Considering context

Many students of the Bible are aware a text without the context is a con. I have known this phrase for many years, but it wasn't until this week at MYC, that I really understood how this was so integral to formulating our understanding of church.

By far the most vivid thing coming out of MYC on the Holy Spirit was just how far off centre the majority of conversation regarding the Spirit is, especially the Spirit and the Church. We mostly formulate our expectation and understanding of the Spirit and His work primarily from Acts onward. The underlying assumption is that Genesis to John is largely irrelevant.

When you hear that at our conference we were studying the Bible about the Holy Spirit, what's your first thought? If you had one, my guess is that it was probably 1 Corinthians 12-14. Yet here's the importance of context (particularly situational) in reading the Bible. While it would be a mistake to not include 1 Corinthians 12-14 in any robust discussion of the work of the Holy Spirit, it's equally problematic to immediately bring this passage to mind. 1 Corinthians is written to address problems in the worst church gathering in the New Testament. Is this really where we should look to discover our expectation of what church should look like? It's not that many lessons can't be learned from Paul's response. They can. But the danger with studying a corrective is we get a slanted view of what is best. It's the danger of looking at anything in the negative. You might know how not to do things wrongly, but not be that much better off in knowing how to do things right. When flying, would you rather your pilots had studied 'Airline disasters: what went wrong when they went down" or "How to fly a plane." 

As 1 Corinthians was written to address how the Corinthians are getting church wrong, perhaps the better place to go to formulate expectations of what church should be like would be 1 Timothy which was written so that

if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth.