When I was preparing that breakout on spiritual gifts, the one I wrote about in the last post, I did what I often do with a complicated topic: I built a table. Four columns, one for each of the passages where the gifts get listed, with every entry lined up under its text. Tables and frameworks help me make sense of a lot of complicated things.
In this one, the columns are different lengths. Some gifts show up in two lists and not the others. Tongues appear twice in the same chapter. And these lists are remarkably different for being on a similar topic. Underneath the table, I ended up writing a note to myself: these passages are hard to untangle because they move between the practice or expression of a gift, the gift itself, and gifted people. “Utterance of wisdom” is a practice, something done in a moment. “Administration” is a capacity, something a person seemingly carries. And “apostles” and “prophets” aren’t gifts in the grammatical sense…they seem to be people. In my reading of these texts, Paul moves between an activity, an ability, and a person without slowing down to tell you he’s changing categories.
I think that slide is often where most of our confusion about the gifts begins. We flatten four lists into one master inventory (or just dismiss these in the case of many who hold a stricter view of cessationism), and then treat every entry as the same kind of item…a “gift” in the abstract sense. And then we wonder why the whole subject feels like a junk drawer. So before this series walks through the gifts themselves, I want to do the sorting work once, here, to set the table for future clarity in my writing.
Three Kinds of Words
Here are the four lists side by side, in the ESV’s own words, so you can watch the categories shift.
| 1 Corinthians 12:8-10 | 1 Corinthians 12:28-30 | Ephesians 4:11 | Romans 12:6-8 |
|---|---|---|---|
| utterance of wisdom | apostles | apostles | prophecy |
| utterance of knowledge | prophets | prophets | service |
| faith | teachers | evangelists | teaching |
| gifts of healing | miracles | shepherds and teachers | exhortation |
| working of miracles | gifts of healing | contributing | |
| prophecy | helping | leading | |
| ability to distinguish between spirits | administrating | acts of mercy | |
| various kinds of tongues | various kinds of tongues | ||
| interpretation of tongues | interpretation (v. 30) |
Some entries name a practice, the thing that happens when the Spirit moves through someone: an utterance of wisdom, an utterance of knowledge, the interpretation of a tongue. You cannot schedule these; they occur in real time and are responsive to the Spirit’s prompting.
Some entries name a gift proper, a Spirit-given capacity that a person stewards over time: administration, helping, teaching, giving, leading, mercy. These look more like what we usually mean by the word “gift,” something distributed to someone and exercised again and again.
And some entries name a gifted person. Ephesians 4:11 doesn’t say Christ gave apostleship to the church; it says he gave apostles. Prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers…and though other interpretations are possible, I think here the gift is the person. That distinction turns out to matter quite a bit, and it’s where the next post in this series will live, because whether apostleship is a capacity the Spirit distributes, or a person Christ appoints, is a question I’m still wrestling with honestly.
For now, the point is simpler. When someone asks, “What are the spiritual gifts?” I don’t think the biblical answer is a single laminated list. It’s a set of overlapping snapshots, taken from different angles, of one reality: God’s varied grace working through his people. Which is why I don’t like to start with the lists at all.
The Text I Start With
When I taught that breakout, hardly anyone in the room named 1 Peter 4 when I asked for a passage on the spiritual gifts. We instinctively move to Paul because he repeated it. But the apostle Peter addresses it too! And this is the passage I started with, because in two verses Peter does what my table couldn’t. He sorts the whole business.
“As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.”
(1 Peter 4:10-11)
Look at what’s packed in there.
Each has received a gift. Not some of us, and not just the impressive ones… each. Paul says the same thing to Corinth: “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7). So the question in front of you is never whether you have a gift. It’s what you’ve been given and whether you’re using it to serve anyone in the Spirit’s power.
The gifts are for one another. Peter’s word is stewardship, which means the gift in your hands belongs to somebody else’s good. A steward manages what isn’t his.
And then the sorting: whoever speaks, whoever serves. Two kinds of gifts. Every entry in every one of those four lists in the table could be categorized as one or the other. Teaching, prophecy, exhortation, a word of wisdom are speaking gifts. Mercy, giving, helping, administration, and healing are serving gifts. Another way I like to frame these gifts is “declaring” and “demonstrating.” Some gifts declare the good news of Jesus; some gifts demonstrate the reality of the kingdom. Gospel ministry has always needed both, which means the church needs both, which means we value both. The one who quietly restocks the supplies and the one who teaches the room are stewarding the same varied grace.
So perhaps the first genuinely useful question in discerning your own gifting is not “which of the nineteen entries am I?” but something much plainer: when God works through me, do I find myself empowered more often to speak, or to serve?
What Makes a Gift a Gift
There’s one more piece of sorting to do, because “I’m good at logistics” and “I have the gift of administration” are not the same sentence. And I say that as one who is decent at logistics and seemingly has the gift of administration.
My kids often are the initial case study for me working out writing like this. So the other night, I asked my daughter Emmaline about this at the dinner table: “What’s the difference between a spiritual gift and a natural ability?” We chatted for a bit, and as we talked, I found myself sorting it into three things to help her understand.
The source of a gift is God. A natural ability comes through creation, through the parents and wiring and practice God providentially gave you. A gift is given directly, by the Father who sends the Helper to be with you forever (John 14:16).
The power of a gift is the Holy Spirit. Not adrenaline, not competence, not a good night’s sleep. “God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control” (2 Timothy 1:7). When a gift is working, the strength in the room is his.
And the outcomes of a gift are the worship of God and the fruit of the Spirit. The Spirit’s own agenda is to glorify the Son (John 16:14), so a gift that’s actually his will keep producing worship, and it will come wrapped in his fruit, love and joy and peace and the rest (Galatians 5:22-23), rather than in other forms. That said, the gifts do seem to be exercised for other, less than godly purposes, so this is an ideal. The gifts are also used by those who are less mature…that’s what Paul was correcting in 1 Corinthians. And the Spirit of the Lord often speaks in mysterious ways through unprepared saints and those experiencing God’s grace for the very first time.
All that to say, I think Sam Storms compresses all of that into a definition I like: the gifts are capacities imparted to Christians by the Spirit “to enable them to exceed the limitations of their finite humanity in order to serve other believers to the glory of God.” The important word in that definition is exceed. A natural ability is a real grace from God, and they’re important! But a gift goes beyond what the ability explains. Something happens through you that your talent, your training, and your personality don’t account for, and ideally, it leaves worship in its wake.
I’ve seen this distinction in my own life. Leadership was a natural ability I had before I came to Christ. What changed wasn’t the aptitude; it was that God ignited it, and over the years people seemed to follow the Spirit in me rather than just following my plans. That’s when others began affirming it as a gift rather than a skill. Administration I only recognized by comparison, watching things that were genuinely hard for capable people around me come easily to me, and realizing the difference was God’s grace at work and not my cleverness.
The two categories also overlap without collapsing into each other. Scripture commands every believer to encourage, to give, to show mercy, to be ready to speak the good news of Jesus. The gifted person isn’t excused from the commands they aren’t gifted for, and the ungifted person isn’t excused either. I’ve often said I’m a dutiful evangelist, not a gifted one. I don’t have that gift, and I’m still obligated to the Great Commission. The absence of a gift is never a permission slip. What the gift adds is a persistent, fruit-bearing empowerment in one direction, the place where your obedience and God’s unusual power keep showing up together.
Which suggests the second useful question: where have you seen something happen through you that your abilities don’t explain?
How You Actually Find Out
I have nothing against the questionnaires or tests on the spiritual gifts, and some people have found them a helpful starting place. But the New Testament never hands us one, and the pattern it does hand us is relational and active.
To find yours, reflect on where God has actually used you. Ask the people who know you, because the body often sees your gift before you do…others affirmed leadership and administration in me long before I would have claimed them. Pray for clarity, since it’s not selfish to want to use what God gave you. And then serve, concretely, before you have it all figured out. Storms puts it memorably: “act first and ask later, and your gift will find you.” Or as my friend Steven Bush used to say, “the need is the call.” Look for who is in need before you ask what your gift is, and you might see it show up.
The discernment, in other words, mostly happens in motion. You’ll learn more about your gifting in six months of showing up for people than in sixty minutes with a survey.
Why God Split the Gifts Up
One last thing from Peter’s little passage, because it guards everything else.
The two kinds of gifts run into a single purpose clause: “in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.” The gifts aren’t primarily a self-discovery project, and a gifts series like this one could quietly become that if we let it. The point of knowing your gift is not knowing your gift. It’s that the body would be built up and God would be glorified in everything.
Calvin saw the design in the distribution itself. Commenting on 1 Corinthians 12, he wrote that the Spirit distributes the gifts among us so that all would contribute to the common advantage, giving all of them to no one, “lest any one, satisfied with his particular portion, should separate himself from others, and live solely for himself.”
That’s the beauty of it. God made the gifts partial on purpose. Your gift is incomplete without the body, and the body is incomplete without your gift, and nobody gets to graduate from needing everyone else. Speaking gifts and serving gifts, declaring and demonstrating, each of us holding one piece of God’s varied grace and handing it to one another.
He could have gifted us whole, but in God’s perfect design, he gifted us to each other instead!
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