Friday, September 14, 2012

Role of the Apostolic: Identifying Spiritual Gifts


Part of the role of the Apostolic is to call out the giftings in other people and set them in roles and teams according to their giftings. For this reason, an apostolic person must know the different giftings and be able to identify them on a person. It is also helpful to know how they might be packaged in a certain individual to carry out a specific function.

Three of the primary passages concerning the spiritual gifts are as follows: I Corinthians 12:3-8, I Corinthians 12:27-31, and Romans 12:3-8. The primary passages describing the Five-Fold ministry are Ephesians 4:11-16 and I Corinthians 12:27-31.

From these three passages on the spiritual gifts, there are twenty-one gifts listed and some of them overlap. Eliminating the repeating ones, there are seventeen remaining from these passages: words of wisdom, words of knowledge, gift of faith, gifts of healings, gift of prophecy, working of miracles, discerning of spirits, different kinds of tongues, interpretation of tongues, helps (or serving), administrations, ministry, teaching, exhorting, giving, leading, and mercy. (Some may combine helps & ministry, but I will leave it separate for now).

Not every person has all of the gifts. I believe every person can operate in all of the gifts at different times because every believer has the Holy Spirit living inside of them, so at any point, God can use any believer to operate in one of these gifts.

However, God designed the body of Christ to function as a body with different parts. Each person has their own part to play, so God will grant them certain gifts that they continually operate in more than the other gifts. Many times, God will package these gifts in a person to fulfill a certain role in the body of Christ.

We will take the next few blogs to discuss how these gifts may be packaged to carry out different roles.

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