In this two-part series, pastors Cliff and Derek discuss why and how Christians should identify their spiritual gifts.
Transcript
Derek: Welcome to With All Wisdom where we are applying biblical truth to everyday life. My name is Derek Brown and I’m here today with Cliff McManis and we are both pastors and elders at Creekside Bible Church in Cupertino, California and professors at the Cornerstone Bible College and Seminary in Vallejo, California and today we want to talk about discovering your spiritual gifts. But before we get to our topic, I want to let you know about WithAllWisdom.org where you will find a large and growing collection of theological and practical resources to help you grow in your walk with Christ. In fact, if you go to WithAllWisdom.org right now, you’ll find links to our three most recent books. If you scroll down a little bit, you’ll find it on the right side of the website and the first book you’ll find is What the Bible Says About Israel. That’s by Cliff McManis who I just introduced. The second book is The Parable of Sports by JR Cuevas and then the third and most recent book that just came out is Rescued by Grace, Volume 2, which is simply a collection of about 15 testimonies of salvation compiled and edited by me and Cliff and with the good help of our good friend Jasmine Patton who now lives with her husband and two children in Tennessee. Let me just say that you will be encouraged, deeply encouraged by these testimonies. My wife is currently reading this book each night before she goes to bed and she’s really enjoying the book and I’ve been talking to others, we’ve been talking to others at church who say that these stories of salvation are very encouraging, even bringing some people to tears as they hear story after story of God saving grace. You can get a free PDF copy of the book at WithAllWisdom.org or you can purchase a physical copy of the book at Amazon for just under $6 and that price is as low as we could set it for a 200 page book and that’s only covering printing costs. No editor or contributor is receiving any royalties for this book. We’re keeping the price as low as possible so you can purchase it and be deeply edified by these testimonies of salvation. Again, you can also download the PDF for free on our website. Now on to today’s topic. We want to talk about an important practical issue in the Christian life. It’s an important topic. It has a serious impact on your service to the local church, yet many Christians express some confusion about it. The issue is discovering and identifying your spiritual gifts. How should a Christian go about the process of discovering their spiritual gifts? And this is a vital question for four reasons. First, Scripture teaches that every Christian has a spiritual gift or gifts. Number two, the Spirit of God gave us these gifts so that we might use these gifts to build up the body of Christ. First Corinthians 12:7 says, To each has been given a manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. Number three, every gift is vital to the overall health of the body of Christ. And then number four, we will be most effective in serving and building up the body of Christ when we know what our gifts are and pour our time and energy into developing these gifts. And this is actually going to be a two-part podcast. We’re going to come back and talk more about what I just discussed there in terms of how we go about discovering our spiritual gifts and why it’s important. But before we do that, we have to ask a more foundational question. I want to turn this over to you, Cliff. I want to begin by asking a two-part question so you can kick us off. What are spiritual gifts? And related to that, what gifts are available to believers today?
Cliff: Thanks, Derek. What are spiritual gifts and which gifts are available today? What a topic. I am delighted to be talking about this topic of spiritual gifts, Derek, and to be doing it with you as we serve in the local church together as shepherds of God’s people or as elders and overseers. And foundational to shepherding our people is the role that spiritual gifts play. And as always in all of our podcasts, I think just about every single one of them, whatever topic we’re talking about, usually you and I are doing it from the perspective of being pastors and shepherds in the local church. So that’s more practical application of these truths as opposed to approaching the topic of spiritual gifts from a more academic or polemical point of view, which has a legitimate place, which you and I actually just did when we taught a seminary class on this, on spiritual gifts and the sign gifts. So it was a very different emphasis that we had there, not only in theology, but this is more practical and shepherding. It’s a delight to do so. Just I wanted to say to you, because we’ve been serving together now in the local church going on, is it seven or eight years?
Derek: Yeah. Seven plus years. If you add together in this capacity, but if you add prior service together in other churches, it’s going well over, let’s see, 12 plus years.
Cliff: That’s right. And in light of that, here at our church that we’ve been serving together here at Creekside Bible Church, I think it’s noteworthy that we do not have, the topic of spiritual gifts is not a contentious issue at our church. And some churches, that’s a problem where they just fight and argue and squabble about spiritual gifts. And it’s a divisive matter, which grieves Christ. But that hasn’t been the case at our church. So we’re thankful for that. Also regarding spiritual gifts, I’m just thankful that there is a lot of information in the New Testament on spiritual gifts, their nature and how to use them, and even, I think, how to discover your gift. So God hasn’t left us in ignorance, so we thank Him for that as well. So in light of that, before I just answer the two-fold question, what are the spiritual gifts and which ones are for today, I want to start with, I think the foundation, when we’re talking about the spiritual gifts, I think the conversation needs to be with the great, singular spiritual gift, and that is the gift of the Holy Spirit. And it really does start in the ministry of Jesus in John chapter 7, about midway into His ministry, His three-and-a-half-year ministry, where He spoke publicly at the feast, and He promised to give eternal life for anyone who would believe in His name and recognize Him as the Savior or the Messiah. And if they did believe Him in the Messiah, He promised that He would give them living waters deep within their soul. And John says in John chapter 7 that the living waters there is a reference to the promise of the Holy Spirit, who had not yet been given until Jesus had been glorified. So there, Jesus gives the promise of the coming of the greatest gift of all, and that is the Spirit of God, that every Christian would receive the moment they believe, after His death and resurrection. So that was the promise of the gift, and that was the middle of His ministry. Then at the end of His ministry, after He died, He rose again, He appeared to His saints, He’s about to ascend into heaven, and just before He ascended into heaven in Luke 24, again He mentions this promise, and He told His apostles to be patient, to wait as He’s about to ascend into heaven, be patient and wait here in the city for the promise that I told you about. Well, what was that promise? Well, then you go to Acts chapter 1, and you see clearly that that promise that Jesus promised really to the apostles and all believers of the Church was the outpouring and the coming of the Holy Spirit. And so Peter says on the day of Pentecost, Acts chapter 2, when the Church began in fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, God poured out His Spirit on every person that believed in Jesus after hearing the gospel, and thus the Church started, and Peter preached a gospel sermon, and primarily to a Jewish audience of thousands of people, they were pierced to the heart, they were convicted about who Jesus was, and the response to Peter at the end of his sermon was, what must we do? And Peter said, repent, and you’ll receive each one of you, and you will get the forgiveness of sin, and then He also promised that they would get, and He called it the gift of the Holy Spirit. So there it is. So we’re going to talk about spiritual gifts, but what are those? Well, they come from the greatest gift, and that’s the gift of the Holy Spirit, and once you become a Christian, every Christian, the moment they’re saved and believe in the gospel, God literally gives them the Holy Spirit to live inside of them.
So if you’re a Christian, you have the Spirit of God literally living in you, it’s a miracle, and we believe it by faith, but it is a reality, and you can’t, if you don’t have the Holy Spirit living in you, you’re not a Christian, and you can’t be a Christian if you don’t have the Spirit living in you, and that’s a reality that’s new in the New Testament that wasn’t realized by all Old Testament saints, they didn’t have that privilege, that every believer had the Spirit living in them, and it’s from the gift of the Holy Spirit that God wants to use His people in the church to help the saints grow by giving them manifestations of that gift of the Holy Spirit that we call spiritual gifts. So that’s where it begins, and if we want to find out about the spiritual gifts and what they are, the nature of them, how to use them, there’s plenty of information in the New Testament, primarily God used the Apostle Paul to give us that information about the theology of spiritual gifts, so he really helps us in answering these two basic questions that I want to address here, and the first part of that is, what are the spiritual gifts? The nature of that question implies that we can actually give the answer to that question, we can actually delineate and name the spiritual gifts, not everybody would agree. In other words, is there a finite specific group of spiritual gifts that are named in the New Testament that can be delineated? I would say yes, and I would say that there are 18 of them. That’s what I think most evangelical Christians would say. There are some who say otherwise, and they don’t deny their spiritual gifts, but they just say, no, there’s not 18, there’s more than 18. There’s a gazillion; there are just so many.
Robert Gromacki from Cedarville University, a very excellent New Testament scholar, for instance. That would be his view, and many others, some well-known Bible teachers would say that, well, you can’t put a number on it, and I’m saying, well, I’m going to put a number on it. How many spiritual gifts are there? I think there’s 18 that the Apostle Paul specifically listed, and he’s pretty specific because in Corinthians he says, here are the spiritual gifts. First, apostles. Second, prophets. Third, I mean, literally, he enumerates them, and he does that a couple of times. So, he’s very specific in delineating them. So, I would say that there are 18 spiritual gifts. There are three main passages, if you wanted to do more study on that, that you look to. I mean, there’s other passages, but these are the main ones you start with, and they’re all passages from the Apostle Paul, Romans chapter 12, 1 Corinthians chapter 12, and Ephesians chapter 4, and in those three chapters you’re pretty much going to find a mention of all 18 of those spiritual gifts. The 1 Corinthians 12, it’s actually 1 Corinthians 12, 13, and 14, very comprehensive discussion on the spiritual gifts. So, we got 18 gifts, and we got three New Testament passages. Out of those 18 gifts, I think they can logically be divided into two main groups, which I think it helps kind of understand them better, and there’s a lot of different ways you can divide up the 18 gifts. I’m just, for simplicity’s sake, I come up with two categories for the 18 spiritual gifts. Category 1, I call the sign gifts. The word sign is deliberate. It’s not artificial that somebody made up. In the New Testament, many times the word sign, same as in the Greek word, refers to a miracle or that which is miraculous. So, the Apostle John, for example, in his gospel, every time he talks of a miracle of Jesus, he calls it a sign. So, that’s his word for miracles. So, there are sign gifts, and then there are service gifts is category number two. The sign gifts are miraculous gifts that I would say were foundational gifts and apostolic gifts, meaning those were gifts primarily used by the Apostles and New Testament prophets, and they were of a supernatural or extraordinary nature outwardly for the purpose of validating the ministry of the Apostles as spokespersons for God and the prophets and also for laying the foundation of the church. And so, they’re foundational gifts, the sign gifts are, and then I would argue that they aren’t around today. They ceased during the apostolic age because they weren’t needed. They accomplished and fulfilled their purpose. So, that’s the sign gifts. The second category, the service gifts of the 18, and those I would say continue, and they’ve continued all throughout church history for a good almost two thousand years. And they provide a very specific purpose by God to continue to build and mature His church, the body of Christ. So, we have the sign gifts and the service gifts. And then let me just go over what exactly, which gifts fall into which of the categories in answering the question, what are the spiritual gifts? First is the category, nicely and conveniently here, I’ve got two divisions, sign gifts and service gifts, and there’s nine in each category.
Derek: Wow.
Cliff: I didn’t even make that up. I got this from other people looking at the Bible, and I think it makes sense. There’s a little question here. It might be not quite nine to nine, but that’s pretty close. Okay, here are the nine miraculous foundational gifts or the confirming gifts or the gifts that have ceased because God used them. And when I say that the spiritual, these spiritual gifts have ceased doesn’t mean that we don’t believe in spiritual gifts. Right. Because we do. An example of a gift that has ceased, a sign gift would be the gift of apostleship. I don’t believe that you and I don’t believe apostles are around today. There were only 12 of them. There were certain qualifications and then Paul, additional apostle. One of the qualifications is you have to be appointed directly by the risen Lord Jesus, and that ain’t happening to any of us. So, and then they received direct revelation and had it written down in the New Testament. So, that’s just one example of why we say that there’s a spiritual gift that has ceased. So, here are the sign gifts that aren’t around anymore. There’s apostleship, there’s prophecy, the New Testament prophets who partnered with the apostles, really to give us some of the New Testament as they received direct revelation. Number three is the distinguishing of spirits. That’s only mentioned, I think, two times, and each time it’s in proximity with the gift of prophecy. So, it’s not the gift of discernment. Some people mistakenly say that. No, it’s distinguishing of spirits, and that was to be used in conjunction with somebody who claimed to have the gift of prophecy. That gift is not around. Number four, sign gift that’s not around anymore is the speaking in tongues. We do believe in the gift of speaking in tongues, absolutely. The apostle Paul spoke in tongues more than anybody, but that gift is not around today. One of the reasons I believe that tongues is not around today and that has ceased is because 1 Corinthians 13, 8 Paul said it will cease. So, it’s like we’re not making that stuff up either. He also said in 1 Corinthians 13, he gave a prophecy that prophecy would be done away with and cease. So, us cessationist guys, we’re not making it up. It’s in the Bible.
Derek: And I will say, in terms of prophecy, we have the last two podcasts that we did, if you want to check them out listeners, if you want to check them out. The last two podcasts we did was on the gift of prophecy specifically and why we believe it’s no longer available.
Cliff: Yes, absolutely. So, we got tongues and then we got the interpretation of tongues. We have miracles or powers, dunamis. Number seven was the supernatural gift of healing. Does God heal today? Absolutely. At his sovereign discretion, sometimes in answer to prayer, sometimes just sovereignly in his own initiative, and sometimes he chooses not to heal. The gift of healing was actually an individual that had that gift. Number eight, the word of knowledge. We’re not quite sure what that is because there’s not a whole lot of detail about that, but it was some form of divine revelation that God gave. And then, similar to that, the word of wisdom is the word of knowledge. Same thing, this direct divine revelation, I guess, would be similar to prophecy. Again, it’s somewhat obscure because we don’t have a whole lot of information. So, those are the nine that I would propose are signed gifts and they’re not around today. And that’s why I would be called a cessationist, and I’d probably say that our church is cessationist if you want to put it in the category. Then the second category, in addition to the signed gifts or the service gifts, these are gifts that are ongoing. They were given to the New Testament church at the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. They continue in the church, used by God’s people even to this day. I have nine of them listed here. They will probably all sound familiar to you if you’re a Christian. And here they are. Number one is teaching. Number two is pastor. Teaching and pastor are specifically mentioned in Ephesians 4, where it says that Christ gave gifts to the church, apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, evangelists. So, the first three are the gift of teaching, the gift of pastor or shepherding, the gift of evangelist. It’s interesting that nowhere is elder listed as a spiritual gift, but pastor is listed as a spiritual gift. And then the New Testament equates pastor with an elder. So, being an elder is really technically a spiritual gift. So, you’ve got teaching, pastor, evangelist. Number four is exhortation. parakaleō (παρακαλέω) means to come alongside, can be translated as encourage, exhort, counsel. Those are the three common words. It’s all the same thing. So, if maybe you have an inclination desire, you’re good at counseling people. Maybe you have the gift of exhortation. Number five is the gift of leadership. The Greek word literally there is the pilot on a ship who’s steering the ship, leading the way. Number six is the gift of helps, also called the gift of service. And this is manifest in the church in countless ways, helps and service. Gift number seven is mercy. Literally means you hurt in your gut for other people. You just have this God-given identity with people who suffer and you act on that out of service. Number eight is the gift of giving. This gift doesn’t mean you have a lot of money because you can have a lot of money and be very stingy. You can not have a lot of money and be a very good giver. And it’s not just about giving of your money. It’s giving of your time, giving of your resources, but it could also include giving material things very generously. And then at number nine, the last one I put there is on faith because this is debated. A lot of scholars who write on this, they put faith in the signs supernatural category because it always accompanied some of these things like miracles and healing. But the gift of faith is listed there. So one last comment I want to make, Derek, is as I divide these into two categories and some people might say, oh, that’s kind of artificial, but I don’t think it is. But I just noted that every one of the eight service gifts, teaching, pastor, evangelist, exhortation, leadership, mercy, helps and giving, those are alive and well in our church at CBC, wouldn’t you say?
Derek: Yeah, I would. Absolutely.
Cliff: You could literally look around our church and identify people who manifest these gifts. And the corollary is also true. The sign gifts, do you see people doing those in our church? I don’t. We don’t have people. It’s not like we’re banning people from doing that, but the fact is they’re not doing it. There’s nobody who’s an apostle or giving divine revelation, who has a word of wisdom and knowledge and healing and miracles, and that’s not by mistake. This is God’s plan and our church, I think, is trying to be a healthy church, obedient church, a growing church, an active church, pleasing to Christ, reaching our potential, and our saints are trying to do that by exercising their gifts.
Derek: Right. And it is. It’s a beautiful thing when you see saints using their gifts, knowing what their gifts are, and then implementing them as best as they can in service to the local body. And it is true. You see the health that Paul predicts in 1 Corinthians, the health of the church that is where the church is actively utilizing all their gifts. In fact, we’ll talk about this in the next episode, that every gift is vital to the health of the church, which is exactly one of the reasons why you need to be discovering your spiritual gift. So we’re going to sign off for this podcast, this part, and then we’re going to go on to another one. So we would encourage you to look for that next part two of our discussion on discovering your spiritual gifts. We really appreciate you listening to this one, and we encourage you again to check out WithAllWisdom.org, and we’re going to also be recommending some books. In fact, I’m going to have Cliff recommend a couple of books right now that he thinks are useful, that we think are useful for this topic.
Cliff: Yeah, because I went kind of fast. That was a lot of information, but if he wanted to do further study in the book that we published, The Biblically Driven Church: How Jesus Builds the Body, on chapter seven is more information and detail about spiritual gifts that might be helpful. And then Dr. Robert L. Thomas wrote a book. He’s from the Master Seminary. Understanding Spiritual Gifts: A Study of 1 Corinthians 12 through 14. And then at the back, he’s got an appendix on answering practical questions, very helpful.
Derek: Yeah. And the first book that you mentioned, that’s one of your books, Cliff, and you can find that at WithAllWisdom.org. And so you can find more information there, and we encourage you to check that out. But until we see you next time, keep seeking the Lord in his word, and we hope to see you back here soon.
