Spiritual Gifts...Do you know what yours is?

Do you know what your spiritual gifts are?  Do you find yourself frustrated and/or unfulfilled with your job or with the area(s) you may be serving in at your church?  The reason for this could very possibly be that you are employed and serving in areas for which you are not gifted.  This can cause A LOT of dissatisfaction and frustration in our lives and for those around us!  When you are "fighting" against your spiritual gifts, you feel as if you are a fish swimming upstream.  So, how do we go back to square one and figure out what your spiritual gifts are?  Well, this is where the advantages of the Internet comes into play.  This is a website that you can go to and take a FREE spiritual gifts test.  I would urge you STRONGLY to do this if you have never done it in the past!  This can be quite an "eye-opening" experience and could change the course of things in your life!  I have had the youth that I work with take a youth spiritual gifts test so that they can try to figure out VERY early on what their gifts are so that they can be working on developing them and choosing career paths that are in line with these gifts.

What does Paul have to say about spiritual gifts?  Well, a lot of course, in true Paul form!  Let's take a look at what he has to say about spiritual gifts in these chapters.

First, he makes the point that there are SEVERAL spiritual gifts, but only ONE Body of Christ.  There are several kinds of gifts, but only ONE Spirit and each is a manifestation of the Spirit for the common good of the Body of Christ.  Paul then goes on to list the spiritual gifts.  They are:  wisdom, knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, miraculous powers, prophecy, distinguishing between spirits, speaking in different kinds of tongues, and the interpretation of tongues.  This is just the list that is present in Chapter 10 verses 8-10.  This is not an exhaustive list.  There are others that are mentioned later in Scripture.  If you take the spiritual gifts test above, it will give you an explanation of each of the gifts and the things that you should see in your personality and abilities for each of these gifts.  I feel very strongly that there is one missing and one that I have seen in MANY of the young people that I have worked with thus far and in myself for that matter.  And that is the spiritual gift of care-taking for God's creation.  I believe that He has put a burning desire and a passion in certain people to take care of animals and NOT everyone has this ability/passion.  And this ability would be for the common good and for bringing glory to God.  This is just my opinion of course!

Paul then goes on to say that NONE of these gifts means a hill of beans if you do not have LOVE to go along with them.  He then lists the attributes for perfect LOVE in this famous LOVE chapter.  To be honest, this list has always frustrated me because whenever I read it, I see how VERY short I come in my life to displaying this kind of love to those around me.  It is of course PERFECT LOVE, but we should strive to reach it nonetheless!  So how do you match up to this list in your life?  Just checking...

Paul then goes into some more specific instructions for the spiritual gifts of prophecy and tongues in Chapter 14.  He wants to be sure that we understand some important things about these two spiritual gifts.  When one speaks in tongues, unless what the person says can be interpreted, it does not build up the church to do so.  He states that the one who prophecies does build up the church (verse 4) and that the one who prophecies is greater than the one who speaks in tongues (verse 5).  So what does all of this mean?  It means that we need to be VERY careful that we use our spiritual gifts for the edifying of the church and for others and NOT for our own selfish gain. 



So...do you know and use your spiritual gifts?  Do you use these gifts with LOVE?  Do you use them only to edify (or build up) the church?  Some VERY important things to evaluate in our lives!!!