Making disciples is an endeavor that is very hard to separate from the discussion of spiritual gifts, both in terms of the gifts of the disciple and the gifts of his subject.  Both have one or more spiritual gifts, and those gifts will have an effect on how the disciple works with others, and on how the newer believer can be reached. There is no way that I know of for me to cover this very large subject in one post; I’m not sure that I can cover it in any number of posts to be honest.

A few years back, I was involved in putting to gether a course on spiritual gifts. To be more accurate, I was involved in adapting a course for use in a congregation after a big “chunk” had been lost to a crash.  It’s a six-week course, but I’m not sure I’m clever enough to put it into a blog format; I’ll continue to think about that for a possible future series of posts, but for now, let’s just have a quick look at the general subject and most importantly, I’ll explain how this comes in to play for someone who is trying to “make disciples.”

First of all, when I use the term “spiritual gift” I mean a distinctive ability given by the Holy Spirit to every Christian according to God’s grace and design, for the purpose of building the body of Christ.  Please do not attribute any other definition to this term for the purpose of this post, or we will no longer be communicating.  Spiritual gifts are discussed in numerous texts in the New Testament, with the principle texts being: Romans 12:3-21; 1 Corinthians 12; Ephesians 4:7-16; 1 Peter 4:10-11.

Second, the actual gift is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, which is to say that the spiritual gift all Christians have is the Spirit Himself.  The “spiritual gift” we all discuss is the manner in which the Holy Spirit manifests Himself in our ministry.  This is not the same thing as a natural talent or ability, it transcends natural human traits.

Third, we need to find out what the spiritual gifts of our people are, and they need to find them out too. There are several reasons for this:  First, if a person has the gift of teaching, but we need a greeter, pushing that person in the direction we want and against the direction in which they have been gifted by the Holy Spirit isn’t going to work out for anyone, and the body will suffer for it.  This brings us to the second reason which is the fact that God will often inform the leadership of a congregation of the direction He wants them to go by the gifts of the people He brings to their congregation.  If you find that suddenly, a high percentage of the new people who come to you are gifted in a particular direction, you can bet your bottom dollar that God is telling you something!  Sadly, very few leadership teams ever notice things like this!

Finally, it is very important for the younger Christin to understand what their gifts are because very frequently this will be the single thing that influences them the most in their early days.  I have seem several cases where an individual was “holding back” a bit in their spiritual growth. They were not quite ready to let go of their pasts, their personal likes and dislikes and so forth.  Then they learned about spiritual gifts from our class.  Finding out their gifts seemed to set them free from doubt, worry and shyness over night and they rapidly became key workers in ministry teams; it was as though they had received permission for doing what they knew they should do already.

To sum up this post, it is very important for us to know about and have a proper understanding of the subject of spiritual gifts in order for us to be effective in making disciples.  For many of us, this is a murky area because we don’t want to seem like we have gone off the deep end, or because we have been taught badly in the past about the subject.  There are many misconceptions, that’s for sure, yet if we learn what the gifts are, what they do and have a basic understanding of the purpose of spiritual gifts, this understanding can make all the difference in becoming a mature disciple ourselves, and in helping others to do the same.

I’m struggling right here; this is the end of this post… I have accomplished my mission which is to get you thinking about the subject.  Yet it strikes me that what I’ve really done here is more of a tease than anything for most people.  I’ve given just enough for most people to ge the idea that there might be something to check into, but I haven’t gone the next step and answered the questions you have.  I’m not sure how to do that on a blog!

I’ll be thinking about his and I’ll drop in another post later in the week; I’d like to get this right, you see…

As for this Disciple series, next week we’ll take a look at encouraging others.