I left off with a discussion on tongues and my early morning revelations as I pondered our study the Thursday before. Since then we have completed Chapter 8 and continued discussing the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
When it came to the gifts of healing we recognized that this gift wasn’t about producing “Divine Healers”, but rather “Divine Healing”. We discussed many of the public figures of today and included the gift of miraculous powers in the discussion. We accept that God gives these gifts but are also wary of how they are sometimes used - and choose to place our deliberations in the hands of the Holy Spirit to validate and lead.
We then decided that after we completed our next study on the Fruits of the Spirit, we would then study the Gifts of the Holy Spirit and spend more time on each of these. So I won’t write about the Gifts until then. We’ll reserve our thoughts for later, after a more in depth look at the gifts.
But why does Paul talk about the unity of Christ’s body at the same time he talks about Spiritual gifts? The proper use of Spiritual gifts should contribute to the harmonious functioning of the body, in that there are no jealousies, or disputes and that all gifts are important and needed to complete the body. We aren’t to use our gifts in comparison of each other’s worth or to establish our value to the church, as all Spiritual gifts are used as God desires and therefore we can not boast. This “Gift” we did not have until the Holy Spirit gave it to us.
What about the natural gifts some of us are born with? We aren’t born with Gifts of the Holy Spirit but some of us do possess talents that can be used by God. But not everyone is called to use their natural gifts. How many talented people do you see that don’t believe?
When we do discover the gifts of the Holy Spirit that have been given us, we are to use them to benefit the body of Christ - our church which has many limbs in it’s members.
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