Listen to the podcast episode: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2FEhS9IV2MYRETbcam5ZES?si=FyCzZhFDRWOsjnvJKcHx6A
The Spiritual Gifts of faith, hope, and love definitely still exist and are available to believers. I believe the miraculous sign gifts, like speaking in tongues, healing at will, and prophecy, have ended, though God can still make an exception. The Bible doesn't say whether other gifts, like administration, remain. In this message, we look at what a spiritual gift actually is, the two kinds of gifts, what Paul said about tongues and prophecy, and why he said some gifts would pass away. Then we look at what to do with all of it: be careful, serve to build up, check your motive, and be slow to draw lines.
This is the third message in Side Quests, a short series where we step away from preaching through a book of the Bible to cover topics Christians talk about that don't fit neatly into a verse-by-verse study. We started with the rapture and end times, and last week was Satan and demons. In each one, what we generally think we know about these topics comes more from pop culture and what other people say than from what the Bible says.
Why Spiritual Gifts Feel Like Superpowers
What superpower did you want when you were a kid? Flying, running super fast, reading minds? There's something attractive about being able to do what other people can't, and I think that's why people are so drawn to spiritual gifts. They sound like Christian superpowers: speaking a language you never studied, healing people, and prophesying all sound cool.
There's nothing wrong with that. God gave spiritual gifts for a reason, the problem comes when we replace the reality of Spiritual Gifts with someone else's version of them.
The Holy Spirit Is a Person, Not a Force
The Holy Spirit is a He, not an it. He is a person of the Trinity, God in the same way Jesus is God, and He lives in every believer from the moment of salvation. When you recognize your sin, believe that Jesus is the only Son of God and your only hope, and call out to Him for forgiveness, the Spirit is with you and in you.
The picture we have is the Old Testament temple, where the glory of God filled the holy of holies. When we place our faith in Jesus, God comes to live inside us, and that's why we are the temple of God. It's also why we're careful with language that invites the Spirit to show up and fill the room. He's already here, and treating Him like a mystical force that comes and goes misunderstands Him.
In the Old Testament, it worked differently. The Spirit came on specific people at specific times. Saul knew when the Spirit of God was no longer with him, and Samson could do what he couldn't otherwise do only when the Spirit came upon him. Jesus promised something better, telling His disciples it was actually better for them that He leave and send the Spirit, who is with us at all times to lead, guide, convict, and pray on our behalf. After the resurrection, Jesus breathed on the disciples in John 20, and they received the Holy Spirit. That is the indwelling, the Spirit living inside them. But it isn't what we think of when we think of spiritual gifts. We'll look a little later, at Acts 2, where something different happened.
What Happened at Pentecost
Filled With the Holy Spirit
When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.
Acts 2:1-4
So, they had the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, but at this point, they receive the empowerment of the Holy Spirit: the Spirit made them able to do things they could not do on their own. The "divided tongues" were flames divided among the people, not forked tongues like a snake. And notice that they already had the Holy Spirit, so "filled" has to mean something more. Our best guess is that He accelerated what He was already doing, like revving an engine that's already idling.
Then they began to speak in other tongues. The Greek word is glossa, which means specific languages. Acts 2 doesn't name the languages, but it names the people who heard them, including visitors from Rome and Arabia. So, picture one of the Galileans suddenly speaking Latin and having never known Latin, and another speaking Arabic. They weren't just babbling and making sounds, and Acts 2 confirms it several times, because the crowd says each of them hears in his own language. The gift was on the speakers, not the listeners, since the listeners didn't know Jesus.
That is what a spiritual gift is. It is supernatural, something they could not do on their own, but it isn't the chaos we often picture when we think of spiritual gifts.
Sign Gifts and Service Gifts
The New Testament lists the gifts in several places. I break them into two categories, and I want to be clear that the Bible doesn't. I do. These are my categories.
Sign gifts are miraculous things no one can do on their own: healing, working of miracles, prophecy, utterance of knowledge, and speaking and interpreting languages.
Service gifts are things a person could do, but God helps them be extra good at them: helping, administrating, service, teaching, exhorting, contributing, leading, acts of mercy, utterance of wisdom, faith, distinguishing between spirits, hope, and love.
The Gift of Healing
The gift of healing was the ability to walk up, lay hands on someone, and heal them at will. It didn't always work. Paul, who had the ability to heal, was basically blind and was never healed. Epaphroditus nearly died, and they couldn't heal him. In both cases, God chose not to allow the healing. So, it was their at will ability, but subject to God.
That is different from laying hands on someone and praying for healing. Anyone can do that, no matter what gifts they have, and God heals or doesn't according to His choosing. We looked at anointing with oil and praying for the sick in What Does the Way You Pray Say About Your Relationship With God?.
We have seen God heal. A man in our church had pancreatic cancer, which moves fast. We gathered, laid hands on him, and begged God to heal him. He said he knew the moment it happened, and the next day the doctor said, "I don't understand this, but it's gone." We didn't heal him, and nobody in the room had the gift of healing. We asked, and God healed. That is different from me deciding to heal you.
Miracles, Prophecy, and Knowledge
We don't really know what the working of miracles was. Maybe it was water to wine, maybe walking on water. It was something they knew about that we don't.
Prophecy was God telling someone what would happen, and that person speaking it. In Acts, a prophecy of a coming drought in Jerusalem led a church to take up an offering for the church there. So, the gift of prophecy was information about the future given by God.
The utterance of knowledge was telling people things about the Bible or spiritual matters that they had no right to know. At first, they didn't have the New Testament. So, God supplied the answer, much like He did with Moses, who took his questions to God and spoke what God told him.
What About Speaking in Tongues?
The gift of languages is the one that trips everybody up. Many charismatic Christians believe tongues is a heavenly or angelic language that sounds like nonsense to everyone else unless someone interprets. I disagree, but there is a reason they believe it.
The Tongues of Men and of Angels
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
1 Corinthians 13:1
Some read that as proof that angel languages were part of the gift. I read it as hyperbole: even if I could speak every human language and angel languages, too, without love it accomplishes nothing. Everywhere else, the New Testament describes only human languages, starting with Acts 2. If the gift turned into something else, Scripture doesn't tell us. So, I don't believe someone just babbling and repeating sounds is speaking in tongues.
The Service Gifts
The service gifts don't need much explanation. The difference is that the sign gifts are things I could not do no matter how hard I tried, while the service gifts are things I could do and God helps me do extra well. They aren't the headliners. Nobody gets excited that you love really well.
But the sign gifts caused real problems in the churches, because it went from helping people and reaching people who don't know Jesus to showing off a cool skill. So, Paul created rules for their use that regulated them, but also gave us insight into them.
Paul's Rules for Using Gifts
Keeping Worship Orderly
If any speak in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three, and each in turn, and let someone interpret. But if there is no one to interpret, let each of them keep silent in church and speak to himself and to God. Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said. If a revelation is made to another sitting there, let the first be silent. For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all be encouraged, and the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets. For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.
1 Corinthians 14:27-33
The showy gifts had taken over the services. People were interrupting and talking over each other. Services lasted forever and people were getting frustrated. So, Paul made some rules. Two, maybe three people speak, one at a time, and only if someone is there to interpret. No interpreter, no tongues in church. Do it at home with God. Prophets get the same limits, and a prophecy isn't law just because someone says it came from God. Everyone else weighs it. The services were turning into circuses, and Paul said to get it together and focus on what they were there to do.
That is a wildly different picture from what I see in videos of a lot of charismatic churches. It's chaotic and becomes more about the gift than building up the church. Now, Baptists tend to react to this by being as boring as possible. I'm not looking for flags and dancing, but we could probably liven up a little. There is a middle ground between jumping pews and refusing to move during a song. The goal is not to make things so confusing that we lose the purpose, not to be afraid of emotion.
We learn something specific from these rules: the gifts are controllable and services should be about building up the church. If you have the gift of tongues and you're number four, you close your mouth. Gifts aren't something that overwhelms you and takes over, and that's not the Benny Hinn picture of people falling out with no control. The modern depiction is wild abandon, but Paul says you're in control. Get it together.
When your services stop being about the experience and not building up the church, you've lost the plot. We should worship and meet with God corporately, but that should look like something that helps people know and follow Jesus better, not just a cool experience.
Do We Still Have These Gifts?
So far, we've looked at what gifts they had and the rules for using them. But the bigger question is not just what they had, but what we have. It's cool to find out what everybody else got for Christmas, but we want to know what we got. Do we still have access to spiritual gifts, and is God still handing them out the way He did then? Paul deals with spiritual gifts more in 1 Corinthians 12 through 14 than anywhere else, and in chapter 13, he's talking about love, because the Corinthians were obsessed with tongues.
Some Gifts Are Partial and Will Pass Away
Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. … So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:8-13
Paul describes some gifts as partial and some as complete. The word "perfect" here means complete, not morally excellent. If you collected spoons from all 50 states, you'd have a perfect set, but that says nothing about the condition of the spoons. It's about having all of them. Paul compares the church to a child who needs special rules, like not crossing the street alone, and later leaves them behind. He isn't saying using gifts was childish. He's saying the church needed them then.
In Corinth, the gifts were doing more harm than good. People were divided between those with the really cool gifts and those with the "boring" ones. Instead of serving, they were fighting. Paul said there would come a point when they no longer did more good than harm, and God would remove some of them. The gift that would for sure stay were faith, hope, and love, because that's what you actually need to accomplish the work of God.
I believe the miraculous sign gifts are gone. God isn't dispensing them the way He did, where every believer gets something and a lot of them are miraculous. I've been in a lot of churches all my life and I've never seen one of these gifts, so I'm using an evidence-based approach, which is dangerous in theology. But Paul said it would end, and it sure seems to me like it has.
What Is the "Complete"?
Paul says the partial gifts will pass away when the "complete" or "perfect" comes, so the obvious question is what the complete is. One answer is that it's the Bible: once Scripture was completed, all the gifts left except faith, hope, and love. I understand how you get there, but I don't know that it lines up, because Paul was writing the Bible as this happened and the gifts lasted a lot longer after that.
I don't know what the complete is, and the Bible doesn't say. I'm not going to say it's this or this or this, because I'd have to use outside information to figure that out, and I'm not going to draw a line that splits me from someone else because I made something up and decided it was true. I'm only going to do that when the Bible is really clear.
Also, Paul gave three examples of partial gifts: prophecy, tongues, and knowledge. These are examples from a broader category. He said that faith, hope, and love remain, but not that ONLY faith, hope, and love. There is room in between. Maybe administration is still here, maybe giving, maybe understanding and interpreting. We don't know.
So, are the gifts still here? Faith, hope, and love definitely are. Prophecy, knowledge, and the other sign gifts? I think God does not give them in the same way He did before.
My theory is that "the complete" isn't one specific event. My 16-year-old son has to fill out his own college application, and I'm not doing it for him. There wasn't one specific event that made me decide that. It wasn't just that he's 16 now or that he has a car. I just know that he's ready. I think that "complete" isn't a specific event, but God's understanding of when they were no longer necessary.
I think there's good evidence they are gone, and I believe Paul backs me up, but I can't tell you every detail, and I won't draw a hard line over something we're kind of making up.
Be Careful
If someone says they have a spiritual gift, I'm not necessarily going to dismiss them, and I'm not necessarily going to believe everything they say. We'll have a conversation.
As we talked about with Satan and demons, I know credible, stable people who aren't running around thinking they have superpowers, but have told me about speaking to a group of people who did not know his language and did not have Jesus, and suddenly they could understand him. I'm not going to call that person a liar. God can do whatever He wants. If He wants to give someone the ability to speak in tongues for a moment, or permanently, that's fine.
The same goes for stories of people in Muslim communities having dreams, being saved, and sharing the gospel with spiritual gifts alongside it. I'm not going to say they weren't followers of Jesus. But in the New Testament, the gifts were permanent and at will. What we see now are exceptions, where God steps in and decides they're necessary for this moment and situation.
Still, if someone says, "I have a spiritual gift, so you need to do this," be careful. We have had people in our church who disagree with me completely and believe they can speak in tongues. That's cool. I can be wrong about stuff. But we follow Paul's rules: tongues in the service only with an interpreter present, and a prophecy gets weighed by a few wise believers before it is brought to the church. If someone says they have a gift and that you should do something because of it, hold up and think about it for a minute.
Serve to Build Up, Not to Be Seen
The purpose of these gifts was to build up the church, not to have everybody look at me. It isn't for a TV special or a crusade that raises millions of dollars in offerings. Whether it's faith, hope, and love or speaking in tongues, it is used to build up the church. That's true for a spiritual gift and for any talent you have.
Check Your Motive
Everything you do, spiritual gift or not, needs to be done in love. Without it, I don't care how impressive it is, it's a waste of time.
I once had a pastor I couldn't stand, and he didn't like me. He lied to my face a few times about the Bible, things I knew he was lying about. I did not like him. I sat under his preaching for years, but I have no idea whether he was a good preacher or not. I don't remember his sermons at all. All I remember is his lack of love. I had another pastor who could not preach his way out of a paper bag, but his people loved him with a fierce love, and they wept when he retired. His love made up for everything else. What made their work effective or ineffective wasn't skill, talent, or ability, but love.
So, whether it's spiritual gifts or serving in the church, if you do it with love, it makes up for the deficiencies. I don't care how talented or skilled you are, or if God made an exception and gave you every spiritual gift. If you don't do it with love, you're wasting time, and nobody remembers anything except how big of a jerk you were.
Be Slow to Draw Lines
There are lines that need to be drawn. Jesus is the Son of God. The Holy Spirit is part of the Trinity. The only way to salvation is recognizing you can't do it on your own and trusting Jesus to do it for you. Baptism is by immersion only. Those are lines we draw.
But we draw a lot of lines we don't need to, like insisting that the spiritual gifts were definitely done away with when one specific thing happened that we have no evidence for. We think this is what happened, but we don't know, so why draw that line?
There are times for a hard line, but there are other times when someone disagrees with us on something we can let go. It may help to think of it as giving them room to grow into the right position. Let's draw fewer lines based on our opinions and focus on the lines that come directly from Scripture.
So, What Would You Do With a Superpower?
If you had the gift of tongues or healing, what would you do with it?
Then why wait on a gift? What are you good at? What has God made you good at? Do that, with a good attitude and a positive heart. If the question of spiritual gifts is holding you up, let it go, pray about it, and step out in action. Whether God has given us these gifts or removed them, He has given us everything we need in either situation. So, do whatever He calls you to and let Him make up the difference.
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