A Fast Track for
Discovering YourSPIRITUAL GIFTS
You may have heard of spiritual gifts. Most Christian believers
have. Possibly you are among those who have identified your
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 some
who feel that, for some reason, they have been left out and they
do not have any of the gifts.
This book will help you understand that if you are sure 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 has been circulating
since the 1970s. But the fast-paced world in which we now live
requires 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 similar books.
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 came 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 the Holy
Spirit began. The production of literature itself is a reasonably
accurate indicator. A decent seminary library will catalog more
than 50 books on the subject of spiritual gifts. Probably over
90 percent of them will have been written after 1970. Previous to
1970, seminary graduates characteristically left their institutions
knowing little or nothing about spiritual gifts. Now such a
state of affairs would generally be regarded as a deficiency in
ministerial training.
The Beginning
The roots of this new thing began in 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 was considered
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 "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.
Although many of these evangelical Christians still show little
interest in experiencing the baptism in the Holy Spirit, the main
distinguishing feature of these new movements is that they are
appropriating the dynamic 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.
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 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."
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
been recognized by relatively small segments of the Church from
time to time throughout Church history. But until quite recently,
cessationism has been the prevailing Church doctrine. Yet
times are changing. Today, on a global scale, including the United
States, most Church leaders would agree that cessationism now
belongs on some "endangered doctrines" list.
Realizing the Ministry of
All Believers
Martin Luther permanently changed Christendom when he
rediscovered the priesthood of all believers back in the sixteenth
century. Still, Lutheranism retained much of the clericalism of
the Roman Catholic Church. One wonders why it took more
than 400 years for the churches born of the Reformation to
rediscover the biblical teaching of the ministry of all believers. It
is very important to understand the difference.
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. In 1972, Ray Stedman's book Body Life
was published, and it became a best-seller. In his book, this highly
respected non-Pentecostal leader recognized, 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 "Body life" had brought health, vitality and
excitement to Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto, California.
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 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.
Being Everything THAT GOD WANTS
YOU TO BE
One of the Scripture texts most frequently recommended to new
Christians for memorization is Romans 12:1-2: "I beseech you
therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your
bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your
reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be
transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove
what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God."
This Scripture goes on to say that the key to coming to practical
terms with the will of God for our lives is to "think soberly"
of ourselves (Rom. 12:3). This means that each of us needs a realistic
self-evaluation as a starting point.
We need to take two steps-one positive and one negative-if
we are going to "think soberly" of ourselves.
Negatively, we are not allowed to think more highly of ourselves
than we ought to think. In evaluating ourselves, therefore,
we have no room for pride. Sober judgments always involve
humility.
Positively, we are to recognize that part of our spiritual constitution
is a "measure of faith" (v. 3), which God has distributed to
every Christian person. The implication is that every Christian
may receive a different measure and, therefore, every Christian is
unique. But unique in what sense? Before Paul answers this question,
he gives us the analogy he is preparing to use extensively to
explain spiritual gifts, namely, the analogy of the human body.
"For as we have many members in one body, but all the members
do not have the same function, so we, being many, are one body
in Christ" (Rom. 12:4-5).
What Is the Body of Christ?
What, precisely, is the Body of Christ to which we have been introduced?
Because the Bible says that we Christians are all one Body
in Christ, we understand that it is a group of believers. It is the
Church.
But how did God organize the Church, the Body of Christ?
On the one hand, God did not plan that the Body of Christ
should be organized around the model of a dictatorship where
just one person rules, benevolent as that person might be. On
the other hand, neither did God intend that it should be a
democracy where every member rules. This latter point needs to
be emphasized, especially here in America where our civil culture
prides itself so much on democracy and where this is frequently
carried over into our churches.
Instead of a dictatorship or a democracy, God has chosen to
make the Body of Christ a living organism, Jesus being the head
and each member functioning with one or more spiritual gifts.
Understanding spiritual gifts, then, is the foundational key to
understanding the organization of the Church.
The major biblical passages on spiritual gifts reinforce the
above conclusion. It cannot be mere coincidence that in all three of
the explicit passages on spiritual gifts, Romans 12, 1 Corinthians
12 and Ephesians 4, the gifts are explained in the context of the
Body. "God has set the members, each one of them, in the body just
as He pleased" (1 Cor. 12:18). This means that God has not only
designed the Body on the model of an organism, but He has also
gone so far as to determine what the function of each of the individual
members should be.
If each one of us knows what our particular function is in the
Body, we are able to "think soberly" of ourselves and launch into
doing the will of God.
Who Has Spiritual Gifts?
Not everybody in the world has spiritual gifts. Unbelievers do not.
But every Christian person who is committed to Jesus and truly a
member of His Body has at least one gift and quite possibly more.
The Bible says that every Christian has received a gift (see 1 Pet.
4:10) and that "the manifestation of the Spirit is given to each one
for the profit of all" (1 Cor. 12:7). First Corinthians 12:18 stresses
that every one of the members is placed in the Body according to
God's design. Possession of one or more spiritual gifts is part of
God's plan for every Christian.
This comes as good news to the average believer. It is pleasant
to be reminded that God knows me, He loves me, and He
considers me special enough to give me a personal gift so that I
can serve Him. This is especially true in a society such as ours in
America where many school districts establish special programs
for "gifted children." The implication of that is that ordinary citizens
aren't gifted. Not so in the Body of Christ! God gifts us all!
What Are Gift-Mixes?
Many Christians are multigifted. I would suspect that probably
the majority, or perhaps even all Christians, have what we could
call a gift-mix, instead of a single gift.
Continue.
Excerpted from Discover Your SPIRITUAL GIFTSby C. PETER WAGNER Copyright © 2002 by C. Peter Wagner
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
