Should I Take a Spiritual Gifts Survey to Determine Which One I Have?
I took one of those surveys once, but I had to chuckle. It basically said that if you see miracles, you have the gift of working of miracles. If God gives you interpretations of tongues, you have the gift of interpretation. And so on. To me, it was stating the obvious; I didn’t need a survey to tell me how God was using me.
But this question reveals a couple of misunderstandings that can trip you up.
For starters, you don’t “have” a gift in the sense that you can manifest it at will. The gifts operate as the Spirit wills. When Pul asked if all “had” the gifts of healings in 1 Corinthians 12:30, it was in the context of which gifts the Lord primarily manifests through you.
The worse misunderstanding, and the one I need to major on here, is that you “have” ONE spiritual gift. That thought limits you! At one point I have been used in all nine gifts, even though there are certain gifts that God uses me in most frequently. I remember one case where God wanted to use me in a way in which I hardly ever flow in front of a large crowd. I was “sweating bullets” thinking, “Can that really be God? He doesn’t use me that way!” But He DID use me that way; I just had to be available to be used in any gift He wanted to manifest through me. You would be wise to be available to be used in any gift as well!
Scripture disproves the idea of “having one spiritual gift.”
EVERYONE is commanded to desire the best gifts (1 Corinthians 12:31). The word gifts is plural. (I checked – the original Greek is plural too). Thus, it can’t be God’s will for you to only flow in one gift.
EVERYONE is commanded to desire to prophesy (1 Corinthians 14:1). We see that nine manifestations of the Spirit are mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12:8-11, prophecy being one of them. But this proves that anyone flowing in the other eight gifts is ALSO commanded to desire to prophesy, which would mean that he would be used in more than one gift! As further proof of this, 1 Corinthians 14:31 says that we can ALL prophesy. So even if God uses you in a different gift, He could use you in prophecy as well.
I think the misunderstanding that you have one gift comes from a misinterpretation of 1 Corinthians 12:8-11. Paul is not saying that one person would only ever be used one of these ways (we’ve already disproved that). He simply says that to one is given one thing and to another is given another thing during a particular service.
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