3 All Gifts Credible

The spiritual gifts are essential in evangelizing and equipping the followers of Jesus.

Essential.

Essential to such an extend that, when Jesus left Earth for Heaven, he expressly forbade his followers NOT to do any ministry until they had received the empowerment of the Holy Spirit who is the source of all the gifts. His giftedness and effectiveness was based on his relationship with the Father through the Holy Spirit. It is no different for anyone following in his footsteps.

Let’s take a look at the vast variety of spiritual gifts. For they are diverse. And, despite their diverseness, they are all credible.

When people peruse the lists of spiritual gifts as outlined in Scripture they generally refer to them in two categories – “the normal ones” and the, for lack of a better phrase, “the weird ones.”

The normal ones are the gifts that are, well... normal. You know - the ones we can understand - like gifts of teaching, administration, hospitality, mercy, service, giving, and encouragement - things that are pretty much in the box.

This is an example of a normal gift of the Spirit in action:

When I was a college student I used to attend a Friday night gathering where there were other students, a lot of food, a really nice house, and a Bible study. I lived for those Friday evenings. Every time I passed through the door and entered the house I felt like I was coming home - always welcomed unconditionally with smiles, hugs, attention, and, perhaps most significantly, with honor. I could walk into the kitchen, nab a glass from the cupboard, wander into the living room, plop down on the sofa, kick off my flip-flops, and take a nap if I wanted. I just felt normal there. I didn’t have to look the part; didn’t need to act the part. Even if I was in the worst mood it didn’t matter. Something about being around those people lifted my spirits and made me feel human again. When I left their house I felt renewed, affirmed as a child of God, and at rest in my soul.

I later learned that the hosts of the home had (and had been practicing) the spiritual gift of hospitality – the gift of welcoming people and making them feel like family. The gift of hospitality is a so-called “normal gift” of the Spirit. You don’t have to be a spiritual heavyweight (or even look weird) to pull it off. Like many gifts, it is seen in our culture about everywhere we go. We’re used to it.

No so with the other category, “the weird ones.” They are subjective, supernatural, super-sensationalistic, and secret. When people talk about them, their voices drop to a whisper and they look around the room to see if anyone is looking. They include gifts of healing, discernment of spirits, dreams, prophecy, tongues, visions, exorcism, and so on. Sometimes they are called the "revelatory" gifts because their actions depend on the revelation of God for them to work.

This is an example of a weird gift of the Spirit in action:

Recently, I was praying for a young adult at a service when, in my spiritual vision, I saw the ringleader of a three ring circus. He was dresses in a red coat and tall black hat - just like the ones in the movies - and standing in the center ring. It was a small, knee-high ring which, as I watched, began to enlarge and and grow in its parameter. Within a few moments the ring expanded completely out of my sight.

I opened my eyes and told the young adult that I believed God was going to expand the parameter of his tent – that everything he knew was going to be multiplied and increased in a very significant manner. He sort of smiled and went back to the pew. The service ended and we all went home.

A few weeks later he pulled me aside in church and shared with me some recent events that had occurred in his life. He told me that a firm - with an entirely different product and focus than what he been schooled for - had contacted him “out of the blue” and had offered him double the salary of what he was then making. Remembering the vision of the ringleader and the expanding center ring, he decided to go for it. In the process of leaving his old firm for the new firm the old firm decided, in attempt to keep him working for them, to match the new firms offer - and even increase it. When the new firm realized he was reconsidering staying at the old firm, they increased the increase of the doubled salary and won him back!

This is a wonderful example of how the weird gifts work. (Of course, by now you know there are not “weird gifts of the Spirit” and “non-weird gifts of the Spirit.” All gifts are credible and provide wondrous ways wherein God manifests Himself to others.) While all the gifts of the Spirit are alive and well in the church today, not all Christians believe that. Contrary to consumer belief, we are not free to pick and choose the gifts that make sense to us and those who don't – or even place historical limitations forbidding the operation of gifts we “have trouble” with. It is God himself who distributes the gifts and he distributes the gifts as he desires. Who are we to pick and choose the ones we consider theologically relevant?

I had a terrible struggle with this. Perhaps you have, too. As a young believer I had actually been taught by sincere followers of Christ that the spiritual gifts were no longer “effective” for our day and age. Thus, whenever a person was seen using a spiritual gift it had to be a counterfeit and, in short, “of satan.”
Now I had spent enough time under his dehumanizing influence and wasn’t about to return to that. At the same time, I knew that God was bigger than satan and, if satan had gifts, then God must have had gifts as well. If not, what was he counterfeiting? If all the devil was doing was copying God, then what was he copying? That’s where I wanted to be. Surely, I reasoned, God wasn’t going to set me free me from the bindings of my enemy, meet me, and call me into the continuation his miraculous work with a powerless hope and questionable praxis that is no longer relevant and for this day and age!

So I talked to a lot of people. And the answers were all over the charts. The pentecostals were closest to what I was thinking. They told me satan counterfeited the all gifts - even tongues and healing - and that, in itself, was proof they were still around. The evangelicals told me that only the normal gifts of the Spirit were operative because the revealed will of God now came through the Scriptures - the “living, breathing Word of God.” The fundamentalists were quite skeptical of all things experiential and told me none of the gifts were around!

What a broad spectrum!

Once I was tanning on a beach when a couple of good people from Campus Crusade for Christ came up to me and asked, if I were to die “tonight,” would I go to heaven. I sat up and we had a wonderful conversation. At one point I asked one of them about the gifts of the Spirit - especially the gift of tongues. (I was particularly struggling with tongues.) He gave me a very interesting look and, with a twinkle in his eye, told me that I would have to seek those answers out for myself. That was an amazing answer - probably the gift of wisdom! So I took him up on it. And today I have come to the understanding that all the gifts of the Spirit are still being poured out on the church today - even the weird ones.

It's interesting to note that over the course of His three-year ministry, Jesus exhibited all the gifts of the Spirit - excluding tongues and their interpretation.The early church relied heavily on the power of the Holy Spirit and his manifested gifts, day in and day out. It’s also interesting to note that, in our day and age, the vast majority of the world-wide Christian Faith embraces all of the gifts as well.

So our summary of this chapter is a reminder that the gifts of the Spirit – those we can mentally understand (such as mercy, teaching, helps, and administration) along with those that are more mystically-centered (such as tongues, discernment of spirits, visions, dreams, and prophecy) – are given by God, and specifically designed for the evangelizing and edification of the followers of Christ.

Some are weird. Others are not.

All are credible.