How Do We Discover Our Spiritual Gifts?

Question 09068

Few questions reach me more often than this one: how do I work out what my spiritual gifts actually are? It usually arrives with a little anxiety attached, as though the Christian life were a treasure hunt and somebody had mislaid the map. I want to take that anxiety out of the question straight away. The Holy Spirit has already given you what He intends you to have, and finding it is far less mysterious than we tend to make it.

Here is the thing that surprised me when I first worked through the relevant passages carefully. The New Testament never once instructs a believer to go looking for a gift. It instructs us to serve, to love, and to build one another up, and it assumes that gifting will show itself in the doing. That reframing changes everything about how we approach the question.

Start With What Scripture Says About Spiritual Gifts

The four main passages are Romans 12:3-8, 1 Corinthians 12, Ephesians 4:7-16 and 1 Peter 4:10-11. Read them together rather than separately and a consistent picture emerges. The word Paul most often uses is charisma, a grace-gift, something handed to you rather than earned by you. Peter uses the same root when he calls believers stewards of God’s varied grace. You are a steward of something you did not buy.

Those texts tell us four things about spiritual gifts that settle a great deal of the confusion. They are given by the Holy Spirit and not selected by the recipient. They are given for the common good and not for personal standing. They are deliberately varied, because a body made entirely of one organ is not a body but a tumour. And every believer has at least one, which means the question is never whether you have been gifted but what you have been gifted with.

If you begin anywhere other than the text, you will end up chasing whatever gifting happens to be fashionable in your circle. I have watched sincere believers conclude that they must be defective because they could not produce the one gift their church prized most highly. Scripture protects us from that. Familiarity with what the Bible actually says about spiritual gifts is the first and best safeguard.

The Spirit Gives, and You Do Not Choose

Paul could not be plainer. All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills (1 Corinthians 12:11). The distribution is His decision. Later in the same chapter Paul says that God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. Twice in one passage the initiative is placed firmly with God.

That has a liberating effect once it sinks in. You are not responsible for the gifting you were not given. You are responsible for the gifting you were. A great deal of frustration in church life comes from believers trying to be someone else’s answer to prayer rather than their own. The Spirit knows which part of the body He is building, and He does not make mistakes about placement.

Gifts Show Up in Service, Not in Solitude

Spiritual gifts are not discovered by sitting still and waiting for a feeling. They surface in use. A person with the gift of teaching finds that when they open a passage, other people understand it and grow. A person with the gift of mercy finds themselves drawn towards the suffering and finds that their presence actually helps. A person gifted in administration finds that the muddle in front of them starts to become orderly and that others are relieved rather than irritated by it.

So my counsel is almost embarrassingly practical. Volunteer. Take on the thing nobody else wants to do. Serve in the creche, help with the sound desk, visit the housebound, teach the children. You will learn more about your spiritual gifts in six months of unglamorous service than in six years of introspection. The body of Christ is not a laboratory and you are not a specimen. It is a working organism, and function reveals design.

This is why I keep pointing new believers towards the ordinary life of the local congregation rather than towards a course. If you want to know why the gathered church matters so much for this, I have set out the wider case in what the church is actually for.

Let Your Church Tell You What It Sees

One of the healthiest habits a believer can develop is asking mature Christians in their own congregation what they observe. We are not reliable judges of ourselves. Some of us think far too highly of our abilities and some of us far too little, and both errors distort the picture. The people who have watched you serve for three years have data that you do not have.

Ask them directly. Where do you see me being useful? What do I do that seems to help people? Where do you think I am straining against the grain? Be prepared for an answer you did not expect. I have known men convinced they were called to preach who were in fact gifted evangelists, and quiet women who assumed they had nothing to offer who turned out to carry a pastoral gift that shaped a whole congregation.

This is one of the reasons the New Testament assumes membership in a real, local, accountable body rather than a loose association of the spiritually curious. Discernment about spiritual gifts is a community project. It cannot happen among strangers.

Watch What God Blesses

There is a difference between doing something and God using it. Fruitfulness is not the only test, but it is a real one. Paul told the Corinthians that the gifts are given for building up, oikodome, the same word used of constructing a house. If your service consistently leaves people stronger, clearer and more confident in God, that is evidence worth weighing.

Equally, if you have laboured at something for years and nothing is built, that may be the Lord’s gentle redirection rather than a failure of faith. I say gentle, because He is not in the business of humiliating His servants. Sometimes the most useful discovery is that a particular task belongs to someone else, and that discovery releases you into what was yours all along.

The Trouble With Gift Inventories

Questionnaires that promise to identify your gifting can be a useful conversation starter, and I have used them without much harm. But they measure preference and personality as much as anything, and they can hand people a label that then becomes a wall. I have heard believers refuse a legitimate request for help on the grounds that hospitality was not on their printout. That is not what Paul had in mind.

Whatever your gifting, Scripture still commands you to show hospitality, to give generously, to encourage the fainthearted and to speak the truth to your neighbour. Those are Christian duties, not specialisms. Spiritual gifts describe where you will be most fruitful; they never describe the limits of your obedience.

Named or Not, Keep Serving

Some believers never settle on a tidy label, and I am not sure that matters as much as we imagine. The New Testament lists differ from one another and none of them looks exhaustive, which suggests they are illustrative rather than a closed catalogue. The aim is not to complete a personality profile. The aim is to be useful to Jesus and to His people.

I would also add a word about seasons. Gifting can be exercised differently at different stages of life, and a season of caring for elderly parents or small children may look very unlike a season of public ministry while drawing on the same underlying grace. Do not conclude that your spiritual gifts have evaporated because your circumstances have narrowed. They are given for a lifetime, not for a decade.

Do Spiritual Gifts Ever Change?

People often ask whether the spiritual gifts a believer receives at conversion are fixed for life. The New Testament does not answer that question directly, which should make us cautious about answering it dogmatically. What we can say is that Paul urges Timothy to fan into flame the gift of God that is in him (2 Timothy 1:6), which implies that a gift can burn low through neglect and can be revived through deliberate use. Gifting is not a fixed quantity sitting in a drawer.

I have also watched capacities grow. A hesitant teacher becomes a confident one over fifteen years, not because a new gift arrived but because the old one was exercised. Spiritual gifts behave rather like muscles in that respect. They strengthen under load and they waste when unused, and the believer who complains of having nothing to offer has sometimes simply not lifted anything for a long while.

There is also the plain fact that God calls people into new work. A believer who has served quietly for years may find themselves asked to lead, and discover that they were being prepared all along. So hold your understanding of your own spiritual gifts firmly enough to serve and loosely enough to be surprised. The Spirit who apportions as He wills is not obliged to keep you in the same slot for forty years, and He often does not.

So, now what?

Stop auditing yourself and start serving. Pick the need in front of you in your own congregation and do it faithfully for a year. Ask two or three mature believers who know you well what they see. Read Romans 12:3-8 slowly, with a pen, and notice how quickly Paul moves from gifting to love, sincerity and honouring one another.

And hold the whole thing loosely enough to enjoy it. The Spirit gave you what He gave you because He wanted that particular contribution in that particular body. Related questions are worth thinking through too: gifts can go wrong, as I explain in can gifts be misused, and there is a right and a wrong way to seek gifts in the first place. If your concern is how a congregation honours the Spirit without tipping into excess, I have addressed that as well.

What would change this week if you believed that God has already equipped you for the good works He prepared for you to walk in?

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.

1 Peter 4:10-11 (ESV)