Then he said, “So I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God says, ‘Jesus is cursed,’ and no one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.”

So from that frame, I am concluding that these gifts have to do with speaking. All of them have to do with speaking, based on how Paul himself prefaced this discussion from verse 1. He started by saying, “I don’t want you to be uninformed.” He said, “You were led astray to speechless idols.” So there is a comparison Paul is making between the kind of influences the people were subjected to while they were pagans and now that they are Christians.

He calls it “led astray.” Continuing in that parallelism, this operation of the gifts of the Spirit is a leading. It is a gift because it is given. It is not something that is native to you. It is something the Holy Spirit prompts, stirs up, works out on an individual‑by‑individual basis, and He operates it for whatever reasons He wants.

So I have said that all these gifts—I believe all of them—have to do with speaking. I am going to go through them one by one. I also believe they are special operations of God that have to do with God’s leading for specific purposes at specific times.

Let’s now pick them one by one. Verse 8 says: “For one person is given through the Spirit the message of wisdom, and another the message of knowledge according to the same Spirit.” Some other translations will call this “word of wisdom” and “word of knowledge.”

The way I have understood it for a long time is that “word of knowledge” is when you know something hidden about someone. But I am thinking maybe not, because when you go to chapter 14, Paul says, “Pursue love and be eager for the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy.” And one of the things he mentioned was that some people will come into your midst, and when the secrets of their hearts are disclosed, as everyone is prophesying, they will fall down and declare that God is really among you.

From that, I conclude that “word of knowledge” does not have to do with information about people. That is prophecy. That is what I am concluding.

Here, in the NET, it is called “message of knowledge,” and it is actually a message. It is something spoken. It is something that, in a way, you have received and you say, just like Paul saying, when it comes to the Lord’s Supper: “For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you.” That is knowledge. It is not information about somebody.

“It is not ‘there is somebody here…’” “There is somebody here…” is prophecy, because you are talking about a secret people know is not publicly available, for whatever reason the Holy Spirit wants to operate that.

Now you might say to yourself, “Why bother myself with saying, ‘It is not prophecy’?” I think it is important because of the place of knowledge. We need to put knowledge in its right place. We need to put divine inspiration that comes when the pastor is preaching and the Word is coming—and there is no “somebody here”—in its place. That could be the message of knowledge coming.

That could be an impartation of the Spirit to cause that man speaking to communicate specific knowledge about God from the prompting of the Holy Spirit. It could be ten minutes, twenty minutes. So it could be “message of knowledge” in that scenario, while prophecy, in that specific sense, is the “there is somebody here…” kind of utterance.

And that is not all there is to prophecy, because if you go to 1 Corinthians 14, you see other things about prophecy, but that is one aspect. When people want to say “prophecy is when you are preaching,” I think that is more like a message of knowledge or a message of wisdom.

I’ll continue later. God bless you. See you later.