Spiritual Gifts II [Part 1]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright.

You don't fix somebody when you encourage them, but you help them face what they need to face because they're going to make it through it, and you've been called alongside of them. Encouragement's the currency of heaven, and discouragement is the currency of hell. Who wouldn't want the gift, the spiritual gift of encouragement?

That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt, excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series Higher Power, as presented at Rinaldo Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout our entire program today, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries.

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877-544-4860. More on this later in the program. But right now, let's get started with today's teaching. Here is Alan Wright.

Are you ready for some good news? You are gifted. You are not gifted in the way the world uses the term. Isn't it odd? We say, oh, we've got our gifted and talented students.

We've got, you know, that person is so gifted. And I've always thought, you know, in a secular world, what do they mean by that? Because the whole idea of a gift means that you have received it freely from someone else. It's not something inherent. It's not something that you're just born with.

It's not something that you accomplish. To be gifted means to be the recipient of a gift. We're talking about the gifts of the Holy Spirit for the second week as part of a series that I've called simply Higher Power. We're talking about the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives. So let's look again at First Corinthians chapter 12, verse 1, where Paul lists some of the gifts and has some important things to say about them.

Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be uninformed. So there is a way in which you can not be aware of the gifts of the Spirit and therefore may be missing something that God has for you. Verse 4, there are varieties of gifts but the same Spirit. Verse 7, to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good, for to one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, and to another the interpretation of tongues. And then in Romans 12, he lists some that intersect and some additional gifts here. Verse 6, having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them. If prophecy, then use it in proportion to our faith. If service, then use it in our serving. The one who teaches in his teaching, the one who exhorts in his exhortation, the one who contributes in generosity, the one who leads with zeal, the one who does acts of mercy with cheerfulness.

And this is important. First Corinthians 14, verse 1, pursue love and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy. So the gifts of the Spirit are to be desired, which means that you can grow in the gifts. It means that you have gifts and you can grow in those gifts and you can have the Lord give you new gifts, all of that.

So that's what we're talking about, the gifts of the Holy Spirit. When our kids were little, I was the guy that put them to bed. If I was home, I was the one and expected story time. Now, we read Bible stories, but we also had some fun stuff. Hank the cow dog, we would read. Oh, that's hilarious.

And I think maybe one of their favorites would I would tell them spy stories. Yes, there was a very special spy family named the Wrights, bared some real similarities to our own family because there was a father in this family and his name was Alistair Debonair Wright. His wife was Annalise and the son, it's so funny, I always remember this because I gave him a chance to kind of pick out their own symbolic name. I said, Bennett, we're going to call you Benjamin something. And he decided on it. He was Benjamin. If I was Alistair Debonair, he was Benjamin Millionaire Wright.

He already figured that out around age eight. He was going to be a millionaire. And then there was the little girl, Abilene.

It's a city in Texas. I don't know how we came with that, but that was the spy family. The spy family had a red phone that was a direct hotline to the White House. And when the spy stories told, they would ring and Alistair would pick it up and the President of the United States had an important mission for them. One of the coolest rooms in the spy family's house was the gadget room where there are all the tools that they would need for their spy work, all their espionage. And they would always get equipped before every mission that they would go on. But there was some regular tools that each of the members of the family had.

Alistair, the dad, had a special watch. I think it shot laser beams. I can't remember what all it did. And the mother, Annalise, she had, well, it was very eerily similar to real life.

Everything was in her pocketbook that you could possibly need. There was something about her lipstick that was like a stun gun or something. I can't remember what.

It was something about the lipstick. But I do remember this, that Benjamin Millionaire Wright had a special chess set. This was at a time in which the kid was learning to play chess. And he had a special chess set that each pawn and each part of it was a different kind of explosive. And little one, little Abilene, she had a special magic blanket because she's always had her blankie all the time. And she could unfurl that blanket and it would go and stretch across people and capture them in an impenetrable web. And so as long as everybody would use their special spy tools, the mission could be a success. We told those spy stories. I was thinking back about it. I thought, sounds kind of violent, doesn't it? And it wasn't. It wasn't.

I mean, we weren't killing people and this stuff. But everybody wanted their, it's like, you can't really do this unless you get your special gift. And there is a sense in which when you think about the mission of the church of Jesus, it's like the Lord has said, here's what you're going to do. You're going to go and start in Jerusalem and then Judea and Samaria and go to the ends of the earth and you're going to share the gospel and you're going to change the world. You're going to make disciples people. You're going to heal the sick.

You're going to care for the poor. You're going to teach people and open up their understanding and you're just all of this and you go, how are we going to do that? And it's like, in a sense, the Lord has also said, I'm going to be with you and I'm going to give you the tools that you need to do it. Now, my illustration breaks down at a lot of different levels, but it gets us into this idea that the body of Christ is far from the way a lot of people perceive church now is not a group of people that sits in an audience and watches something that's happening, but they are the very hands and feet and eyes and ears of the body expressing the very power and the very presence of the Holy Spirit. And so I wanted to talk to you again today about spiritual gifts, because last time we only touched on a few of them and I just thought we need to revisit this because I do not want you to be uninformed about spiritual gifts and I want you to yearn and long, as Paul said, desire these spiritual gifts in your life.

You don't make them happen, they come by the Spirit, but you can want them and you can ask the Lord and you can recognize the gifts that you have and have them stirred into flame. That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Would you love a better marriage? You don't need more good advice.

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Here once again is Alan Wright. Let me review first the gifts of the Spirit first and foremost. 1 Corinthians 12, 1, we realize these are spiritual, now concerning spiritual gifts. And as I pointed out, this literally in the Greek says concerning the spirituals, which means that what he's emphasizing here is this is not natural ability, as wonderful as that is. It's not natural gifts or talents, as wonderful as it is.

If someone is just an artistic person or someone's really good at math or somebody's really athletic, these are things we say, well, that person's gifted. But what we're talking about here are spiritual gifts, wherein the Holy Spirit himself is bringing this gift through human means by connecting with you spiritually. They're also, they're gifts. Keep that in mind, 1 Corinthians 12, 4, variety of gifts. And I pointed this out, the word gifts in Greek is karismata, which is the plural form of karis, which is the word you hear me talk about a lot, because it means grace.

So karismata is the plural form in Greek of the singular word karis, which means grace. So the gifts are the graces of the Holy Spirit. It's the same grace that saved you, sanctifies you.

The same amazing grace that forgave you is also what fills you. The same grace, that grace that saved you and enabled you to become a child of God is the same grace, the gifts of God that gets manifested in the expressions of the power of the Holy Spirit at work in your life through the gifts. So it's spiritual, they are graces. And then verse seven, to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit. And we made this point, this is why the gifts of the Spirit are not like Benjamin Millionaire's chess set, which is a thing that stands by itself. The gifts of the Spirit are never by themselves. They are the manifestation of the presence of the Holy Spirit. So the Holy Spirit is the one who's doing the healing, or the encouraging, or the teaching, or the serving, but it's happening through human means.

That's what that means. So let's talk, I want to talk to you about a few other of the gifts. And I want to first talk to you about encouragement.

Romans 12, eight, if it is to encourage, then Paul says, by all means, give encouragement, use that. We have a lady in this church, many people, some of you know her, many of you may know her, her name's Karen Revitz. And she is the epitome of the gift, the spiritual gift of encouragement. So for years, my early years here, I was amazed at the notes that she would write to me. And she would write, you know, not just like your birthday, but just, I mean, whenever, spirit leader, she would write this note to me, and it would be so encouraging, full of scripture, full of just encouragement about how the Lord was using me, about the ministry, about our family, just, I mean, whatever, I mean, just overflowing, often had just a wonderful sense, not only of love with it, but a kind of profound insight that was with it.

And then you could see, she'd go on the front, and then she'd go on the back of the car, and then she'd run out, and she started going vertically up the side, and then she'd go across the top, and then she'd come back this way, and then you got to turn up this way because it was this way, because she just like, she's just spilling over with it. And I just thought, it's so amazing that, you know, I'm the special one that Karen writes all these notes to. And some years ago, we had a big, a big birthday celebration for Karen, and a bunch of people were there for this big celebration. A bunch of church people were there, and people kind of started saying things, and somebody stood up and said, you know, the amazing thing about Karen is these notes that I get. And I'm like, man, somebody else gets a note. And then somebody else stood up and said, you know, I love all those notes. And we realized, all these people were getting these notes all the time. It's just spilling over in there.

What is that? Well, that's the gift of encouragement. The word encourage here in the Greek language, I want you to know this, because I love this word, is para kaleo, which comes from para. You know that prefix para, like parallel, and it means alongside of.

Okay, like parallel means running alongside of each other like that. So it comes from para, and it comes from a Greek verb kaleo, which means to call. Now, this is really important because this word para kaleo is also related directly to the word para kleitos, which is Jesus's term that he uses in John 15, 26 to describe the Holy Spirit. So the Holy Spirit, he calls the para kleitos, which is just a noun form of para kaleo to encourage. He called the Holy Spirit the one who is the encourager. So that's the word Paul's talking about here in this spiritual gift that is called encouragement. So I point that out because if Jesus calls the Holy Spirit, the para kleitos, the encourager, when you are encouraging people, you're doing something very, very much like God.

It is the nature of God. This idea of the para kleitos, the one who's called alongside, it gets translated in a lot of different ways. And interesting, I read this week in one central African culture, they translate it as the one who falls down.

And I'm like, what? And the reason they do is because the image is if someone has been taken hurt or ill on the side of the road and a passerby comes to help them, they get down with them. And so they use the word to mean one who's fallen down next to someone else who's in need.

Wow. The encourager is also an image of one who is called in to help. And that's where you get the idea of an advocate.

In 1 John, Jesus is called the para kleitos, an advocate. And that's an image, a legal image of when you've been accused and you don't know what to do about it, you have an advocate legally who stands in the gap on your behalf. That's encouragement. And when we're discouraged, we just need someone who has a supernatural capacity to help reframe the story of our lives. The power to prevail and to endure comes when we have someone that puts courage into us. So people need more than just a pep talk.

They need something supernatural. And that's what happens in encouragement. It's not superficial. It's not what Jeremiah spoke about when he said some false prophets say peace, peace when there's no peace. It's not superficial, but it is profound in that you don't fix somebody when you encourage them, but you help them face what they need to face because they're going to make it through it.

And you've been called alongside of them. That's the currency of heaven. And discouragement is the currency of hell. Who wouldn't want the gift, the spiritual gift of encouragement? I want to talk about leadership. Romans 12 8, the one who leads, leads with zeal, do so passionately. I was looking back at a sermon that I preached in 2010, and I saw that I'd made comments about the gift of leadership.

And I want to read you verbatim what I wrote in 2010. I said, this is a very important gift. The spirit empowered capacity to lead God's people successfully while keeping a servant's heart. People with this gift usually have supernatural wisdom to see programmatic and administrative solutions that help the church. And I then had this line, Pastor Chris Lawson demonstrates this gift regularly. I looked to him for it. Have you ever searched for a spiritual solution and found that nothing would quite fit?

And then there's one adjustment in the logistics, and suddenly it opens up right. And I wrote these words, 2010, we had been laboring for a solution to a problem at Reynolda. Our church is full. What do we do? This was 2010.

No place for people to sit. And Pastor Chris said, I've got an idea we could start a new worship venue using a video cast in the fellowship hall. And so we did, and in short order, our tenets had grown, but what we never realized is what we started back in 2010 of trying, could we do the sermon by video and have a different band and the people, we didn't know it was going to become a multi-site model where we have four campuses and we've been able to expand our mission two or threefold.

So leadership is anointed of the Holy Spirit and becomes a gift when there is a supernatural unction on it. Alan Wright, our Good News message, spiritual gifts from the series Higher Power. I encourage you to stay with us because Pastor Alan is back here in the studio sharing a parting good news thought for today. Here in just a moment.

We'll be right back. Alan Wright Ministries. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support. When you give today, we will send you today's special offer. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Alan Wright Ministries.

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Back here in the studio now sharing Pastor Alan's parting good news thought for the day. It'd probably be silly for me to suggest that, you know, your spiritual gift is something you choose like going down a grocery aisle and just choosing your own. But would it be something to say that probably most, most of the time the Lord is going to use natural talents and skills and I mean, he's created you after all.

And so you're probably not going to be terribly surprised. You know, it's every, every good gift comes from God. So there are, there are abilities even that non-Christians have, but it came from God. So if it's good, it came from God.

If there is a scientist who has a brilliant mind to make discoveries because he or she has a capacity to think through things here. I think that's a, that's a gift from God. When it comes to the gifts of the Spirit we're talking about those ways that the Holy Spirit supernaturally empowers you to do what you would not be able to do by merely human ability. And sometimes as you're saying, Daniel, where, where let's say a supernatural gift of teaching intersects with a natural talent or skill of teaching and where that intersects with how you cultivate it, sometimes that's pretty blurry. And I think that's okay with God, right?

It doesn't matter as much. Some of the gifts, it's very clear that that there's a prophetic utterance. If there is a healing miracle that takes place that these are not things that by any means human wise you can do, but all of them, all of the gifts, whether they be the ones that are more ecstatic and revelatory and miraculous seeming or whether they seem to be something that we could relate to in everyday life, they still are gifts from God. And what we want to do is we want to learn what all the gifts of the Spirit are. Both those that are more dramatic and those that are less dramatic and find what your gifts are and find how God can use you and learn more and more about how those gifts can be cultivated in you. Every Christian has spiritual gifts and every Christian can grow in the power of spiritual gifts. Thanks for listening today. Visit us online at pastorallen.org or call 877-544-4860.

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