Welcome back; here are the last two commonly asked questions about spiritual gifts that I came up with…

Do spiritual gifts operate independently from one another?

No, they don’t, and this is a key point!  God designed the body of Christ to be inter-dependant, so there are no spiritual Lone Rangers running around out there!  We as Christians need each other to be able to function as God planned.  For example, can you picture a leadership team running around with no mercy?  Things would get done, but there would be body bags all over the place.  Can you imagine the gift of faith operating without the gift of administration?  There would be great and wonderful ideas and visions, but nothing would ever be done about them.

How many gifts are there and what are they?

The primary scriptural passages list 19 gifts (20 if you count tongues and interpretation as different) The passages are: Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4.

There are 9 other items for which there is strong Biblical support even though they are not listed in the three main texts on the subject, and they are:

While we will not be dogmatic about this list, and we will certainly add that we are not infallible here, there are several reasons for these things being considered.  The gifts listed in Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4 do not match up exactly: Why?  A likely reason for this is that God knows us well enough to know that if they did matchup exactly that this would unduly limit His ability to work effectively with us.  The reason is that if He had given us a “Thus saith the LORD” kind of list that we would codify it, go totally legalistic and carve every action into stone.  We would want to make up a list of extra rules and regulations about them (as though we don’t do enough of that already) and that we would not be able to recognize a special situation.   The practical result would be that God couldn’t do anything without our permission!  Doesn’t the whole history of the Law bear this out?

So, if it doesn’t build up the body of Christ, if it doesn’t serve the common good of the body of Christ, if it doesn’t advance God’s work, and glorify God then it doesn’t belong on the list of spiritual gifts.  In the final analysis, we know that there are great changes coming both in the world, in society and in the church.  We can see that there are going to be challenges for us that were not even dreamed of just a few years ago, but through all of this, great things are happening in the body of Christ!  God is keeping His tool box open and available to meet these challenges, and as long as we are willing to be open to His leading and open to His ability to have that open tool box, He will provide us with the tools that we need to minister effectively to meet the needs and achieve the purpose of the body of Christ as the future unfolds.