|
|
|
||||
|
|
SPIRITUAL GIFTS
Click HERE to read "ONE BODY" by By Rose Olsen, Sabbath School Superintendent, Saskatoon Central SDA Church Click HERE to read "A GIFTED CHURCH" by By Rose Olsen, Sabbath School Superintendent, Saskatoon Central SDA Church
God designed us to receive his Special Gifts from the Holy Spirit. The Gifts are what enable us to serve him with passion and understanding, and with our own personal style. The following scripture is quoted from The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language: “What I want to talk about now is the various ways God’s Spirit gets worked into our lives. This is complex and often misunderstood, but I want you to be informed and knowledgeable. Remember how you were when you didn’t know God, led from one phoney god to another, never knowing what you were doing, just doing it because everybody else did it? It’s different in this life. God wants us to use our intelligence, to seek to understand as well as we can. For instance, by using your heads, you know perfectly well that the Spirit of God would never prompt anyone to say “Jesus be damned!” Nor would anyone be inclined to say, “Jesus is Master!” without the insight of the Holy Spirit. God’s various gifts are handed out everywhere, but they all originate in God’s Spirit. God’s various ministries are carried out everywhere, but they all originate in God’s Spirit. God’s various expressions of power are in action everywhere; but God himself is behind it all. Each person is given something to do that shows who God is: Everyone gets in on it, everyone benefits. All kinds of things are handed out by the Spirit, and to all kinds of people! The variety is wonderful:
All these gifts have a common origin, but are handed out one by one by the one Spirit of God. He decides who gets what, and when. You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body. Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body. It’s exactly the same with Christ. By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything. (This is what we proclaimed in word and action when we were baptized.) Each of us is now a part of his resurrection body, refreshed and sustained at one fountain—his Spirit—where we all come to drink. The old labels we once used to identify ourselves—labels like Jew or Greek, slave or free—are no longer useful. We need something larger, more comprehensive.” (1 Corinthians 12: 1-13) Becoming aware of your gifts will give you an opportunity to minister in various ways. There are several on-line opportunities to learn more about your Spiritual Gifts, even to do an inventory of them.
Administration
- The gift
of Administration is the divine enablement to understand what makes an
organization function, and the special ability to plan and execute
procedures that accomplish the goals of the ministry. See 1
Corinthians 12:28
Discernment
- The gift
of Discernment is the divine enablement to distinguish between truth and
error. It is able to discern the spirits, differentiating between good and
evil, right and wrong. See 1 Corinthians 12: 8-10 The above definitions of various Spiritual Gifts are set out in Connections: Implementing Spiritual Gifts in the Church, By: Bruce Bugbee, Don Cousins and Bill Hybels . Thank you to the Livermore, CA Seventh-day Adventist Church for a reprint of this information from their webpage at http://www.tagnet.org/livermore/index.htm “You are Christ’s body—that’s who you are! You must never forget this. Only as you accept your part of that body does your “part” mean anything. You’re familiar with some of the parts that God has formed in his church, which is his “body”:
God bless you in your ministries! “You, my brothers [and sisters], were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge in sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love.” (Galatians 5:13, New International Version)
|
||||
|
|
