Use & Develop Your Spiritual Gifts

Scripture:
"There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men." (I Corinthians 12:4-6)

As an analyst, I am always looking for ways to "measure" things so that I can evaluate progress and implement positive changes in my life. For years I have taken all kinds of assessment tests to find out who I am, how to use my strengths, what weaknesses do I need to work on, how much stress is in my life, etc. From Myers-Briggs I know that I am an INTJ. At a marriage retreat my wife and I found out that she was a Golden Retriever and I was a Lion. My communication style is primarily Analytic & Synthetic and until recently in my life, I have always had high stress levels. Years ago these test where more serious and costly. Now, with the Internet, many of these tests are fun, and even free. Why am I telling you all this?

Three years ago I taught an evangelism class at our church and I included with that class a spiritual gifts assessment test. To administer and score the student results, I wrote an Access database program where I could type in the answers, score and print out a spiritual gifts assessment report for each student. Then we all reviewed the results, both individually and collectively, to determine the types of spiritual gifts we had in the class. Individually we determined that we all needed to put to use our strengths, our stronger spiritual gifts, and work on developing our weaker spiritual gifts. Collectively we considered how our gifts could work together to form an evangelism team to do evangelism ministry for the church.

Well recently I took that same test again and reviewed my results from three years ago with my recent results. The results were very interesting. First of all, I noticed that the spiritual gifts that I was strongest in remained strong. Music & Teaching are at the top of the list for me. Secondly, some of my weaker gifts, like healing & working with my hands went up the list a little. Thirdly, two of my stonger gifts moved down the list quite a bit (Apostleship & Discernment). From this I am concluding that my music and teaching have remained strong because I am still actively involved in ministries that include these gifts. Healing and working with my hands has gone up because I have been focusing on them in my life and apostleship & discernment have gone down because we only moved into the area this year and we are still growing in our integration into a local church fellowship.

All of this to encourage you to continue to assess and develop your spiritual gifts. If you don't already know what your spiritual gifts are, then you can take the following online spiritual gifts assessment test. If you already know what your spiritual gifts are then assess yourself periodically and determine where you are right now and build into your life a personal spiritual gifts development & use strategy to make sure you are using the spiritual gifts that God has given you and strengthening other spiritual gifts by "growing" them in your life.

Here is a URL where you can take a spiritual gifts assessment test.

http://www.gregwiens.com/gifts/

Prayer Request:
Ask God to reveal to us our spiritual gifts so we will use them for His glory and that we would learn more about those spiritual gifts we do not have so that God will help us in "building up the body of Christ."

Prayer:
Heavenly Father, we are yours. You knew what you wanted us to be before you even created the foundations of the world. And you know where we are right now in our spiritual walk to become more like your Son. Open our eyes Lord to be able to see more how you want us to be and help us to diligently seek you and teach us, Holy Spirit, that we may do the work you have ordained for us to do. In Jesus' name. Amen