Unique Spiritual Gifts
There are miraculous gifts, enabling gifts, and team gifts. It’s the team gifts that are unique to each believer of Christ. These gifts are not the same thing as our natural talents we are born with. Upon our salvation and reception of the Holy Ghost, we also receive special capacities. A capacity doesn’t automatically mean ability. Ability comes with practice, exercise, discipline, guidance, time, effort, and patience. God did not create us all equal, which means we don’t all have the same capacity to enable us to perform most tasks like someone else can. This post won’t dive deeper into the importance of knowing what our unique gifts are. That should be obvious, but usually it’s not. When it’s not obvious to someone, they may mistakenly believe it is God’s will for you to do something. If you fall for their mistaken perspective, you may either feel guilty for how poorly you performed your work, or awful that you refused to do so. This is why it is important we learn what purpose God has created us for individually.
Dr. Larry Gilbert wrote the book, “Your Gifts: Discover God’s Unique Design for You.” It’s 190 pages of needed information for any church. Do churches avoid this topic because they don’t want to deal with the congregation’s pride and they fear division over sorting such things out? Pride comes before the fall, and churches today don’t nourish humility as much as they should. We all have low scores in certain areas to humble us. Where we score low, is where we don’t belong. A high score can’t exist beyond 2-3 categories, as seen in the chart below.
In the above score sheet taken to evaluate where Faith’s weaknesses and strengths exist with her God-given gifts, clearly the top ability exists in exhortation. Her weakest area is in serving. This works out well considering she is married to a man whose greatest God-given gift is to serve! His weakest area is Faith’s strongest and vice versa! This is because God knows what He is doing!
Believers with “ministering” gifts, or support gifts, are blessed with self-forgetfulness as they focus on the needs of others. Those who have the speaking gifts are not so blessed with self-forgetfulness, but this does not mean they’re narcissists either. GotQuestions’ article about a spiritual gifts survey tells us that the ministering gifts include Shepherds, Mercy-Showers, Servers, Givers, and Administrators. They also say that the the speaking gifts are Evangelists, Prophets, Teachers, Exhorters, and Shepherds.
It’s only logical that self-forgetfulness is more appropriate for support gifts, while self-reflection is an asset to have with speaking gifts. All Christians have these enabling gifts: faith, discernment, wisdom, and knowledge, but some receive an extra measure for their unique work in God’s Kingdom.
The book ministry’s website, ChurchGrowth.org, has an electronic form visitors can use to survey their gifts, but they say you may make a copy of these questions for your personal use if you bought their book. The book was bought and here is where that copy shall reside to help visitors better understand the score numbers in the sample answer sheet done above showing the gift of exhortation being the strongest, while gifts of prophecy and teaching are equal in strength, with serving coming in as her most weak gift.
The survey answer sheet below can be clicked on to open to its own page and from there you can download the image to print it for filling out.
ChurchGrowth.org provides enhanced details of each gift on their website, along with offering books written on each gift that go deeper into them. Their primary book on gifts is for general use, but that’s enough for most of us. There are versions for children and teens too. The satisfaction of knowing what specifically God has created us for is wonderful, because then we can truly function as a healthy body of believers without anyone trespassing out of their lane of responsibilities according to our Father in Heaven!We Christians are forgiven even before we sin, which is why we want to repent as soon as we become aware of our sin committed. It is a sin to not live for what our creator created us for, so we need to figure out our purpose here on earth. God willing, the information in this post helps!
Success is being where God places you, and doing what God wants you to do with the gifts He has given you. When your life is in God’s hands, it’s already a success! Our holiness doesn’t come from us. It comes from humble dependence upon God’s grace. His grace changes the way we think, when we walk by faith in the Spirit. Without the Holy Spirit’s enabling, our flesh would doom us to fail. Without faith, we can’t know God’s forgiveness. Without forgiveness, we can’t know that repentance which leads to Godly sorrow. Ungodly sorrow is self-destructive rather than sin-destructive. Without believing and trusting God telling us He wants us to receive His forgiveness when we become aware of our sin, where will our ability to live right come from if not from the power of Christ’s righteousness?
We Christians are forgiven even before we sin, which is why we want to repent as soon as we become aware of our sin committed. It is a sin to not live for what our creator created us for, so we need to figure out our purpose here on earth. God willing, the information in this post helps!
Post-script added May 8th (next day) — The day after writing this post, the devotional message in the Daily Bread happens to be on this same topic! Such “coincidences” are God’s way of remaining anonymous. He confirms decisions like what to say or do constantly, when believing in prayer He will reveal His will!
