Reflections on 1 Corinthians 2:12
“What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us.” (1 Corinthians 2:12, NIV)
The Living Bible says the Spirit is given “to tell us about the wonderful free gifts of grace and blessing God has given us.”
Two things stand out to me in this verse.
First, Paul sets two spirits side by side: the spirit of the world and the Spirit who comes from God. The spirit of the world is the selfish, me-first way of thinking we were all born into. Changing from one to the other isn’t a matter of squeezing out the old. It is a matter of building new pathways in the mind.
Each decision we make draws us more in tune with the spirit we have chosen to follow. Choosing to be loving feeds that pathway, and the more we use it, the stronger it becomes. The pathways we stop using are, in time, pruned away. So with each choice we are becoming more like the spirit we are following.
You are your choices. If you want to be something new, let new things into your life. All you have to do is choose them and do them. Each choice feeds a habit, and a lifetime of habits makes a character: your life, who you are.
And changing the direction of your life takes only one single choice. It’s called turning around. Head in the other direction.
Second, Paul tells us plainly what the Spirit came to do. The translations bring it out beautifully. Goodspeed says the Spirit is given “to make us realize the blessings God has given us.” Williams says, “that we may get an insight into the blessings God has graciously given us.” Phillips puts it softly: “so that we can understand something of God’s generosity towards us.”
God’s Spirit is here to open our eyes to what He has done for us. It is the Spirit’s job to bring these gifts home to us. He sets them in our hearts and minds in a way we can take hold of, until they become part of who we are.
We can know that Jesus died for us, that He became our substitute, and still hold it only as head knowledge. Head knowledge alone doesn’t heal. What heals is realizing the truth of this gift in our hearts and seeing how it touches the way we live each day. That is when the healing power comes alive in us.
Healing begins when we understand that there is power in the truth about God to heal all the damage done by the nature we were born with. This gift is our only way out of this sinful mess alive, our only escape from being destroyed by that old nature.
Dr. Tim Jennings of Come and Reason Ministries puts it this way in The Remedy: “We have received God’s very own thoughts, attitude, methods and principles – brought to us by his Spirit – so that we may understand God and all he has done for us.”
And here is the gentle part. The Spirit brings this knowledge to us as soon as we are ready to know it. He doesn’t push or hurry us, and He doesn’t hold back. He waits for an open heart, then brings the gifts home.
