Someone said to me recently, “Grace is an amazing church. Just imagine if the Holy Spirit got hold of it.”
I knew what they meant. They meant the kind of dramatic, revivalistic expressions of worship and spontaneity that you see in more Pentecostal churches. They meant fire from heaven. Unexpected waves or prayer and prophecy happening in our midst.
And trust me, I’m open to all that God wants to do at Grace. But I want to push back, gently, on something I think was underneath the comment. Because the assumption was that the Holy Spirit hadn’t really shown up yet.
Let me say this as clearly as I know how. Anything good or lasting that has ever happened during my three decades at Grace… every time the Gospel has been proclaimed, every time someone far from God has heard the good news that Jesus saves, every time God’s name has been lifted up in praise and worship, every time God’s face has been sought in prayer, every time somebody cheerfully and graciously gave to God money they could have kept for themselves, every time one believer paused to rejoice or mourn with another one, every time somebody took time out of a full schedule to care for a little child, every time a sinner was convicted of sin and repented and was baptized and the new name was written in the book of life. Every time it happened, it was the Holy Spirit of God, moving and prompting and rejoicing in the midst of the people of God.
And one of the main ways the Holy Spirit works in Christ’s church is through what the New Testament calls spiritual gifts.
In this post, I’ll start with laying the foundation, then addressing some of the questions people actually ask when this topic comes up.
What Is a Spiritual Gift?
Paul gives the church at Corinth his most thorough treatment of this topic in 1 Corinthians 12 through 14. He opens chapter 12 with this: “Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed.”
Translation: “You guys have no idea what you’re doing.”
This is a correction letter. The Corinthians weren’t lacking gifts. They were drowning in them and using them poorly. So, when we read these chapters, we need to remember we’re reading a rebuke, not a recommendation. We are not supposed to do church the way the Corinthians did. Paul is telling them to knock it off. Here’s a working definition.
A spiritual gift is a special ability, given by the Holy Spirit to every believer at conversion, to be used to minister to others and build up the body of Christ.
A few things to notice. The gifts are given by the Holy Spirit. You don’t earn them. You don’t pick them from a menu. He decides who gets what. Every believer gets at least one. The moment you became a Christian, the Spirit handed you something to use for the good of His people. You may not know what it is yet. That’s fine. It’s a bit like the way a newborn baby has the capacity to see, hear, taste, smell, and touch, but hasn’t figured out yet that those senses are even working. You got the gift at your spiritual birth. The unwrapping comes with maturity.
It’s for ministry to others. Not for personal enjoyment. Not for status. Not for spiritual flexing. For ministry.
The biblical lists of gifts are not exhaustive. The big four passages are:
- Romans 12
- 1 Corinthians 12
- Ephesians 4
- 1 Peter 4
Even between them, there’s overlap and difference. He gives administration, apostleship, craftsmanship, creative communication, discernment, encouragement, evangelism, faith, giving, healing, helps, hospitality, intercession, knowledge, leadership, mercy, miracles, prophecy, shepherding, teaching, tongues, wisdom, and probably some that defy easy labeling. The point isn’t to find your label. The point is to use what He gave you.
Related Read: Looking for a Spirit-Led Church? It might not be what you think…
What Are the Gifts of the Holy Spirit For?
Paul answers this directly in 1 Corinthians 12:7. “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” Not your good. Our good. Collectively.
This is one of the hardest things for modern Christians to absorb because we live in a culture that personalizes and individualizes everything. We even read Scripture asking what God is doing for me. Paul has the audacity to suggest that the Spirit gave you something that doesn’t actually belong to you. You’re holding it in trust. You’re a re-gifter. The Spirit hands it to you so you can hand it on.
I grew up watching the gifts in action. My dad and mom were both public school teachers and coaches. There was something different about how they approached their roles at church compared to their roles in their careers. People would tell my dad that his teaching changed their lives. My mom would host athletes in our home and you’d hear stories afterward about how God had met people through what she’d put together. I got a front-row seat to the way the Spirit uses ordinary believers using their gifts to do extraordinary things. That’s what Paul is trying to recover in Corinth. That’s what every healthy church is built on.
The result, Paul says in Ephesians 4, is that the body grows up. The gifts bring unity. The gifts bring maturity. We become more like Christ together.
Who Decides Who Gets What Gift?
The Holy Spirit does. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:11 that he “apportions to each one individually as he wills.” You don’t get a say. He, in His perfect wisdom, knows what gifts will bring you fulfillment and fruitfulness. He also knows what the body needs from you specifically. Both of those things matter to Him, and He sorts the giving accordingly.
This means a couple of things. You don’t get to envy someone else’s gift. If God wanted you to have it, you’d have it. Wishing you had Sarah’s gift of hospitality doesn’t make you more hospitable. It just makes you bitter.
You also don’t get to project your gift onto everyone else. People with the gift of mercy can’t understand why everyone else isn’t more merciful. People with the gift of administration can’t understand why everyone else can’t keep a calendar. People with evangelism gifts can’t understand why everyone else isn’t constantly sharing their faith. Stop expecting other people to look like you. The Spirit didn’t make a body of clones. He made an actual body, with eyes and feet and kidneys, and each part does what it was made to do. And the kidney is important. Even if nobody can see it.
That’s Paul’s whole point in 1 Corinthians 12:22 and following. The hidden parts of the body matter as much as the visible ones. The people working with kids while you’re enjoying worship matter. The people running the soundboard, stuffing the bulletins, restocking the coffee, mowing the lawn, leading the small group nobody notices, dropping off meals after a baby is born. All of that is the Spirit at work through ordinary people. The body doesn’t grow on the gifts you see. It grows on the gifts you almost never do.
Your Responsibility
If you’re a Christian, you have a gift. Which means you have a responsibility. Three of them, actually.
Discover them. The easiest way to find your gift is not to take a test. It’s to try things. Serve. Try a couple of different ministries. Pay attention to what comes alive in you and what bears fruit. Listen to what mature believers say about how God uses you. It’s easier to discover your gift through ministry than to figure out your ministry through your gift.
Develop them. Gifts come in seed form. They need a greenhouse. A man in our church once realized he had the gift of discernment but didn’t know the Bible well enough to use it properly, so he spent a year in intensive study to grow into what God had given him. Paul tells Timothy to fan into flame the gift that is in him (2 Timothy 1:6). Gifts don’t develop themselves. You steward them, or they stay buried.
Deploy them. This is the part where some of us need to hear the Spirit’s nudge. You can park in our lot, find a seat, watch a service, and go home. You really can. But it’s not as good. Sitting in the bleachers will never be as fulfilling as rolling up your sleeves and getting in the game. You are as accountable to God for your ministry as I am for mine. The pastor’s job, according to Ephesians 4, is not to do all the ministry. The pastor’s job is to equip you to do yours.
Now, the Hard Questions
Now that we’ve laid the foundation. Now let’s deal with the questions people actually ask when this topic comes up.
Are the Supernatural Gifts of the Holy Spirit Still Active Today?
By sign gifts, most people mean tongues, prophecy, healing, and miracles. The dramatic ones. The ones that show up in Acts and split denominations in modern times. There are three main camps as it relates to sign gifts.
Cessationists say the sign gifts ended with the apostles. They were authenticating signs for the early church, and once the New Testament was complete, they stopped. There’s no tongues today. No prophecy. No miracles. They typically point to 1 Corinthians 13:8-10, where Paul says tongues will cease. The problem is that the timing of that ceasing, in context, is much more naturally read as referring to the return of Christ (“when the perfect comes”), not the closing of the biblical canon. It’s a long reach, in my opinion.
Pentecostals say the sign gifts are not only still active but are evidence of a second work of the Spirit. They argue that there’s salvation, and then a separate “baptism in the Holy Spirit” that comes later and is marked by speaking in tongues. Until that second moment, you haven’t received the fullness of the Spirit. The trouble with this view is that it creates two tiers of Christians, which the New Testament won’t let us do. More on that in a minute.
Continuationists (which is where I land) say the supernatural gifts are given to every generation but should be practiced within the boundaries Scripture sets. My favorite description of this position is “charismatic with a seatbelt.” That’s about right. The Spirit is free to move. The Word sets the guardrails.
I want to be honest. I’ve had both very positive and very negative experiences with sign gifts.
I have been in church services where the gift of tongues and prophecy were expressed for the building up of the body. They were done in a way that added clarity and not confusion. When tongues were expressed, an interpretation was given immediately, and the body of Christ was built up. The gifts were exercised with order, humility, and edification. That’s the positive.
On the negative side, I was in a prayer meeting one night when the convener of the meeting asked if there was anyone in the room who had not been baptized in the Holy Spirit and who had never expressed the gift of tongues. He went on to teach that this was an inferior spiritual status that should be enhanced by a ‘second work.’ I raised my hand and was ushered to the front of the room. What followed was a long (over an hour), well-intentioned prayer session for me to receive the gift of tongues. I truly was open to receiving this gift. When it wasn’t happening, I considered manufacturing it, faking it, doing anything just to make the awkwardness stop. I appreciated their love for me, I disagree with their theology.
What I’ve learned from both is that the test of any gift, sign or otherwise, is not how it makes the room feel. The test is whether it’s rooted in the truth and builds up the church. Paul says it like this in 1 Corinthians 14:26: “Let all things be done for building up.” That’s the metric. Did it strengthen the body? Did it draw people closer to Jesus? Did it create unity? Or did it become a status symbol, or a way to separate the insiders from the outsiders?
Paul actually gives four specific warnings about how the gift of tongues was being misused in Corinth, and they’re worth naming because they still apply.
1) Selfishness: the gift was being used for personal edification in public worship rather than for the church.
2) Distraction: people were prizing the more spectacular gift over the more useful ones.
3) Confusion: visitors were walking into services and concluding the Christians had lost their minds.
4) Disorder: people were speaking over each other without interpretation, and the gathering felt like chaos. Paul doesn’t tell them to stop. He tells them to grow up.
One of the reasons Grace doesn’t generally encourage the use of the sign gifts at our public gatherings (we would certainly stop everything and respond should he choose to break in), is because of the size of our gatherings and the number of non-believers and new believers in the room, it would be hard to avoid these warnings from Paul.
What is the Baptism of the Holy Spirit?
The clearest verse on this is 1 Corinthians 12:13. “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, and all were made to drink of one Spirit.”
The baptism of the Holy Spirit is the act by which the Spirit places you into the body of Christ at the moment you’re saved. I believe it is the universal experience of every believer, not a second work for only some believers. Ephesians 1:13 reinforces this: “When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit.”
Since we’re studying Acts together, you may be wondering about the “second experiences” in Acts. Where getting saved and receiving the Holy Spirit seem to have happened at different times. The Samaritans receiving the Spirit later in Acts 8. Cornelius and the Gentiles in Acts 10. The Ephesian disciples in Acts 19. I don’t believe these few instances were meant to establish a normal pattern for the rest of church history. They were strategic moments where God made it unmistakably clear, to the highest leadership of the early church, that the Spirit was being given to groups people previously assumed He wouldn’t go to. It was like God gave three more echoes of Pentecost to three different groups, Samaritans. Gentiles. Outsiders. Each of those second experiences was God saying, “Yes, them too.” They were intended to demonstrate Kingdom inclusion, and not to act as templates for a two-stage spiritual conversion for the rest of history.
The biblical pattern is one baptism, many fillings. You receive the Spirit once at conversion. You are filled with the Spirit again and again throughout your life, for boldness, for joy, for endurance, for ministry. If part of your spiritual story was having an experience of God’s Spirit that felt new and powerful to you at some point after your conversion, I’m not trying to talk you out of it! I would suggest that was probably a filling which is a beautiful thing. I would also suggest that it doesn’t represent a second work that applies to all Christians, and a second-class spirituality for those who didn’t experience it.
The Truth Underneath All of This
The way the Spirit moves in the average Christian’s life, in the average church, during an average week, is mostly non-dramatic. It’s not flashy. It rarely makes anybody cry. It mostly looks like ordinary people doing ordinary things in faithfulness, and the cumulative effect of that ordinary faithfulness is a community that looks unlike anything else in the world.
Hospitality. Mercy. Teaching. Administration. Generosity. Discernment. Encouragement. Helps. These are spiritual gifts. The person who sets up chairs at 6 a.m., the person who notices the visitor and learns their name, the person who runs the images on the screen, the person who writes a check, the person who teaches the third-grade class for the eleventh year in a row, the person who texts you on the worst day of your life because the Spirit nudged them to do it. That is the body of Christ functioning. That is the Spirit at work in all His glorious ordinariness.
It’s also grievous that the very gifts God gave to bring His people together have been one of the most common ways churches are split apart. Denominations have fractured over this. Friendships have ended over this. Whole movements have defined themselves over their position on this. The gifts of unity have somehow become weapons of division. That’s not a Spirit problem. That’s an us problem.
So, here’s the way forward. Discover what God gave you. Develop it. Deploy it. Hold it open-handed. Use it to build others up. Celebrate the loud gifts within the boundaries Scripture sets. Celebrate the quiet gifts even when nobody else does, because heaven sees them just as clearly.
The Spirit isn’t waiting to show up. He’s already here. He’s been here. He’s been the One behind every good and lasting thing this church has ever done. And He isn’t done yet.
Whatever He gave you, He gave it on purpose. He gave it for now. He gave it for us. Unwrap the gift.
