Big Healing Book - Can I Pray a Certain Prayer to MAKE God Use Me in Certain Spiritual Gifts?

Can I Pray a Certain Prayer to MAKE God Use Me in Certain Spiritual Gifts?

No, because the manifestations of the Spirit are given as the Holy Spirit wills (1 Corinthians 12:8-11), not as WE will.

If there were a way to MAKE God use you in a certain gift, it would be no longer a “gift” but an “obligation” on God’s part.

Believe me, if I could pray to MAKE special faith, working of miracles, and gifts of healings manifest on demand, I would do it every time I encountered a sick person! It would be so much easier if the sick person never had a need to exercise any faith but could rather just trust in special manifestations flowing through me. But that isn’t how these Holy Spirit manifestations work.

It is helpful to DESIRE spiritual gifts, and in fact, we are COMMANDED to do so (1 Corinthians 14:1). So if you DON’T want the Holy Spirit to use you supernaturally, you are out of divine order and out of God’s will on the matter. However, that doesn’t make you lord over the Holy Spirit when it comes to these manifestations. He still decides when to use someone in a particular gift.

In the verse above, He even wants you to desire to prophesy – a particular one of the nine manifestations that Paul enumerates two chapters before (1 Corinthians 12:8-11). So you should desire to prophesy. But that does not mean that you can prophesy on demand whenever YOU want to do it (2 Peter 1:21), as some today teach in error.

It is important that you make yourself AVAILABLE to the Holy Spirit to be used as He sees fit. If you will do that, He WILL use you, because the manifestation of the Spirit is given to EVERY man, at least every man who is open to it (1 Corinthians 12:7). So you have the right to believe that the Holy Spirit WILL use you in at least some of the ways that Paul describes some of the time. However, you do not have the right to specify which gift (if any) He uses you in at any particular time. Leave that up to Him.