The Lord has specifically, creatively, and uniquely designed you to have an awesome impact on other people. Perhaps you’re someone who brings safe and tender care to children. Perhaps you’re someone who helps people’s computers function better. Or someone who teaches others useful wisdom for tasks and living. Or a manager who trains teams to work effectively. When the Lord designed you with the characteristics and strengths for those ways of serving, he created a unique person who has the potential to reflect God’s love as you serve others. And if you use your strengths to love others through ..read more

The core theme of Spiritual Gifts Reimagined (SGR) is that spiritual gifts must be integrated with spiritual growth. To be clearer, I teach that discovering and developing your gifts (the wonderful potentials God has given you) depend on whether or not you’re growing. But I have two questions for you. First, what is spiritual growth? And second, what is your level of interest in growing? These two questions are intertwined, but that second one probes whether you or I truly want to grow. If I don’t have a desire to grow, I won’t be too interested in learning more about what growth is. This ques ..read more

I remember a weekend evening during college. I was sitting on a stair in an echo-y metal and rubber institutional dorm stairwell. All alone. Everyone else was out having fun with friends. I was wailing within. Didn’t know who I was. Didn’t believe I had any worth. Had no idea how to take the next breath, let alone enjoy relationships. No idea what love is. Imprisoned in fear. I felt all this in the bottomless pit that was my gut. This was my reality. It was a very long journey from that painful reality to becoming a leader of people, a preacher and teacher, and one who’s helped individuals dea ..read more

There is a connection between Christmas and spiritual gifts. But you must use your imagination to see it. And that is what Paul asks us to do when he teaches about gifts in Ephesians 4. In this blog I only have space to slightly open that door and let you peek in to glimpse the wonder. But isn’t that what children do at Christmas? In Ephesians 4:7-11 Paul reveals that we are showered with spiritual gifts by Jesus out of the dramatic journey of his birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension. Paul shortens it to Jesus “descending” (the incarnation we celebrate this season) and then “ascendi ..read more

You’re probably familiar with the idea of taking a spiritual gifts test, discovering which gifts are yours, and then finding ways to serve others using those gifts. In Spiritual Gifts Reimagined (SGR) I call this the Mechanical View of spiritual gifts. It’s all about how you function, not about who you are. Is this what God intended for us to learn from the Bible passages about spiritual gifts? When Paul wrote about gifts, he strongly emphasized love and unity. Those are values that go deeper than simply understanding how we each function differently. Paul is urging us to deepen our connection ..read more

Which would you prefer to talk about? If you were sitting down with your closest Christian friend, would you be more drawn to talk about the spiritual gifts of each of you, or your spiritual growth? What is your preference and why, and which is more important? As you think about that, I’d like to address this topic by sharing with you why I wrote Spiritual Gifts Reimagined (SGR). Here’s what I say about that in the book’s conclusion, followed by a few further comments about gifts and growth (and explanation of the butterfly). “My deepest desire in publishing this book is not to introduce a dif ..read more

Eugene Peterson, the insightful pastor and spiritual guide, wrote: “A favorite theme of C. S. Lewis was that ‘heaven will show much more variety than hell.’  All our mistakes turn out to have a sameness about them.  There is nothing quite as unoriginal as sin.  But … the Spirit is inventive and the forms of grace are not repeated” (Peterson, “Working the Angles,” 113). Indeed, Lewis writes that God’s “unfathomed bounty” propels us toward a reunion with him “in the perfect freedom of a love offered from the height of the utter individualities which he has liberated [us] to be” (L ..read more

When Christians think or talk about spiritual gifts, the usual focus is either a) the lists of gifts and the books and tests that help explain and identify our gifts, or b) the debates between charismatics and noncharismatics about which gifts are still active today.  I think both of those focuses miss the main scenes of gifting in our lives. A previous blog talked about the focus on lists, so in this blog I’d like to address the tendency to focus on the debates around charismatic issues.  It’s not hard to understand why those issues get so much attention.  Walking into and wors ..read more

Christians’ lack of interest in spiritual gifts in the last couple decades raises this question.  It’s an interesting question because, if you’re a Bible-believing Christian, you probably think that the teachings of the Bible are important.  But if you look at how much attention gifts get anymore in church teaching and preaching, Christian books sold, or just in discussions among believers, you’ve got to wonder if they deserve our attention. I mentioned that the lack of interest in gifts describes the last couple decades, say since around 2000.  Before that, in the late 20th cen ..read more

My new book, Spiritual Gifts Reimagined, will be coming out very soon—February 2023.  And nowhere in it will I tell you what I think the right list of gifts is.  And nowhere in it will I define a single gift or explain how any of them work.  Not much of a book on gifts, huh? A year ago, Susan and I experienced the immersive Van Gogh exhibit that’s been touring the world.  I’ve been fascinated by Van Gogh for quite a while and have read about him and perused his artwork.  That was fun and educational, but the immersive experience was … well, immersive!  Color and m ..read more