Tommy Mann

Do you know your spiritual gifts? I remember taking spiritual gift inventory assessments when I was younger, a tool to help Christians identify and utilize their gifts from the   Holy Spirit. Four places in the New Testament list a total of about twenty different spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 12:28, Ephesians 4:11-12, Romans 12:6-8, and 1 Peter 4:10-11).    Something that jumps out at me when I read these four lists is that they are not uniform; some gifts appear more than once, while others do not, and some (I believe) are not in use today. I don’t believe, then, that we need to be so rigid about what the gifts of the Spirit are; there may be other gifts not necessarily listed, like those who use their giftedness with technology in the church. Consider what we read about the construction of the tabernacle in Exodus 35:   The Lord “has filled [Bezalel] with the Spirit of God, with skill, with intelligence, with knowledge, and with all craftsmanship, to devise artist...

What are spiritual gifts? We talk about them a lot in our churches. We ask people if they know what their spiritual gift is, and if so, are they using their gift. We pass out spiritual gift inventory assessments to help people discern their gift. Spiritual gifts are simply gifts—or skills—that the Holy Spirit gives believers to use for God’s glory.    There are many spiritual gifts listed in the New Testament. In fact, there are lists in four different passages. But the lists are not identical in each passage (Ephesians 4, Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, and 1 Peter 4). There is some overlap, but there are unique gifts in each list as well. I believe this teaches us that there is not a rigid list of gifts. For example, in our modern society there are people who are gifted technologically, working in the AV ministry, the church website, social media, and graphic design. These are not gifts mentioned by the Apostle Paul, but they could very well be gifts given by the Holy Spirit fo...