What is the gift of teaching?

Question 4064.

Of all the gifts I could be asked about, the gift of teaching is one I hold especially dear, because it is the gift God has largely given to me, and I have watched it feed and steady His people over many years. The gift of teaching is a Spirit-given ability to take the truth of God and make it clear, so that ordinary believers actually grasp and hold what God has said.

Let me say at the very outset what this gift is not. It is not the same thing as being clever, or well read, or a confident and polished speaker, though God may certainly use all of those. The gift of teaching is something the Spirit Himself gives, and its aim is never to make the teacher look impressive but to make the Scriptures plain to the hearer. Let me unpack what it really is, where it comes from, and how you might recognise it.

A gift the Spirit gives, not a skill I earn

Paul lists teaching among the gifts that the Spirit distributes to the church (Romans 12:7; 1 Corinthians 12:28), and that placing matters a great deal. The gift of teaching is supernatural in its origin. The same Spirit who inspired the Scriptures in the first place is the Spirit who now enables certain believers to open those Scriptures up for others. Without Him at work, the words simply stay flat and lifeless on the page, however learned the teacher may be.

That keeps me humble, and it ought to. Whatever study I put in, and I put in a great deal of it, I cannot of myself make the truth actually land in another person’s heart. Only the Spirit can do that. So the gift of teaching is not a platform for showing off my learning or winning admiration. It is a stewardship entrusted to me by God, given for one purpose, that His people might be built up and grow. You can read how every believer comes to find their own gift in my answer on discovering and using your spiritual gift.

What the gift of teaching actually does

At its simplest, the gift of teaching takes what is true and makes it understood. The teacher explains, clarifies, orders and applies the Word of God so that the hearer is able to say, ah, now at last I see it. It is closely tied to the Spirit’s wider ministry of illumination, of opening the understanding so that spiritual things make sense, which I touch on in my answer on the Spirit’s role in teaching Scripture. The teacher cannot do that opening; the teacher serves the Spirit who does.

Notice too that the gift is bound to a fixed and given content. A true teacher in the church is not free to be original in the sense of inventing new doctrine or improving on the apostles. The teacher is a steward of what has been handed down once for all to the saints, no more and no less. The creativity, and there is real creativity in it, lies entirely in the explanation, in finding the picture, the order or the illustration that makes an old and settled truth suddenly clear and alive. The truth itself is never up for revision.

Teaching and shepherding belong together

In Ephesians 4:11 Paul speaks of pastors and teachers in a way that ties the two very closely together, and I think that knitting is deliberate. A shepherd who does not feed the flock is no real shepherd at all, and the food of the flock is the Word of God, taught. So the gift of teaching is by no means only for the lecture hall or the seminary. It is for the pulpit, the small group, the discipleship class, the kitchen table, anywhere at all that God’s people need the truth made clear and brought to bear on real life.

This guards me against a subtle danger that every teacher knows. I can come to love the explaining for its own sake, the elegance of an argument, the satisfaction of a well-turned point, and quietly forget the actual sheep it is all meant to feed. But the gift of teaching is given for people, never for performance. If my teaching does not nourish, steady and change real lives, then I have turned a God-given means into a self-serving end, and I have missed the whole point.

A gift that carries a heavier weight

James says something that every teacher ought to feel in his very bones: not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness (James 3:1). The gift of teaching is a high privilege, but it is a weighty and sobering one. To handle God’s truth in front of God’s people is to take real responsibility for what they come to believe and how they come to live. That is not a thing to take up lightly or hold loosely.

So a teacher must always be a teachable person first. I cannot honestly pass on to others what I have not first received and sat under and let do its work in me. The very best teachers I have ever known are lifelong learners who still tremble a little at the responsibility, and that trembling is a healthy and proper thing. A teacher who has stopped being taught, who no longer sits humbly under the Word himself, is a teacher already heading quietly for trouble.

How to recognise the gift in yourself or others

So how do you know whether you, or someone in your fellowship, actually has the gift of teaching? Look for a few honest signs rather than a feeling. There is usually a deep love for the truth and a real hunger to understand it more fully. There is an ability to take something tangled and complicated and make it genuinely clear to others, so that people go away saying they have finally grasped what always confused them. And there is fruit, real fruit, believers actually growing, being steadied and equipped under that ministry over time.

And please do not despise the quieter forms of the gift while you wait for the grand ones. The mother patiently teaching her children the Scriptures at bedtime, the older believer carefully explaining a hard passage to a younger one over coffee, the small-group leader who makes the text live for ordinary people on a weeknight, these are all the gift of teaching at work in its truest form. It does not need a stage, a title or a microphone to be real and to bear lasting fruit.

The gift of teaching and the health of the whole church

I want you to see how much the health of a whole church hangs on the gift of teaching being honoured and rightly used. Paul says the gifts were given to equip the saints for the work of ministry, so that the body grows up and is no longer tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine (Ephesians 4:12-14). A well-taught church is a stable church, hard to deceive and slow to drift. A poorly taught church is at the mercy of the loudest and latest voice.

So the gift of teaching is never just for the teacher’s sake or even the hearer’s sake alone; it is for the protection and the growth of the entire body. This is why I take it so seriously, and why you should value sound teaching far above clever entertainment. When the truth is made plain week by week, ordinary believers are quietly equipped to stand, to serve, and to teach others in their turn. That is how a healthy church reproduces itself.

And remember that the gift of teaching is meant to multiply itself. Paul told Timothy to entrust what he had heard to faithful men who would be able to teach others also (2 Timothy 2:2). So a true teacher is always quietly raising up the next, never hoarding the truth but handing it on. If God has given you the gift of teaching, then ask yourself honestly whom you are training to carry it on after you are gone.

So, now what?

If God has given you this gift, then for His sake do not bury it in the ground. Develop it, submit it humbly to the oversight of your church, and above all keep sitting under the truth yourself, because you simply cannot give to others what you do not first possess. Teach in order to feed people, not in order to impress them, and let the sheer weight of the responsibility keep you often on your knees before the God whose Word you handle.

And if teaching is not your particular gift, then thank God warmly for those who have it, pray for them more than you criticise them, and receive the Word they bring you with an open Bible and an open, humble heart. The whole body of Christ is fed and strengthened when the gift of teaching is honoured and faithfully used. So how will you either use this gift, or actively support it, in your own fellowship this year?

“And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.” Ephesians 4:11-12