You may be gifted in an area that you didn’t realise because you thought you would experience the gift like a bolt of lightning, but it often comes as a still small voice, an inner desire that you haven’t spoken about, or a gut feeling or nudging. We only step out in these gifts as we practice them, so I’d encourage you, even if you feel the slightest leaning towards one or more of these gifts, ask God to show you more about it, and how to partner with His Holy Spirit in activating it more.
The gifts are God-given, so we don’t receive the gift by practicing, but most of us have so much self-doubt (or perhaps a lot of self-assurance but a lack of wisdom, on the flipside) that I believe practice is an essential way for us to learn HOW to move in the gift without second guessing all the time, or how to move in it with wisdom so that that we don’t get in the way of ourselves.
Spiritual Giftings
Click the link here to check out Part One in the series and you’ll see what it means to be a five-fold gift – a prophet, pastor, teacher, evangelist or apostle. This second article is focusing another patch of scripture looking at what most people would call ‘the nine gifts of the Spirit’ of 1 Corinthians 12 (just read the whole chapter, it’s all good!) These are gifts that are given to us by the Holy Spirit after we’ve received Jesus into our hearts. The Holy Spirit chooses which gifts we get – ‘distributing each one individually as He wills’ – but the scripture also suggests that the Holy Spirit wants us to ask Him for more gifts in addition to the ones we are given initially by Him, because we’re told to ‘earnestly desire the best gifts’. He wants to know what giftings we want! This is different to the five-fold gifts where Jesus gives people to be gifts and we don’t get to choose which one we are wired to be (see previous article). With the nine gifts of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit distributes the gifts however He wants, BUT He’s open and flexible to lean into our desires!
Breaking down the nine ‘Gifts of the Spirit’ mentioned in 1 Corinthians chapter 12:
1.Word of Wisdom: We all have moment where we have to make gnarly decisions and we feel like we’re darned if we do and darned if we don’t. The gift of wisdom has a way of helping us make decisions even when it seems like an impossible or overly complicated situation. Wisdom allows us to make decisions, strategies, or take approaches to situations (or give other people advice on this) that will benefit not just in the short run but also in the long run and in serving the bigger picture. We all need some-a-that!!
2. Word of Knowledge: This is where someone knows something about another person’s current life (or past history) that they could not possibly know other than having a supernatural source (the Holy Spirit!). So someone with a word of knowledge might sense that a person in the room has a sore knee, then they could offer to pray for them to demonstrate God’s power. Or it might be as simple as a sense that someone is struggling with depression, even though on the outside everything looks fine and they are acting cheerful, not giving anything away. Word of Knowledge is very powerful in showing people God knows them and loves them – it can be particularly spectacular when used as an entry point to evangelism!
3. Faith: People with a gift of faith will believe that the weather will change when they pray, mountains will be moved when they seek God, that God will provide even when there’s only two bucks in the bank account, and that your family members WILL come to God even if they’re currently P addicts who curse Jesus. We need the gift of faith! It’s the belief in the substance of things that haven’t even happened yet, based on the authority and promises God has given us. If you have crazy ‘impossible’ visionary ideas of things you want to see God doing, or you are the one still believing for something great when others have given up, maybe you have a gift of faith.
4. Gifts of healing: People with gifts of healing will pray and see healings happen! Most of the time people think of physical healings when they mention this gift, and this is an amazing aspect of it – healings of injuries, sicknesses, cancer, other illnesses or ailments – but I wonder if it also includes inner healing issues to do with the emotions. It’s a gift that is an incredible demonstrator of God’s power and love. The word ‘gifts’ is plural with this one, suggesting there are different types or areas or ways of healing available. If you have a passion for healing, God might want to use you in this! I think the concept of plural ‘gifts’ of healing is fascinating and would love to explore this more in Jesus.
5. Miracles: miracles is such a gloriously broad category! So I guess this is the area of mind-blowing things that God does which don’t fit into the other more specific categories. A miracle is something that goes against the laws of nature or something that is impossible in a physical, scientific sense. Sundials moving backwards, a sea parting, angel armies defeating the opposition, feeding five thousand people with just a little bread, finding money to pay the IRD in a fish’s mouth! There are so many miracles in the Bible and I believe God just keeps on extending his range of things that He wants to do which contravene his own laws of creation! Fun!! I don’t want to really put limits on this one by defining what a miracle is other than that. Let your imagination run!
6. Prophecy: Someone with a gift of prophecy will sense God communicating something to them which is then to be communicated to someone else, or to a group of people with the purpose of encouraging, building them up or adding momentum to that person to do good and follow God’s ways (usually God won’t communicate via an audible voice but it will often be through things like an inner knowing, thought, impression, dream and interpretation, vision, or circumstances or symbolic ‘signs’ that seem more than ‘coincidence’ etc). If you get an impression that a person has a particular gifting that is a bit hidden, or you see amazing qualities in them that remind you of a Bible character/person, God might be wanting you to speak this out to encourage them, and to develop the gift of prophecy in you. Prophecy can include foretelling future events as well, but this is only one facet of the gift.
7. The Discernment of Spirits: There are many spirits and a lot of spiritual activity in the world. Only one Spirit out of all the spirits is perfectly pure: the Holy Spirit, sent to be our teacher, advocate, comforter and our empowerment here on earth. The gift of discernment of spirits will allow us to see the difference between supernatural activity that is of God, and supernatural activity that isn’t of God – aka unclean spirits, demons. We might meet someone for the first time and get a really uncomfortable nudging that the person struggles with being abusive towards others without us having hard evidence of this – situations like this could be God showing you He wants you to move in the discernment of spirits. This is very helpful for steering clear of, or confronting, when we sense things that are not of God, but also for focusing on what God is doing even when we perceive darkness – for example, praying for freedom when someone is trapped by darkness. It’s essential to ask for wisdom to know what to do with the type of information the Holy Spirit brings us in this gift.
8. Speaking in different kinds of tongues: I’ve heard it said that every Christian can ‘speak in tongues’ because this can be our prayer language to God, a direct line from our spirit to God’s spirit, and it builds our spirit as we speak. I tend to agree with this – but speaking in ‘different kinds of tongues’ is a specific gift listed in the scripture which appears to suggest that some people have several kinds of languages that they speak through the Holy Spirit (sometimes these are actual human languages that the person never studied, or can be heard as human language as a supernatural sign to those who don’t speak our own native tongue) as evidenced in the book of Acts, or it could be multiple prayer language tongues, not necessarily human languages. The Holy Spirit is big on communication – communicating the heart of God – so if He can use spiritual languages and also sometimes impart to us other human languages that we didn’t naturally learn so that foreigners to our culture can hear Him, He’ll use that too!
9. Interpretation of tongues: This is when someone hears a God-given language or ‘tongue’ being spoken by someone else usually, and God downloads to them the meaning or interpretation of the foreign-sounding words so that everyone can understand something that otherwise might sound like gobbledegook! This is important as someone with the gift of different kinds of tongues might be unknowingly prophesying an important message and it takes teamwork – the person with interpretation – to bring that message in a way that the rest of us, or someone visiting the church, will understand.
And with that final mention of teamwork, that’s what it’s all about at the end of the day. If you do read the whole chapter of 1 Corinthians 12 (hey, and why not go on to chapter 13 too which outlines something we need to have way more important than the gifts of the Spirit), you’ll see that God has given different gifts to different people through the Holy Spirit. If anyone claims to have every gift and be all of the five-fold rolled into one, that person is a phony. Only Jesus had every gift and was every gift all rolled into one. We are all parts of the ‘body’ of church, and the second half of 1 Corinthians 12 explains how God has designed us to each contribute something different, and we need to honour each other for those differences.
When Jesus went to heaven after His resurrection, He broke up his ministry (His work on earth) into pieces – so that we would have to work together in love to have a full picture and appreciation for who He is. So be encouraged to get around other believers in Jesus, and it’s in that community that we’ll truly discover more of ourselves and learn more about the gifts. We need each other.
My new Facebook page Spiritual Growth and Giftings is a great place to grow more with others – if you like my blog, you’ll like this page – don’t forget to click ‘LIKE’ on the Facebook home page to stay up to date with the free resources that are offered. I’m currently working on part three of ‘What are your giftings?’ This will cover some things you might not initially think of when you hear the word ‘giftings’ – I’m excited to share it soon.
~Alicia
Spiritual Growth and Giftings 