My friend Pete has been taking enormous risks for as long as I’ve known him, and I’ve never once seen him look rattled by any of them. He moved to Austin as a resident on the strength of one conversation, took a leadership role that nobody could have described to him yet, moved his family overseas when most people we know wouldn’t have considered it, and then wrestled his way through a calling to come back. For years I quietly wondered whether he was counting the cost of following Jesus… and what I was really doing was filing his gift of faith under his personality.
He always believed God would provide, that the Spirit would move, and that God’s mission had no insurmountable problems. I’ve come to think that’s a gift, and that what I did with it is one of the ways we lose it in the church.
That’s the trouble with both gifts in this post. Generosity looks like a bank balance and faith looks like a temperament, so we explain both by natural causes long before we ask what the Spirit is doing. Which makes the first claim the one we get wrong first: the gift of giving isn’t a bigger number. It’s a whole heart, and Paul says so in a place we’ve perhaps read past.
What Paul Actually Says About the Giver
Romans 12 moves through the gifts quickly, a clause each, and the giver gets six words: “the one who contributes, in generosity.” The Greek behind “contributes” is plain: metadidomi, to impart or to give. The word doing the real work is attached to it, haplotes, which sits much closer to sincerely and without pretense than to abundantly. So the phrase isn’t a “how much” instruction at all… it’s a description of the heart the Spirit is working in. Somebody with very little to give can obey it completely.
Paul spends two entire chapters on it elsewhere. He wants the Corinthians to finish a collection for the poor believers in Jerusalem, and rather than pressing them directly, he tells them about somebody else.
“We want you to know, brothers, about the grace of God that has been given among the churches of Macedonia, for in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part. For they gave according to their means, as I can testify, and beyond their means, of their own accord, begging us earnestly for the favor of taking part in the relief of the saints—and this, not as we expected, but they gave themselves first to the Lord and then by the will of God to us.”
(2 Corinthians 8:1-5)
Read that last clause carefully. They gave themselves to the Lord first, and the money came second; Paul says the second part surprised him. The gift isn’t the transfer of money. It’s a person devoted to God with the money still in their hand, eager to support a worker and brother. The transaction happens precisely because it’s no longer the point. That’s what the Spirit does in a giver: sincere rather than performative, willing rather than pressured, obliged by nothing, and finally offering themselves.
Notice the Macedonians were poor. Paul says it twice: extreme poverty and beyond their means. It immediately reminds me of Mark 12 where Jesus sits across from the treasury watching people put money in. A poor widow drops in two small copper coins, and Jesus calls His disciples over to look.
“Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the offering box. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”
(Mark 12:43-44)
The Bible’s two great pictures of this gift are both of people who had almost nothing, and that’s worth genuinely sitting with. Church leaders often celebrate the person who gives significantly out of their wealth, and that’s where we go looking for the gift… but Jesus and Paul both keep finding it among the poor. In my own personal support-raising, the greatest joy I have is in those who give in the smallest, most faithful ways.
What We Do to the Giver
We do two things to this gift, and the first is so ordinary it barely registers. We don’t receive it. Sometimes that’s because we never see it. A large gift out of abundance is easy to notice and easy to thank, and the widow’s kind of giving stays invisible unless somebody is sitting where Jesus was sitting, watching the box. Seeing the gift of giving takes intentionality to look for it.
And sometimes we see it and still don’t receive it. Look again at what the Macedonians were up to: “begging us earnestly for the favor of taking part.” The ESV notes that the word behind “favor” is charis, which can mean favor, grace, or thanks. They were begging for the grace of being let into the sacrificial, joyful act. Giving, in Paul’s account, is participation, and somebody exercising this gift is asking to be part of the work rather than fund it from a distance. So when a church takes the money and never tells the giver what it did, or thanks them in a way that closes the conversation instead of opening it, or routes it through a process built so nobody’s got to be in a relationship with anybody, the gift’s been used, and the giver hasn’t been received. They’ll usually keep giving, which is why we’ve gotten away with this for years. And our automated digital systems of giving make relationships even more transactional and not even noticeable.
The second thing we do is squeeze for more. Paul carefully refuses to, even though he’s mid-fundraising-letter with every reason to ask for more. He tells the Corinthians plainly, “I say this not as a command.” He arranges the collection before he arrives so it’ll be ready “as a willing gift, not as an exaction.” Then he says it flat out: “Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” That’s the same cheerfulness he attaches to mercy back in Romans 12, doing the same work in both places, telling you the condition of the person rather than the size of the act. If we twist arms or ask for more than we need, we so quickly squelch the joy for both the giver and the receiver.
And the giver isn’t automatically innocent here, either. Money can buy proximity and influence in a church, generosity can purchase a seat at a table nobody would otherwise offer, and a giver can learn to enjoy that arrangement as much as the leaders do. I’ve seen it happen. But a church quietly running on one person or family’s generosity has a problem gratitude won’t fix. Read James 2 and consider the sin of partiality.
Faith Is Not Just Optimism
The other gift in this post gets even less room. Four words in the middle of a list: “to another faith by the same Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:9). Paul doesn’t define it, doesn’t illustrate it, and he’s on to healing before the sentence ends.
So most of the definitional work here is defining what the gift isn’t. This isn’t saving faith, because Paul is listing things not everybody has, and every Christian has that one: “by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8-9). And it isn’t the ordinary measure of trust God hands every believer either, “the measure of faith that God has assigned” (Romans 12:3), which sits five verses before the Romans gift list and is addressed to everyone. What Paul names here is a third thing, apportioned “to each one individually as he wills” like everything else in the chapter.
The word study won’t do the sorting for us either. The Greek word is pistis in all three places, the ordinary word for confidence, certainty, and trust in whatever it’s resting on. Paul doesn’t give this gift its own word… he gives it its own distribution.
Which leaves some cross-references to tell us what it looks like, and the ESV’s run to two very different verses. One is 1 Corinthians 13:2 and the faith that moves mountains — the dramatic end of it. The other is more subdued, and I’d guess most of us have never connected it to the gift at all: “Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, ‘I believed, and so I spoke,’ we also believe, and so we also speak” (2 Corinthians 4:13, quoting Psalm 116:10).
I believed, and so I spoke. Whatever else this gift is, I don’t think it is private. This can certainly be twisted into Word of Faith and the modern manifesting nonsense, but faith here is connected to speaking. The person carrying it says aloud what they’re convinced God will do, and often keeps saying it after everyone else has quietly stopped praying for it. They aren’t necessarily more optimistic than the rest of us. They just can’t hold the conviction silently. That’s what Pete was doing all those years. He wasn’t naive; he simply had the gift of faith.
What We Do to the Person of Faith
The other diminishment is subtler, and usually kinder. We hear the gift and file it as naivety.
Somebody says God’s going to do a thing, the room does the arithmetic, and the arithmetic isn’t on their side. So we start managing them. We put them where their conviction can be absorbed without disturbing anything, we praise their heart in the tone people use for children, and we let them understand, without ever saying it, that their job is to be talked down. It works. I’ve sadly done this.
The impact, though, is that people with the gift of faith get quieter; they learn to caveat, and eventually they run the numbers before they open their mouth, like everybody else. And the church that trained them won’t ever know what it didn’t hear, because a conviction nobody voices leaves no evidence behind.
I never said any of my doubts out loud to Pete, and what that means is he never got to answer them with his own faith. I NEED people with this gift because I am so prone to planning and trusting what God’s providence will produce, not His power.
There’s a real danger on the other side, though, and Paul names it one chapter after he lists the gift, in the sharpest way available to him: “And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” Faith that isn’t tethered to love will spend other people’s money and other people’s safety on a certainty it’s never had to pay for itself… which is where these two gifts meet and where they can do each other the most damage, since the one with faith is often making promises about resources the giver will have to produce. Neither can be trusted alone. A church that has both, and lets both speak, and makes them answer to each other in love, is holding something rare.
Paul, having refused to command the Corinthians, does the only other thing left to him in his letter. He shows them Jesus: “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.” Every giver in the Bible stands downstream of that sentence, and so does everyone who’s ever believed God for something the room had given up on.
When Paul runs out of argument two chapters later, he doesn’t land on the collection. He lands here: “Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!”
My hope is we’d do the same with the gifts the Spirit gives to the church.
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