Maturity in the Use of Spiritual Gifts

A serious mistake a spiritual leader can make is to suppress teaching about spiritual gifts, or to teach their congregation that the gifts are not for our time. This robs them of the greatest resource God has provided for the effectiveness and vitality of his people.

It is urgently necessary, however, for God’s people to recover the biblical, balanced use of the gifts and rescue them from the extremes of both fanaticism and denial into which we have plunged them today.

More than ever, we need spiritual leaders with a mature understanding and experience of the gifts and mysteries of the Spirit. We urgently need pastors and teachers capable of introducing believers to the sound use of the whole armor of God. That knowledge will enable them to stand firm against the schemes of the devil and effectively carry out the tasks God has assigned them.

Sadly, there is much abuse in the use of the gifts among a large segment of God’s people throughout the world. We must admit that much of what passes today for prophecy, spiritual warfare, and apostolic ministry is far from being any of those things.

We must insist that we are desperately in need of truly apostolic correction concerning the biblical use of the gifts. In 2 Chronicles 18, we are shown how the gift of prophecy can be thoroughly abused and distorted. If we learn anything from that passage, it is that there are true prophetic gifts and false prophetic gifts. Zedekiah, who makes himself iron horns to encourage Ahab to go to war against Ramoth-gilead, is the very essence of the false prophet, deceiving himself into believing he possesses a true gift but, in reality, sadly subject to demonic deception.

We need sound instruction that teaches the proper balance between the gifts and the Fruit of the Holy Spirit, and establishes a complex, nuanced biblical framework for the sound functioning of the gifts among God’s people. That is what prompted the apostle Paul to write chapters 13 and 14 of 1 Corinthians, for example.

The gifts are not an end in themselves. They need a framework of love and wisdom to function as they should. Let us not be dazzled by the gifts and become their servants. Let us subject them to the other principles of Scripture. And let us subject them to the understanding of God within us. The movement of God takes place within a framework of order and discipline. After all, as the apostle Paul makes clear, “the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets” (1 Corinthians 14:32).