Your Divine Design - How to Discover Your Primary Spiritual Gift, Part 1

God has given to each believer something that if they understand it, there is a primary motivation, there is a way that aligns their life, their actions, their relationships, but only if they understand what it is and then how to deploy it. What I'm talking about is your primary spiritual gift.

If you do not know what your primary spiritual gift is, don't go away. Welcome to this Edition of Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. Chip's our Bible teacher for this daily discipleship program, motivating Christians to live like Christians. I'm Dave Drouy and we're in the middle of our series, Your Divine Design. In just a minute, Chip will help us better understand who God created us to be and how he's equipped each person for a specific spiritual purpose. So if you're unsure of your God-given gifts, this will be a really thought-provoking message. Now after the teaching, Chip will be with us next week. He'll be with us in studio to share some deeper insight into this topic, so stick around for that.

Okay, let's join Chip now for his talk. Well, the Bible is what I call the era of ignorance. I was clueless. I did not grow up as a Christian, I did not open the Bible until I was about 18 years old, and I read through the New Testament two or three times, involved in a college ministry, started growing, and I'm sure it said something about spiritual gifts. I never heard anyone talk about spiritual gifts. I never heard any teaching on it, no explanation. I was just clueless.

I wasn't looking for one, I didn't know anything about it. I read through and, well, that's kind of interesting. The next era of my journey was I call the era of confusion, and part of it might have to do with, you know, when I became a Christian, but then I was two, three, four years old in the Lord, and when I heard people talk about spiritual gifts, they were always arguing. They were arguing about this gift versus this gift. These are temporary. These are permanent. If you don't have this gift, then you'll never be a somebody. Only this gift.

It shows that you've really got this or that. And people argued so much, I just got paralyzed. And I thought to myself, I don't think I want any of those.

I mean, if this is what it produces, I'm just getting out of there. And so I just kind of put it on the back burner and didn't think much about it for several years. Later, I went to seminary, and you know, you can't go to seminary without studying all the Bible and spiritual gifts, and as a young pastor, I entered the era of what I called discovery. And I decided that, you know something, I'm not going to be ignorant anymore. I did a word study. I went to a seminary that had a high value on the languages, and so after three years of Greek and two years of Hebrew, I did a word study on every single spiritual gift.

Every single word. And I traced it in the etymology of the words, and I mean, I did all the work so that I could say, here's the word, here's the gift, here's where it shows up, here's what this word meant in classical Greek, on and on and on and on. And basically when I got done, I had a lot of knowledge about spiritual gifts. A part of my study, I learned the basics of spiritual gifts, and it was very helpful.

It was a good step. For example, I learned like you did, every Christian has one or more spiritual gifts. I learned many believers have received more than one spiritual gift. I learned that spiritual gifts can be abused or neglected, but if they're really received at salvation, they can't be lost.

I learned that you're given them at the moment of regeneration, but a spiritual gift can go either undiscovered or lie dormant for years. I learned that spiritual gifts aren't the same as the gift of the Holy Spirit. I mean, I learned the gift of the Holy Spirit is coming to faith, you're born again. Spiritual gifts are divine endowments for service. I learned that spiritual gifts aren't the same as spiritual fruit.

Spiritual fruit has to do with character, the life of Christ made in me. Spiritual gifts have to do with service, empowerment to build others in the body of Christ. I learned that spiritual gifts are different than natural talents. Natural talents are abilities I get in my physical DNA when I'm born. Spiritual gifts are what I get in my spiritual DNA when I'm born again. I learned that the word for gift, charismata, literally means a grace gift. And so it means that whatever gift I have, I didn't earn, but sovereignly the Holy Spirit gave it to me because he has a purpose for my life, that I'm to walk into good works. And so it's just a gift and it's sovereignly bestowed.

So those basic principles, I learned all those basic principles and that I could define them. Now here's the bad news, because some of you may be thinking to yourself, I've done that too. Is what I ended up with, imagine in your mind a salad bar. I mean a really big salad bar with all the gifts. And what I ended up with is I could go over and say, oh, beets, salad, you know, those crouton looking things.

I mean, I could describe them and tell you where they came from and I could step back and say, I think my gifts are somewhere. You know, I think I must have a little leadership and maybe a little prophecy. I'm not sure that sounds like a weird word. I don't know if I would say that one. And I think I got some exhortation and when I get up in front of people, some things happen.

So maybe teaching and I kind of boil it down to five or six sort of general ones. And it had little or no impact on how I live my life. I'd like to ask you how many of you, which era, if you just had to take a pen out and say to yourself, which one of these eras am I in?

And there's no shame. Either I'm in the era of ignorance. I don't have a clue about spiritual gifts. Or I'm in the era of confusion. You know, I've heard people say all kinds of things and I really don't know what to believe. Or maybe you're knowledgeable and you say to yourself, you know, I've got the gist of spiritual gifts, but it is not like it's changing my life.

I'm not making any big decisions. And my final era is what I'll call the era of empowerment. An era of empowerment is when I discovered I have one primary spiritual gift and that I have a cluster of ministry gifts. And I began to make decisions about where to focus my energy and where to focus my time. I made decisions about what I was going to do with my life.

In fact, I can tell you, it began to so shape where my energy and focus and development went because I understood that what God called me to do, the good works he wants me to walk in, had to do with being gifted. See, you've got to figure out, and I've got to figure out, what kind of brush are you? Because, you know what, if you don't take this seriously, you can think you're this kind of brush and then God assigns you to do a wall. Tell you what, it doesn't work. Or you can think to yourself, you know, Billy Graham, that was a good one.

I want to be like Billy. And God's called you to do some delicate work and you're going, hmm, you know what, this is not working so well. And so what I want to tell you is that understanding your primary spiritual gift and how it fits with the purpose God has for your life is absolutely empowering and can incredibly give you some focus to your life about what you really need to do. I hope you're asking, so what's the breakthrough? I mean, what helped you? What moved you from this, you understand spiritual gifts in general to it being a focal, absolute point for you to understand this is who God made you to be and this is what he wants you to do. I want to tell you what helped me the most in unwrapping my spiritual gift. Put another way, how to discover your spiritual gift. Here's how I want to develop this.

First of all, I just want to give you some facts and I want to walk through this very logically. Here's the facts, there's four major passages on spiritual gifts. Then what you're going to see is you got to develop some sort of paradigm or framework to organize those in a way that makes sense. So I want to give you a framework.

It's not from Mount Sinai, okay, but it's a framework. It's very helpful. And then I want to go through the description of what I'm going to call the motivational or the core gifts that I believe everyone in this room has at least one of the seven that I'll describe. And we're literally going to go through a process where I will describe the gift, give you the characteristics, talk about some dangers and have you say yes, no or maybe. So all I want to do is kind of put you in a funnel so that when you get to the end of the session, you may not say, oh, that's the one, but you'll go from a general knowledge maybe down to, you know, I think it's probably one of these two. So are you ready? Let's dig in together.

Let's look at the framework. As you look at spiritual gifts, you study the New Testament, what you're going to find, there's four basic passages. Romans chapter 12, 1 Corinthians chapter 12, Ephesians 4 and 1 Peter 4. And what I can tell you, if you look at those just in columns, you can say, okay, Romans 12, okay, here's the gifts. There's seven gifts there.

Okay, you can move on. 1 Corinthians chapter 12, early part of the chapter, gifts are mentioned, how they're used, later part of the chapter. Ephesians 4, you're going to look at primary ministry, some as apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists, some as pastor teachers. And then 1 Peter 4, Peter actually gives you his paradigm. If he says, hey, if you walked up to the apostle Peter and said, Peter, what do you think about spiritual gifts? He'll say, well, I think there's two kinds, speaking gifts and serving gifts.

And then he's going to say, let him who speak as it were the very words of God and let him who serves, serve by the strength which God supplies. And so all I want you to know is that any study of spiritual gifts, you're going to land in these four passages. Now here's the question. How do you organize them?

How do you look at them? Do you look at them as just beads and you look up every gift and there's maybe 28, 29 different gifts, whatever, and you say they're just randomly put in there? Or was there a message to the church at Rome, a different message at the church of Corinth, a different message to the church of Ephesians? Is it possible that God for us has taken these and laid them out in a certain way that there's a lens to look through that can have it all fit together that would make sense for us?

Now I believe there is. And I think that paradigm or that framework is found in 1 Corinthians chapter 12 verses 4 to 6. Notice what he says. There are different kinds of gifts, but the same spirit. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord.

There are different kinds of workings, but the same God who works all of them in all men. Now this is written to the church that seems to have at least more gifts operating than any other church, but also the church that seems to be more carnal, more confused, and misusing them. And so it seems that God here through the apostle Paul is giving a framework about all these different gifts and how they fit together. You'll notice that I put there's different kinds of gifts, but the same spirit. And that word for gifts is charismata.

That's our general word. It means a grace gift, something, an endowment, supernatural ability given from God. But then he goes on to say there are different kinds of service, also referring to spiritual gifts, and that's our word diakonion. And the word deacon, it just means a waiter of tables.

It has the idea of just service. And then the third where it says there are different kinds of workings, that's the idea. The Greek word is energamaton, and I put that there not necessarily to impress you, although I don't pronounce them very well. But I put it there. Can anyone see an English word that might come out of that? Energy. You see, it's energy. And so what the apostle Paul, when he wants to take a framework, he says there are certain, what I would call, motivational gifts. There are certain passions, there are certain drives, there are certain ones that every believer has, I will argue.

And then he's going to say that every one of us will have one of them, and I'll develop that point in just a minute. And then he's going to say that one strong motivational drive will then be manifested in different arenas of service or ministries. And then as your motivational drive's primary gift comes out in different ministries, then the effects or the energy or the manifestation of what the Spirit of God will do will show up in the body of Christ in various ways.

Let me summarize it by this way. There are three kinds of spiritual gifts. Every believer has one primary motivational gift. And by the way, this is not from Sinai.

Here's what I mean by that. I have seen, I've read tons of books on spiritual gifts. I have studied them all. There are lots of people that have lots of good ideas about spiritual gifts, okay? This is the paradigm that has helped me the most, okay? So you need to do what those good Berean Christians do. Examine the Scriptures after you hear what I say. Look at these passages and say, hmm, does this make sense?

Does it line up with God's Word? And spiritual gifts is not an area for disunity or argumentation. The whole goal is what?

Build each other up in love. And so what I want to say is one, every believer has one primary motivational gift. And those are found in Romans 12 verses 6 through 8.

And then I'm going to argue that we're to concentrate on discovering and developing this gift. The second thing that I'll argue is that the motivational gift out of Romans 12, this driver ability can express itself through a variety of ministry gifts. And we find the ministry gifts in Ephesians 4 and 1 Corinthians 12, 28 and following. And third, when we exercise our motivational gift through our ministry gift, the Holy Spirit then determines what manifestation or impact the believer will receive. Open your Bibles with me, if you will, to Romans chapter 12.

And let me see if I can build my case. Romans chapter 12. We know verse 1, you're a living sacrifice, right? Verse 2, don't be conformed to this world, be transformed. Verse 3, have an accurate view of yourself. And verses 4 and 5, that we're an interdependent body, just like the physical body. And then when he talks about unity and diversity, he says to us, but we have different gifts according to the grace given us. Can't take any credit, it's grace given us.

Then notice this command. If a man's gift is prophesying, let him use it into the proportion of his faith. If it's in serving, let him serve. If it's in teaching, let him teach. If it's in encouraging, let him encourage. If it's in contributing to the needs of the saints, let him give generously. If it's in leadership, let him govern diligently. If it's in showing mercy, let him do it cheerfully. Now notice the little phrase, let him, let him, let him, let him. You might put a little underline that in your Bible. Kenneth Wiese talks about this.

He says it's the locative of sphere, grammatically. And what he means by that is that the idea is that the one with the gift, for example, of teaching should remain within the exercise of the sphere of that gift. Now the reason I'm going to tell you that I think Romans 12 gives these timeless motivational gifts is because in Romans 12, you can go through the Bible and I am commanded to obey all seven of those things. I'm commanded to do what? I'm commanded to serve. I'm commanded to exhort.

I'm commanded to show mercy. Second thing is every church, I don't care the background of the church, every church needs those seven things happening. The other thing is every single believer's life, for you to grow to be a healthy, mature believer, all seven of those things need to occur in your life from other people.

Leadership, mercy, exhortation, teaching, prophecy. And so what Kenneth Wiese says basically is that out of need, out of commitment, out of servanthood, we will all exercise all seven of these things. But notice he says, let him who is to teach, teach.

Put your focus on teaching. Meeting needs, be a servant, but when you ask, where do you put the lion's share of your time? If it's service, do it in serving. If it's prophecy, do it to the proportion of your faith.

If the primary is giving, then do it liberally. In other words, it basically says whatever the primary motivation God has given you, maximize it, focus on it. That's where it puts your energy and your strength. Wiese goes on to say, it's a wise man who stays within the sphere of service for which God the Holy Spirit has fitted him and does not invade some other field of service for which he is not fitted. That doesn't mean that we don't serve other people and do all these things on occasion. But what it means as you kind of go through the pipeline of discovering God's will and his purpose for your life, and if you go back to Ephesians 2.10, there is a good work that God has prepared in advance that I'm to walk in. Whatever that good work is, he has a primary motivational gift, a tool in me to use to build the body of Christ. I need to figure out which one this is so that I know whether it's supposed to be leading, motivated by exhortation, is it motivated by service, or is it something else? Now the second thing you'll notice there, then in Romans 12, you have prophecy, service, teaching, exhortation, giving, leadership, and mercy.

But you'll notice there's a whole other set. There are ministry gifts. These ministry gifts are areas of service. They're people that are apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, a worker of miracles, someone who's gifted in healing, helping, tongues, administration. And when you study those, what you find is those are actual ministries.

Those are actual service to people. And where the final category, the workings, 1 Corinthians 12, 8 through 11, these are literally manifestations or effects. When someone is motivated by a certain gift, and then in this ministry, then what you see is people get a word of wisdom, or a word of knowledge, or faith, or healing, or miracles, or prophecy, or discernment, tongues, interpretation of tongues. Now just before some of you get a little uncomfortable and wonder where we're going, is in our next time together, I'm going to go through every single one of those gifts, and I'll give you a definition, and I'll give you some historical background, and we'll look at them. Today, think, I want to get the big picture. I want to get the paradigm. Because here's what happens is we study all these gifts.

Now we have 20-some things to choose from. We learn a little bit about them. We often even take a little test, and we took the test.

Now, has that test made any big difference in what you're doing in your life? See, what I'm going to suggest is if you understand there's one primary motivation, and that one primary motivation will get expressed in multiple ministries, where the confusion happens is when you experience, the way you experience your giftedness is what I call the two Fs, the fulfillment factor and the fruitfulness factor. When you're in your giftedness, if it's in a ministry gift, there's something that happens inside of you.

A joy wells up, and it affects people's lives positively. And so often we confuse our ministry gifts with our motivational gifts. Okay, enough talking.

Are you ready? Let me paint a few pictures, you know, give you three or four examples, and then let's get down to what you really want to look at, and that's would you go through each of those motivational gifts and describe them and help me figure out which one of these might be mine. Let me give you a couple examples. I work with a guy and have worked with him for a number of years now. His name is Greg. His primary motivational gift is service. He is a servant. He loves to serve. In other words, what motivates him is he sees needs and he wants to serve. It can be with his hands, it could be in multiple ways, but his ministry gifts are twofold. His ministry gifts are in the area of administration and in the area of pastor-teacher. And so Greg has this amazing desire, but his drive is always to serve, to serve, to help, to fix, to make things right, to care, to be behind the scenes, to go away from the limelight, and to make everyone else work. In an organization, this guy comes in and he's like oil.

I don't care what's going on in the organization. Once he begins to work in the relationships, things just start working better because he has the ministry gift of administration. But his motivation is not to be an administrator. See, what happens, he administrates so well, people keep trying to elevate him.

And like, you know, he was chief of staff. Well, then, you know, people want to make him, why don't you be the chief operating officer of this group over here or this company over here? And he goes, that's not what I'm made to do. I want to serve. I implement the vision of a visionary.

I do it primarily through the gift of administration, the ministry there, and by pastoring and shepherding people. And because he understands that, when he does that, guess what happens? People get a word of knowledge. Oh, I'm in the wrong fit in my job. People get a word of wisdom. Oh, I guess the way I talk to other people in the organization is offending them, and that's what the barrier is. People get healing as they understand what went wrong in a relationship. Do you see what I'm saying? But see, what happens, though, is if you confuse motivational gifts with ministry gifts, you can really go in directions because everyone pulls you where they see you operating.

But it may not be your primary motivation. Second example I'll give you is my wife. She has the gift of exhortation. She will learn what that is, but at the essence, it's the ability to come alongside people and both comfort them and bring wholeness and challenge them to really walk with the Lord. Well, her ministry gifts are administration, teaching, and actually apostleship.

She over and over finds herself. She wants to help people, and she'll see something that needs to be done. So where we were, she started with a box of books.

An apostleship is someone who likes to start and launch things. She'll see a need, and she'll do it out of encouraging people. So she started with a box of books and built a whole library.

Why? To encourage people to learn how to walk with God. She developed and recruited and actually prayed in a team of about 10 ladies to help her, and more counseling occurred in our library than any place else in the church. How did she do that? Well, she had a ministry gift of administration to organize it. So guess what everyone wants Teresa to do? They always want her to start new things or be some admin. That's not what she wants to do. The other thing she always did is she found the most hurting, lonely, unlovely people in any church we've ever been to, and she is drawn to them like a magnet because she sees the hope, and so she ends up mentoring and counseling individual ladies. But when she does that and teaches, it did real well when we had people.

So we put it on the radio once, and then we got all these requests. You know, this church, this church, this church. Will your wife come and speak? Come and speak, come and speak, come and speak.

It was great. She goes, no. She understands. She can, in the ministry gift of exhortation, teach, but her calling's not to be a teacher. Her calling is to encourage people, and when she understood that, it gives her a grid to say yes to this, no to that.

Third example, a fellow named Dick who's a good friend. His primary motivational gift is giving. It shows up in two ministry gifts. One ministry gift is apostleship. He's an entrepreneur. He starts things.

He starts things in the marketplace, but he also starts things in the spiritual world. And so I remember I was sitting across the table from him, and he became one of my mentors. About every other week, we'd play nine holes of golf, early on Thursday morning, and I would bounce all my ideas off him, and I actually went through my sermon from about hole two to hole six.

We goofed off in hole one, and then the last three holes, it was leadership questions, and he just put his arm around. He mentored me for about five or six years, and he was a big wig in some huge company and decided it was too much travel, so he started his own business and developed these chain of stores like Michael's or Joanne's, you know, the fabric stores, and he's got the gift of giving. And so he heard about the opportunity for radio. I was doing five services. The last thing I ever wanted to do was start a radio ministry. I'm thinking, I'm teaching five services a weekend. This is suicidal.

Start something new. Are you kidding? And he saw it. He put up the money for the first couple years, paid for the whole thing, found people. He entrepreneurs it, but he didn't do it because he had a passion for radio. He had the gift of giving, saw impact, and what he did. So then the other is his gift of helps.

This is really interesting. So he's an entrepreneur with the gift of giving, so guess what everyone wants to make him. Every church I went to, you know what he told me is? They always want to put me on the finance committee. I know how to make money.

I know how to give it away. They put me on the finance committee. I hate finance committees. In fact, then they want to make me a board member.

I hate boards. I have the gift of helps. It's a ministry gift. You know what he was good at?

Putting his arm around guys like me or meeting specific practical needs through his gift of giving. And you know what he said? I don't serve on boards anymore.

I don't serve on finance committees. You know what he does? He's an entrepreneur who takes his money and gives it away to launch great stuff and to come alongside and help people in practical ways. Do you see how understanding your primary motivation can really shape what you do?

Okay, last example. My primary gift is prophecy. For years, probably the first 15, 18 years, I thought it was leadership because I always found myself in leadership areas. And to be a pastor and if you're going to grow something, you got to learn. Now, part of my ministry gifts, you'll notice it says administration slash leadership.

We'll learn later. That word administration, it literally means the one who steers the ship. It's providing big picture direction. That's one of my ministry gifts. But because of my background is, you know, when someone said, would you like the gift of prophecy or would you like the gift of leadership? I thought prophecy, man, that sounds like guys with long beards, out of touch, say wacky things and you ought to shoot her stone if they don't come out right.

So I want to be a leader, you know? And I didn't understand prophecy. But what happened is my ministry, my ministry gifts are pastor teacher and my ministry gifts are administration in the leadership side of that. And then I actually had ministry gifts in prophecy and evangelism.

And so I got confused. My motivation, we're going to look at it in a second. My motivation has always been a passion to see life change and impact and see people be convicted by God's word and be real practical and make a difference. When I see the state of the church and when the church is unholy, I literally, it's one of the few things I cry about. I mean, I don't know what it is. It's inside me. It's just inside me. I long for the church to be the church.

Why? Because God gifted me the good works that I am to walk in, the purpose of my life is to be one of these broad stroke, I'm going to do the background on the wall so that God will take teams of people and come back and sketch and then individual lives to touch up. But he's called me to be a prophet to take God's word in a global way to the world to say, the church has got to be the church. We have to have a high view of God. Pastors, we got to walk with God. Christians, we got to live like Christians. Give me any text and I'm going to tell you those are my applications. It doesn't matter where I preach, I'm going to challenge you, encourage you, beg you, plead with you, comfort you, do whatever I need to do for you to step up to the plate and be God's man or God's woman.

But now I know that. But see, my ministry gifts, I ended up overseas early on. One of my ministry gifts is evangelism. And so I was just in India and I did a crusade. I spoke out of the motivation for change lives and saw lots of people come to Christ. Or I went overseas and I did an internship in evangelism and seminary because I thought I was supposed to be an evangelist because I went overseas and then I saw all kind of people come to Christ.

I guess that's what I'm supposed to do. And then, you know, later on then I thought, well, you know, a pastor teacher, that's what I love to do and I got to take those gifts and put them together. And what happened is that church grew and it grew and grew and grew and God took the prophecy gift, the teaching, and he just made it go this way and he blessed it.

And I was almost the last to know. Dick, my friend, two or three elders, basically said, hey, Chip, you know, you have grown an organization that is bigger than your capacity to lead and we love you, okay? There's thousands of people coming. There's all kind of management issues. You've learned, we've changed your job six, seven, eight times in the last 10 years. It's wonderful what God has done, but what you really bring to the table is when you study, you pray, visionary leadership in our elders meetings and you preach the word of God. That's what you bring. And you're spending all this time in management meetings and leadership stuff and trying to learn and do all this stuff and when the church was at this point, you had leadership gift enough to do it and guess what? The church is at this point and you're the bottleneck.

And you know what? The most freeing thing, the reason I'm here is I realize God wanted me to hone and focus on the motivational gift of prophecy and the ministry gift of prophecy and to be free to team with churches and pastors because I'll tell you what, the other thing I tear up on is man, I love your pastor. Man, I love your pastor. You have no idea what it's like to be a pastor.

You have no idea of the challenges, how much help and support and encouragement they need. So here's what you've got. A category of ministry gifts. You've got a category of motivational gifts and then effects when those things happen and so what I see when I get to preach and teach or I was at Moody and I had a chance to kind of speak prophetically, not in telling the future, but this is the call of the church. I've never felt such joy and we got emails from people around the world who are listening on the internet and by way of the radio because that's just, that happens to be the brush God made me. It's not better, it's not worse, it's not more important, not less important. It's the divine endowment given to me.

What's yours? You've been listening to part one of Chip's Message, how to discover your primary spiritual gift. He'll be right back with his application for this teaching from his series, Your Divine Design. Many of you know our mission is for Christians to live like Christians and a critical step in accomplishing that is for believers to put their spiritual gifts into practice. The problem is, many don't even know what their giftings are. Through this series, Chip explores vital biblical passages that'll help you identify your spiritual gifts and how to grow and use them correctly.

You're not going to want to miss a single message. For more information about Your Divine Design or our resources, go to livingontheedge.org, the Chip Ingram app, or call 888-333-6003. Our Bible teacher, Chip Ingram, is with me now and Chip, before we go any further, I was wondering if you could talk to that person out there who's been listening to this series and is eager to grow spiritually but senses something is missing. Can you give them some encouragement?

I'd be glad to, Dave. I think in our Western way of thinking, for so many of us, and it's really good. I mean, I've been a pastor for many, many, many years and we want people in the Bible and, you know, you need to be in a small group and we talk about all those relationships. But when you're eager to grow, often the big thing missing is sort of the outflow. We tend to, you know, I'm getting podcasts and I'm listening to messages and I'm getting lots of truth in me, but for the dynamic, that's something that's missing is God has deposited inside of each one of us at the moment of conversion a spiritual gift or a set of spiritual gifts. And those are designed so we actually get to be a part of His mission.

We have gifts to teach or administrate or show mercy or be generous and as you activate those, man, I will tell you, you start to really, really grow in a great way. And so, Your Divine Design is a book and a resource that we have created to help Christians discover exactly what God has deposited in them and then get that into the life stream of the body of Christ. So, Dave, I think that would be just a high-level thing to do is learn your spiritual gift and then learn how to put it into practice.

I couldn't agree more, Chip. To order your copy of Your Divine Design, go to livingontheedge.org or call 888-333-6003. Let us help you take the next step in your faith journey, discovering your spiritual gifts and understanding how to activate them. Again, to get your hands on Chip's newest book, Your Divine Design, visit livingontheedge.org or call 888-333-6003. App listeners, tap Special Offers. Well, with all that said, Chip, let's hear your application for this message.

If today during the broadcast your head was swimming and you were saying to yourself, no, wait a second, there's a motivational gift, there's a manifestation of that gift, there's a ministry gift, Chip, would you slow down? You're making me crazy. Look, go to the Internet, livingontheedge.org.

That's livingontheedge.org. I have a chart. If you could listen to what I said today with the chart in front of you, you would see the four facts and four key passages. You would see the framework that I got that out of 1 Corinthians chapter 12 and then laid out is in very detailed careful analysis exactly what a primary spiritual gift is, what is a ministry gift, and then what's the manifestation or the results of that gift. Getting this clear is critical to understanding your spiritual gift in a way that's really going to help you. I don't want you to leave this series with, well, yeah, I think my gift is exhortation, leadership, mercy, serving, and one, maybe it's playing the piano.

I want you to know what's the one primary gift that the others flow out of, and you can learn it, but it's going to take some effort. This is critical. It's important.

Will you please make the effort to discover this precious gift God's given you? It'll make all the difference in the world. Great word, Chip, thanks. As we wrap up, let me quickly tell you about a great way to listen to our extended teaching podcast. Hear Chip anytime on your Echo or Echo Dot. To get started, ask Alexa to enable the Chip Ingram podcast. Then just say, Alexa, play the Chip Ingram podcast. It's that easy. Well, join us again next time as Chip continues his series, Your Divine Design. Until then, this is Dave Drewy saying thanks for listening to this Edition of Living on the Edge.