A Fast Track for Discovering Your Spiritual Gifts
You may have heard of spiritual gifts. Most Christian believers have, but not all. Possibly you are among those who have identified their spiritual gifts and have been using them on a regular basis. But a surprising number of believers who have heard of spiritual gifts are not sure what theirs may be. And there are even those who feel that, for some reason, they have been left out and do not have any of the gifts.
It is possible to be a member of a church, attend almost every Sunday and go for, let’s say, a whole year without hearing anything about spiritual gifts. This is too bad. Why? Because in the first place, the teaching on spiritual gifts is so prominent in the New Testament. The apostle Paul says to the believers in the church in Corinth, “Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, I do not want you to be ignorant” (1 Cor. 12:1). All churches should make sure that they are moving in spiritual gifts. And in the second place, if you don’t know about spiritual gifts, you may well miss out on God’s best plan for your personal life.
This book will help you understand that if you are sure that you are a born-again member of the Body of Christ, you can be equally sure that you have one or more spiritual gifts. It will also set you on the road toward accurately identifying your gifts and then using them for their intended purposes. In fact, many readers will soon realize that they actually have been using one or more gifts without even recognizing that they are true spiritual gifts.
Once you start identifying your gifts, you will find that there are many excellent resources for helping you activate them. For example, my larger book on spiritual gifts, Your Spiritual Gifts Can Help Your Church Grow, has been circulating since the 1970s. Many are still buying it and reading it and applying the teachings to their own lives. However, there are those who never get around to reading it because they are not attracted to big books. I have realized that the fast-paced world in which we now live requires, for many, a smaller and more condensed manual like this one. Once you finish this, you may then wish to get the further details contained in Your Spiritual Gifts Can Help Your Church Grow or in many other excellent books on spiritual gifts.
Before going on, let me explain how the whole Body of Christ only recently woke up to the fact that God has given all of us one or more spiritual gifts.
REDISCOVERING OUR SPIRITUAL GIFTS
A relatively new thing happened to the Church of Jesus Christ in America during the decade of the 1970s. The third Person of the Trinity began to come into His own, so to speak. Yes, the Holy Spirit has always been there. Creeds, hymns and liturgies have attested to the central place of the Holy Spirit in orthodox Christian faith. Systematic theologies throughout the centuries have included sections on pneumatology, thus affirming the Holy Spirit’s place in Christian thought.
But rarely, if ever, in the history of the Church has such a widespread interest in moving beyond creeds and theologies to a personal experience of the Holy Spirit in everyday life swept over the people of God to the degree we now see in our churches. One of the most prominent facets of this new experience of the Holy Spirit is the rediscovery of spiritual gifts. Why do I say “rediscovery”?
FIXING THE DATE
It is fairly easy to fix the date when this new interest in spiritual gifts began. The production of literature itself is a reasonably accurate indicator. A decent seminary library may catalog something like 40 or 50 books on the subject of spiritual gifts. Probably more than 90 percent of them would have been written after 1970. Previous to 1970, seminary graduates characteristically left their institutions knowing little or nothing about spiritual gifts. The American Church was truly ignorant of spiritual gifts. Now almost every seminary or Bible college includes teaching on spiritual gifts as a part of its curriculum.
The Beginning
The roots of this new thing go back to 1900, the most widely accepted date for what is now known as the classical Pentecostal movement. During a watchnight service beginning on December 31, 1900, and ending on what is technically the first day of the twentieth century, Charles Parham of Topeka, Kansas, laid his hands on Agnes Ozman, she began speaking in tongues, and the movement had begun. A fascinating chain of events led to the famous Los Angeles Azusa Street Revival, which began in 1906 under the ministry of William Seymour. And with that, the Pentecostal movement gained high visibility and a momentum that has never slackened.
The original intent of Pentecostal leaders was to influence the major Christian denominations from within, reminiscent of the early intentions of such leaders as Martin Luther and John Wesley. But just as Lutheranism was found incompatible with the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century and just as Methodism was found incompatible with the Anglican Church in the eighteenth century, Pentecostalism found itself incompatible with the mainline American churches in the early twentieth century. Thus, as others had done before them, Pentecostal leaders reluctantly found it necessary to establish new denominations where they could develop a lifestyle directly under the influence of the Holy Spirit in an atmosphere of freedom and mutual support. Such denominations that we know today as Assemblies of God, Pentecostal Holiness, Church of God in Christ, Church of the Foursquare Gospel, Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) and many others were formed for that purpose.
The Second Phase
The second phase of this movement began after World War II when Pentecostal leaders set out to join the mainstream. The beginnings were slow. Some of the Pentecostal denominations began to gain social “respectability” by affiliating with organizations such as the National Association of Evangelicals. Consequently they began to neutralize the opinion that Pentecostalism was a kind of false cult to be placed alongside Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons and spiritists.
In 1960, an Episcopal priest in Van Nuys, California, Dennis Bennett, shared with his congregation that he had experienced the Holy Spirit in the Pentecostal way, and what became known as the charismatic movement had its start. The charismatic movement took form first as renewal movements within major existing denominations, and then around 1970 the independent charismatic movement began with the emergence of freestanding charismatic churches separate from denominations. For the next 25 years, these independent charismatic churches were the fastest-growing group of churches in the United States.
The effect of all this soon began to be felt among Christians who were neither classical Pentecostals nor charismatics. Granted, many evangelical Christians still show little interest in experiencing the Pentecostal/charismatic “baptism in the Holy Spirit,” accompanied by speaking in tongues. However, the broader distinguishing feature of these new movements is not just tongues, but rather the whole biblical dynamic of the operation of spiritual gifts in a new and exciting way. Through their discovery of how the gifts of the Spirit were intended to operate in the Body of Christ, the Holy Spirit is now being transformed from abstract doctrine to dynamic experience across the board.
We could not have said this before the 1970s.
WITNESSING THE DEMISE OF CESSATIONISM
Not everyone agrees, however. Some who remain cool on spiritual gifts, for example, argue that many of the gifts went out of use in the churches after the age of the apostles. An intellectual center of this belief is found at Dallas Theological Seminary, an interdenominational school that has looked with disfavor on the Pentecostal/charismatic movement of recent decades.
John Walvoord, former president of Dallas Seminary, feels that miracles, for example, have declined in the Church since the age of the apostles. His colleague Merrill Unger makes reference to Benjamin B. Warfield of Princeton Seminary who, back in 1918, wrote a book called Miracles: Yesterday and Today, True and False. Other than the Scofield Reference Bible, it has been the most influential book written in America against the validity of the charismatic gifts today. Warfield argues that “these gifts were . . . distinctively the authentication of the Apostles. . . . Their function thus confined them to distinctively the Apostolic Church, and they necessarily passed away with it.”1
The notion that the more spectacular spiritual gifts ceased with the apostolic age is now commonly known as cessationism. As I have detailed in my larger book Your Spiritual Gifts Can Help Your Church Grow, the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit have, in fact, been recognized by certain relatively small segments of the Church from time to time throughout Church history. But until quite recently, cessationism has been the prevailing Church doctrine. I was taught cessationism when I attended seminary back in the 1950s. Yet times are changing. Today, on a global scale, including in the United States, most Church leaders would agree that cessationism now belongs on some “endangered doctrines” list. The trend is definitely in the direction of expecting spiritual gifts to be as operative today as they were in the first century.
REALIZING THE MINISTRY OF ALL BELIEVERS
Spiritual gifts are given for ministry. The Bible says, “As each one has received a gift, minister it to one another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God” (1 Peter 4:10). Since we have all received spiritual gifts, we are all expected to minister.
What I have just said makes such good sense and is so simple that it is difficult to understand why our classical theologians never saw it. You don’t find the idea of all believers ministering with their spiritual gifts in our theological superstars such as Augustine or Martin Luther or John Calvin or John Wesley.
Martin Luther, for example, permanently changed Christendom when he rediscovered the priesthood of all believers back in the sixteenth century. Keep in mind that Luther was dealing with the teaching of the Catholic Church that ordinary believers, in order to get to God, had to go through a priest. His revolutionary teaching was that, according to the Bible, every believer had direct access to God, priest or no priest. Ever since then, the priesthood of all believers has been a fundamental tenet of our faith.
However, while Luther advocated the priesthood of all believers, he did not advocate the ministry of all believers through spiritual gifts. Neither did Calvin or Wesley. In fact, as late as the 1950s when I took my seminary training, only the priesthood of all believers, not the ministry of all believers, was being taught.
The Lutheranism of Martin Luther retained much of the clericalism of the Roman Catholic Church. “Clericalism” refers to the ministry of a local church being done by those who are ordained ministers. The members of the church, known as the laity, can assist the clergy by doing things such as singing in the choir or ushering or teaching children or cleaning the church or cooking for church suppers or serving on committees, but real church ministry is the job of the professionals.
Interestingly enough, when the Pentecostals began surfacing the concept of spiritual gifts in the early twentieth century, the form that their new churches took was about as clerical as the non-Pentecostal churches of the day. The emphasis was on the more spectacular gifts such as speaking in tongues, interpretation of tongues and prophecy, but the pastor was still regarded as the minister of the church. As I have said, it took until the 1970s for all of this to change.
As a matter of fact, I believe that 1972 can be considered the year that the concept of the ministry of all believers attained a permanent status in contemporary Christianity. Why 1972? That was the year in which Ray Stedman’s book Body Life was published, and it became an instant Christian best-seller. In his book, this highly respected non-Pentecostal pastor affirmed, in so many words, that spiritual gifts were OK. Although his list of the gifts turned out to be shorter than some others, because he also was a cessationist, Stedman showed clearly how spiritual gifts, the ministry of all believers and what he called Body life had brought new health, vitality and excitement to Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto, California.2
It remains a mystery to me why it took the Church until 1972 to understand the clear biblical teaching on spiritual gifts. Nevertheless, the ripple effects of the publication of Body Life have had a profound influence. Rare is the church today that will advocate that the professional pastor or staff should do all the ministry of the church. Although some churches have not been able to implement it as rapidly as others, most affirm, at least in theory, that laypeople should be empowered to discover their spiritual gifts and through them actually do the ministry of the church.
How this can become a reality in your life is what this book is all about.
Making It Personal
Notes
1. Benjamin B. Warfield, Miracles: Yesterday and Today, True and False (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1965), p. 6.
2. Ray C. Stedman, Body Life (Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1972), n.p.