God is a God of variety. Everything he has created he has made with variety. Its true with His gifts as well. Now the spiritual gifts are gifts given by God. We neither pay nor qualify for it. It is given by God to use for his purpose and glorify His name.
In the below table we will try to cover the all the gifts listed in the bible. Once we have all of them we will try to remove the duplicates and identify the unique the gifts.
As a next step lets try to group the gifts broadly under three categories. The foundation, Discipleship and transformation gifts.
- Foundation Gifts :In any ministry gifts such as administration, leadership, giving and faith are essential building blocks, without that the ministry would not be able to be survive. We hear ministries and organization getting into non-compliance issues against government and local laws, taxation issues and property disputes due to bad or negligent administration. God's ministry has to run in extreme diligence and carefulness than the worldly organizations as it reflects the glory of the God. The gift of administration and leadership plays crucial in following compliance and regulation.Another aspect of foundation is our faith. We would have seen people operating on their zeal than God given faith. Now is the zeal wrong? No. But it should be catalyst-ed by the faith. If we operate only by zeal then we go by our strength and not by the will of God. There are so many plans made, meetings organized and money spent purely on somebody's zeal.
- Discipleship Gifts :The gifts that grow Christian discipleship either in self or in others are grouped under discipleship. Our words of wisdom, knowledge, teaching, helping etc helps directly or indirectly to groom and nurture somebody with in church, small group or in market place.
- Transformation Gifts :In the books of acts the apostles were equipped with the transformation gifts. They had power to heal the sick, perform miracles and acted as evangelist. The combination of these gifts helped greatly in the spread of gospel during the 1st century. One of the great example could be what happened to Paul in the island of Malta (Acts 28:3-10). A poisonous snake bit his hand and the villager saw it. They thought he was murderer and expected him to die immediately. When nothing happened to him they changed their mind and realized they have a witnessed a miracle. The whole village welcomed them and it opened the door for gospel.
While we study the gifts, lets remember below facts from bible.
- Man is known by his fruit (Luke 6:43-45, Matthew 7:16-20) and not by his gifts (Matthew 7:21-23). Hence the gifts are primarily for glorifying God's kingdom and it should be used in His service with at most care.
- It does not matter how many gifts we have or given, but it matters how we use them (Matthew 25:14-30)
