Reversal: Spiritual Gifts Focus

The topic of Spiritual gifts is one fraught with bugaboos. One the one hand, there are those who misuse and misconstrue the gifts to the point that they focus on them to the exclusion of the richness of the gospel. On the other hand, there are those who seize up at the merest mention of the gifts, because we certainly wouldn't want to admit that there might be a part of our religion that is out of our control or, God forbid, not respectable. There are many other hands in between these two hands, of course, and so many Christians simply throw all those hands in the air and ignore the entire topic in frustration.

My thinking on the gifts is that one sermon or one Sunday school class simply is not enough to do it justice. It is not enough to talk about the topic broadly, yet examining each gift in detail would be cumbersome to do all at once. We are therefore spending several minutes each Sunday over the course of a couple of months to talk about one or two gifts at a time, with the goal being that we will all understand them better, recognize them in ourselves or others, and put them to better use for the service of God's kingdom.

I have chosen Reversal as our overarching theme. Part of some people's consternation -- mine, at least, if no one else's -- has been that these gifts seem rather random. We can't deny the biblical truth of them, but why are they really there? They're a bit weird and unpredictable, so why does God expect us to bother with them? Part of the explanation, I think, is that these gifts represent a reversal of the effects of sin; that is, they are glimpses or foreshadows of what life will be like in God's consummated kingdom, and they therefore also represent a reversal of sorts to what life was like before the fall of humanity. I have no idea if anyone else has ever interpreted the gifts in this way, nor am I going to insist that this is strictly grounded in the Bible, but I do find it a helpful way of thinking of the gifts as a whole.

I will add a gift or two each week, and it's worth noting that these are effectively ripped out of their context in our worship services, so there may be some abrupt transitions here and there. Also, as a guide for my own thinking I have been using The New Testament Gifts of the Holy Spirit by Dr. Kenneth Cain Kinghorn, a former member of the faculty at Asbury Seminary. It is one of the more practical and well-balanced treatments of the gifts that I have seen, and I am indebted to him for it.

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