The gift of Service

Primary Text: 1 Corinthians 12:5

The gift of Service is the ability to identify and meet the practical needs of others. Service and Helps can be easily confused, here is the difference.  Helps is a coming alongside another person to help them accomplish what they are doing.  Service is a matter of finding things on your own and taking the initiative to accomplish those tasks for the Kingdom. Thus we can say that the purpose of the gift is to bring an overall sense of love, holiness and community to the body of believers.

As with the other gifts, there are a few cautions for someone who has this gift, and they include  serving with wrong or impure motives, becoming upset or bitter is your service isn’t recognized, becoming upset if others don’t perceive the same need, and becoming overly aggressive in seeking out people to serve, with the classic example being that of a person helping an ‘old lady’ to cross the street… a street she wasn’t intending to cross!

Evidence that you have this gift would be things like easily identifying the needs of others, having a genuine desire to serve others and gaining a sense of satisfaction and joy from serving others, for your greatest passion is to serve others in ways that are important to God.

The gif of Administration

Primary Text: 1 Corinthians 12:28

The gift of Administration is the ability to coordinate and organize people and projects. It’s purpose is to ensure that dreams, plans, goals, and objectives are realized in a smooth and efficient manner for the glory of God.

Cautions about this gift are interesting; they all tend to deal with putting tasks ahead of people:

•You may tend to put projects before people

•You may be overly concerned with details

•You may have a tendency toward perfectionism

•You may have a tendency to focus more on rules and procedures than on accomplishing the mission.

A person with the gift of Administration usually looks like this:

•You enjoy planning and goal setting

•Organization comes easily to you

•You can manage multiple tasks at one time

•You have a servant heart

•You will stick with a project until it is complete

•You tend to be thorough and objective

The gift of Discernment

Primary Text: 1 Corinthians 12:10; 1 John 4:1-3

The gift of Discernment is the ability to perceive whether a person’s actions originate from Godly, Satanic or merely human sources. Its purpose is to prevent confusion, division and false teaching from infiltrating the body of Christ. Again, there are some cautions:

•Having a spiritually superior attitude

•You tend to spot a “demon” behind every bush

•You become skeptical about everyone

Some evidence that you have the gift…

• You have a clear sense about whether people are telling the truth or telling lies.

•Your spirit is sensitive to the things of God

•You can spot insincerity quickly and easily

•You have a close and committed relationship with God

•You tend to be perceptive and insightful

We’ll tackle the next two later today, Faith and Music…