Can Spiritual Gifts Be Misused?

Question 09069

Anyone who has spent time in church life knows that misused gifts are not a theoretical problem. They are a pastoral one. A gift is a good thing given by a good God, and yet it passes through hands that are still being sanctified, which means it can be handled carelessly, proudly, or with an eye on the wrong audience.

Paul had a whole congregation like this. The Corinthians were not short of gifting; he tells them they were not lacking in any gift (1 Corinthians 1:7). They were short of love, order and self-forgetfulness, and the result was three chapters of correction that the church has needed ever since.

Corinth Shows Us Misused Gifts in Full Colour

The situation at Corinth is worth picturing. Gatherings where several people spoke at once. Tongues without interpretation, so that outsiders walked in and concluded the congregation was unhinged (1 Corinthians 14:23). Prophecy treated as a licence to hold the floor. Communion turned into a display of social rank, with some going hungry while others were drunk. Every one of these is an example of misused gifts rather than absent ones.

Notice what Paul does not do. He does not tell them to stop. He tells them to grow up. Do not be children in your thinking, he says, be infants in evil but in your thinking be mature (1 Corinthians 14:20). The remedy for misused gifts is never the suppression of the Spirit’s work; it is maturity.

Given for the Common Good, Not for Display

The governing sentence sits early in the discussion. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good (1 Corinthians 12:7). That single phrase, sumphero in the sense of what brings benefit together, exposes most abuse before it starts. If the exercise of a gift is drawing attention to the giftedness of the person exercising it, something has gone wrong at the root.

This is the test I apply to myself in the pulpit. Did that sermon leave people thinking about God, or thinking about me? The question is uncomfortable because the honest answer is not always the flattering one. Any of us can turn a genuine gift into a platform, and preachers are not more immune than anybody else.

When Gifts Become Status

The deepest problem in Corinth was not disorder but pride. Some gifts looked more impressive, and impressiveness became currency. Paul’s response is the body image in 1 Corinthians 12:12-26, where he insists that the parts which seem weaker are indispensable and that the less presentable parts are treated with greater modesty. He is deliberately inverting the pecking order.

Misused gifts almost always involve a comparison. Mine is better than yours, or yours is better than mine and therefore I am nothing. Both are the same error wearing different clothes, and both dissolve the moment you remember that the soma, the body, is a single organism with one Head. Feet do not envy hands in a healthy person.

Love Is the Regulator

It is no accident that the great chapter on love sits between the two chapters on gifts. Paul is not changing the subject; he is supplying the missing component. Speak in the tongues of men and angels without love and you are a noisy gong. Have prophetic powers, understand all mysteries, possess a faith that moves mountains, and without love you are nothing (1 Corinthians 13:1-2).

That is a startling valuation. Gifting without agape does not score badly; it scores zero. Which means the corrective for misused gifts is not primarily a rule book but a change of affection. When I genuinely want the person next to me built up more than I want to be admired, most of the practical problems solve themselves.

It is worth noticing where Paul places this argument. He does not treat love as the soft option for people who cannot manage the demanding gifts. He calls it the more excellent way, and then describes it in terms of patience, kindness, the refusal to insist on its own way, and the willingness to bear all things. Every one of those qualities is precisely what a gathering full of eager contributors most needs, and none of them can be faked for long in a small congregation where everybody knows everybody.

Order in the Gathering

Paul does also give practical instruction, and it is refreshingly concrete. Two or three tongues at most, and one at a time, and only with an interpreter. Two or three prophets, with the others weighing what is said. If a revelation comes to someone seated, the first speaker should stop. The spirits of prophets are subject to prophets, because God is not a God of confusion but of peace (1 Corinthians 14:32-33).

That last line demolishes a common excuse. People sometimes defend chaotic behaviour by saying they could not help themselves, that the Spirit overwhelmed them. Paul says the opposite. Self-control is evidence of the Spirit, not evidence of His absence. If a manifestation cannot be paused, that is a reason for caution rather than celebration.

Misused Gifts in the Modern Church

The forms have changed but the substance has not. I see misused gifts today when prophecy is used to manipulate a decision that ought to be made by the congregation, when a leader claims a special anointing that places him beyond question, when teaching becomes a performance, and when giving is announced rather than quiet. I also see it in the reverse direction, in the believer who withholds a gift out of resentment because nobody thanked them last time.

There is a whole industry built on inflated claims, and I have written elsewhere about the misuse of touch not my anointed to shield leaders from accountability. Discernment here is not cynicism. It is love for the flock.

Correcting Without Quenching

The pastoral art is to correct the abuse without extinguishing the gift, and it is genuinely difficult. Do not quench the Spirit, Paul says, do not despise prophecies, but test everything and hold fast what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:19-21). Three instructions held together. Many churches manage one or two and lose the third.

In practice that means teaching before policing. A congregation that has been taught what gifts are for will largely regulate itself, because most misuse comes from enthusiasm rather than malice. Where correction is needed it should be private, specific and kind, and it should come with an invitation to keep serving rather than a demand to sit down permanently.

Misused Gifts and the Silence That Follows

There is a second casualty in all of this that gets very little attention. When misused gifts have damaged a congregation, the usual reaction is not correction but withdrawal. People go quiet. The gifted stop offering, the cautious stop asking, and a church that was once alive with contribution settles into a wary stillness where only the paid staff do anything visible.

That silence looks like peace and it is not. It is the peace of a room where nobody dares speak. Paul faced the same temptation in Corinth and refused it. He could have solved his problem by shutting the whole thing down, and instead he spent three chapters teaching people how to use what God had given them properly. Correction, in his hands, was a way of protecting the gift rather than removing it.

So if you lead a church that has been burned, I would urge you not to let the memory of misused gifts set your policy permanently. Teach carefully, define expectations plainly, start small, and let people serve again under supervision that is honest rather than suspicious. The alternative is a congregation where the Spirit’s work is treated as a liability, and 1 Thessalonians 5:19 has something to say about that.

So, now what?

Examine the thing you do best in church life and ask who it is really serving. Not who benefits incidentally, but who you have in mind when you do it. That question has more diagnostic power than any inventory.

If you lead, teach your people the purpose of gifting before you are forced to address its abuse, and build a culture where weighing what is said is normal rather than insulting. If you have been on the receiving end of misused gifts, and some readers will have been, do not let it drive you into a suspicion of everything the Spirit does. That is trading one error for another. You may find it helpful to read what I have said about discovering your gifts and about how a church handles sin among its members.

Would the people you serve alongside describe your gifting as something that builds them up, or as something they have learned to work around?

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 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.

1 Corinthians 13:1-2 (ESV)