A spiritual gift is a divine enablement (a special God-given ability) that God entrusts to each individual believer in order to involve them in the task of advancing his purposes.
Spiritual gift assessments can be a helpful tool in the discovery process of your spiritual gifts, however, to truly determine your spiritual gifts, it must be done in the context of community. We need to try it out. We need feedback from others. We need experiences of serving in various ways, and sort of “experiment”, with what our gifts might be to really get a clearer sense of our spiritual giftedness. But for now, here’s an assessment to help you in your journey.
Here are a few key facts about spiritual gifts.
1. God endows EVERY follower of Jesus with at least ONE spiritual gift.
- A spiritual gift is given to each of us. (1 Corinthians 12:7 NLT)
- God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts. Use them well to serve one another. (1 Peter 4:10 LB)
- Often, you have more than one spiritual gift, maybe 2 or 3. That’s called your GIFT MIX.
2. Spiritual gifts cannot be EARNED or CHOSEN.
- It is the one and only Spirit who distributes all these gifts. He alone decides which gift each person should have. (1 Corinthians 12:11 NLT)
3. Spiritual gifts are not given to us in FULLY DEVELOPED form.
- …fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you… (1 Timothy 1:6 NIV)
- This may seem obvious, but it’s amazing how many misconceptions there are about it.
- Yes, spiritual gifts have this supernatural power that comes with them when they are in operation. But at a human level, God instructs us to take responsibility to develop our gifts.
4. Spiritual gifts are endowed to us by the Holy Spirit with the purpose of EDIFYING others and GLORIFYING God. (See 1 Peter 4:10-11 and Ephesians 4:11-12, and verse 16)