How to have a personal Relationship with Jesus Christ August 19, 2007
Relating to God through Spiritual Gifts
Introduction:
Over the past few months we’ve been doing this series called. “How To Have a Personal Relationship With Jesus.” We’ve looked at how to start the relationship; how to talk to God, how to recognize God’s voice; the Holy Spirits role in our relationship; how to hear his voice through scripture, and in worship; in creation & life circumstance. Today I want to talk about how we can relate to God through using our spiritual gifts.
What are Spiritual Gifts?
Simply put, spiritual gifts are gifts given to the church by the Holy Spirit!
There are three lists of some of these gifts in the New Testament, we just read the one in 1 Corinthians 12. Because the lists are not all the same, Bible scholars feel that they were never meant to be a complete comprehensive list, the there are more things that the Spirit might give that are not on the list!
In a questionnaire called “Finding your Spiritual gifts, Peter Wagner lists 25 gifts that he finds in the scripture.
If you are a Christian, you have the Holy Spirit and if you have the Holy Spirit, you have one or more spiritual gifts.
Some gifts are obvious, like the gift of tongues or words of knowledge, but others might be a little lest obvious to the person with the gift – things like helps or encouragement. You might say, “well, that is just what I do, or that is just who I am.” Spiritual gifts are things that you do for other people that impact them spiritually. Spiritual gifts also often connect both others and your self with God.
There are times that God takes something that you were good at before you became a Christian and puts his power behind it – so you may always have been a good communicator, but now when you communicate God’s truth, people are impacted and turn to God! You may always have been an encouraging person, but now your encouragements go deep into people’s souls…
There are other times that God will give gifts that are out of the blue – like healing, prophesy, tongues, preaching or teaching. My father grew up with a bad stutter & it would disappear when he sang in church and when he preached. The stutter was all but gone by time I came around, but it began to go as he exercised the gifts that God gave him.
What are they given for?
The passages that speak about the gifts of the Spirit are really about two things – ministry in the church and unity in the church.
Ministry
The Gifts of the Spirit that God has given me are not actually given to me – they are given to the church through me! The Gifts of the Spirit that God has given you are not actually given to you – they are given to the church through you!
We are often times so individualistic in our relationship with God that we talk about the gift God has given me as “My” gift. I know that is had to say because it does not flow, but it is not my gift – it is the church’s gift given through me!
God has given every Christian spiritual gifts to be used to help the rest of the Church to grow and come closer to God.
The gift he has given you is like a jar of candy he has given you and asked you to pass it out to the other people in church. What do you think he would say if you decide to go and sit in a corner and eat it all yourself!
Unity
All of the passages about the gifts of the Spirit are more about unity than they are about the gifts. Paul uses the gifts as an argument for God’s desire for unity in the church. “God wants you to be unified – you can tell because he gave such a diversity of gifts so that you would know that you need each other!
Even the passage that speaks of the leaders that God gives as gifts to the church speaks about unity:
Ephesians 4:11-13
So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.
It is a sad thing that the church has often used the gifts as an excuse for disunity rather than allowing them to bring unity. We do the exact opposite of what Paul says by saying that some of the gifts are not needed or valid today! Paul says, “Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.
Now if the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.
The eye cannot say to the hand, "I don’t need you!" And the head cannot say to the feet, "I don’t need you!" On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, - 1 Corinthians 12:12-22
Even though the purpose of the gifts is to bless the Christians around us and draw us together in interdependent unity, they also draw us closer into relationship with the giver.
How do they improve our relationship with God?
Gifts can often draw us closer to the giver – Wayne’s picture, Pam’s Kayak
Have you ever given someone a gift, and then you go to their house and find out that they use it all the time, and they think it is the best thing ever? Doesn’t that give you pleasure. It gives God pleasure when we use His gifts in the way that they were meant to be used. We can feel that pleasure, and it draws us closer.
Chariots of fire – when I run I feel his pleasure
Tongues
What is the gift of tongues?
The gift of tongues can come in a few different forms. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 13:1 says “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but have not love I am a noisy gong, or a clanging cymbal”
Sometimes the gift of tongues is a mortal tongue - a language that is spoken by a group of people in some part of the world.
Nicky tells the story of two women who were praying for each other at an Alpha meeting. One woman was praying that the other would know God’s deep love for her. She switched from praying in English to praying in a tongue - when she looked up she saw the other woman beaming, and asked why. The other woman explained that she had just prayed in Russian - the first woman spoke no Russian, but the second woman was fluent - studying the language in university. She asked what she said, and the second woman said “you were saying ‘My dear child’ over and over.” If she had prayed this in English, the woman might have just passed it off, but because it was prayed in tongues, the woman received the word and was deeply blessed by it.
Sometimes the gift of tongues is not an earthy language, but a heavenly one. We are limited in expressing or feelings to God by our own limited language - even the most poetic of us might feel like we have not said what we are feeling, but God can give us the depth of heavenly words to match our depth of feeling.
How do people use it?
Most often people use their gift of tongues in their own personal prayer. They find it helps them on all sorts of level, but it is also great to feel that close connection with the Spirit while you are praying.
There are times when we feel that we need to pray for a person or a situation, but we have no idea how to pray – tongues can give us a sense that we are praying God’s will back to him.
Other times people will use the gift of tongues in praise and worship, both personally and corporately. They sing in tongues, or speak out their felt honor and praise toward God in tongues.
Chris shares
There are also times when God will give a word of encouragement to a church through tongues. Paul teaches us in 1 Cor. 14 that if there is going to be public speaking in tongues, it needs to be coupled with its partner gift of interpretation so that the word can build up the whole body.
Prophesy, wisdom, knowledge
The gift of prophecy is not as much about being able to foretell the future as it is to speak God’s word into the present situation – it could be the situation of an individual, a group, a local church, the world-wide church, a city or a nation.
It is likely obvious that hearing from God words to speak out for others would also draw the teller into closer relationship with God
Healing & Evangelism
When we train people in healing prayer, we teach people to talk to the person who has come for healing, and ask them what they would like prayer for, then we encourage them to listen to God as they pray, sometimes god will show you how to pray, sometimes, God wants to do something else in the person’s life before the healing, or instead of the healing, sometimes he shows a cause for the disease that needs to be dealt with first.
There is a similarity between praying for someone to be healed and leading someone to Jesus. In both, listening is key – you need to listen to the person, to see where they are coming from, to see what they need and to see where God could meet them; and you need to listen to God as he gives you insight into how he wants to use you to impact the person’s life.
I don’t think that you can truly pray for healing, or lead someone to Christ without being connected to God intimately in the process.
Just as you will develop a closer relationship with a friend if you work on a project together, you will also draw closer to God as you partner with him to bless another person.
On the other hand, we can accept and use gifts without acknowledging the giver. We can do the same with God, so using you spiritual gift is not a guarantee of drawing closer to the giver.
How do we draw closer to God in the use of Spiritual gifts?
1) Get to know your gifts – see back page
2) remember the giver, and give thanks
3) stay close to God in the use of your gifts
4) focus more on the giver than the gift.
Offer prayer for gifts
