1Co.10-3

Today’s reading is a fun one.

Over the years, it has been popular to use spiritual gift inventories and questionnaires to help believers discover their spiritual gifts. The major problem with these tools is that they’re an abstraction; we can take those tests and try to discover our gifts without being involved in the life of the local church. When used this way, spiritual gift inventories are artificial and even misleading.

They’re artificial because we don’t and can’t discover how God has gifted us in isolation from others. Gifts can’t be traced in a laboratory like DNA. The questionnaires are also misleading because the tests themselves, even if helpful in some respects, are inevitably partial and flawed. In other words, the inventories are produced by humans who have their own biases and preconceptions, and thus believers may wrongly come away from such an inventory thinking they have a particular gift when they don’t. On the other hand, they may think they don’t have a gift after taking the inventory when they do.

Some might say without any assessment tool they don’t know their gift. But knowing your spiritual gift isn’t as important as exercising your spiritual gift. Surely many believers in history didn’t know their spiritual gifts or think much about them, and yet they exercised those gifts in powerful ways. If you aren’t sure what your spiritual gifts are, I wouldn’t worry about it. If you give yourself to other believers in the church, you will inevitably be using your gifts.

The best way to discover your gift, then, is not by taking a test. They didn’t have such instruments in the early church, and people discovered and used their gifts just fine! Rather, if you get involved in the lives of others in your church and love as Jesus commanded, then you will discover your gift.

All of this brings us back to the matter of spiritual gift inventories. If you’re involved in the life of the church and take such an inventory, it might prove helpful. Sometimes we don’t see ourselves clearly, and other believers and resources can help us discern where we’re gifted. Obviously, such tools can be used in a narcissistic and self-absorbed way, but it’s also true that understanding ourselves better may help us become more effective ministers.

From https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/how-not-discover-spiritual-gifts

So with all of those cautionary warnings aside, you can take one of the few popular Spiritual Gifts Inventories below:

https://bit.ly/charismata-35 – 35 questions to discover the 7 gifts mentioned in Romans 12

https://bit.ly/charismata-66 – 66 questions to discover 22 gifts mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12, and Ephesians 5

https://bit.ly/charismata-125 – 125 questions to discover the 25 gifts mentioned above and a few other passages

If you take the inventories, share the top few gifts from your result with the church peers and open to their affirmation of the gifts.