Section 09 - Gifts of the Spirit

The first thing you need to be very clear on is that these gifts are not natural or in any way connected with natural gifts that we looked at earlier.

These gifts are 100% supernatural. They are totally miraculous and not something we can be trained how to do by studying.

We cannot get these abilities in any natural way in this world. So they can not be there until we are born again. In fact they also cannot be there until you have been baptized in the Holy Spirit.

They will not appear before you are born again and filled with the Spirit. So any supernatural manifestation you may have had before being born again was not from the Gifts of the Spirit.

If you experienced any supernatural manifestation before receiving the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, then the chances are that you had something that was left over from before.

There is a danger here that can occur. The gifts only manifest after the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, but something else also tends to manifest then. Anything demonic that was resident within you will also manifest.

It is possible before salvation that there was a demonic power resident in you, either from birth or that you picked up along the way.

When you are born again the Holy Spirit comes into your spirit and a demon cannot live there anymore. It moves outwards and can remain in your body in the realm of your soul. It is still resident in you and may be either active or lying dormant.

If you do not allow yourself to come under any supernatural influence, that demonic power sometimes remains there waiting for an opportunity.

If there is anything else resident in you when you then walk through the doorway of the Baptism of the Spirit, then there is a good chance that it will now manifest.

There will suddenly be a conflict in the spirit between the Holy Spirit in your spirit, and this demon power that is now sitting in your body, probably in the soul.

This conflict occurs immediately and often happens when someone goes through the experience of the baptism of the Spirit.

There is total confusion, and a new kind of spiritual warfare that the person may not have known before.

When you were born again you declared war on Satan's camp. You now became an enemy of the one who before was your god in this world.

However you may not have been much of a threat to him yet and he did not give you much trouble. Probably all that he did up until then was to tempt you to sin and return to your old life.

But when you come through the doorway of the Gifts of the Spirit and open yourself to the supernatural, you enter a new realm of conflict and warfare. You are now a threat to the enemy, and Satan will immediately launch a counter attack against you in the Spirit.

Everyone experiences this conflict in some way, immediately after receiving the baptism of the Holy Spirit. So someone experiencing this for the first time needs to be very careful.

Do not think that because you have entered into a new awesome realm of the Spirit that things will be just wonderful.

When you first receive the Baptism of the Holy Spirit you go on a high. It is like being high on a drug and a wonderful feeling. You may feel like you are floating on the clouds. But then the clouds vanish into thin air and you find yourself hitting the ground.

Everything starts to go wrong in your life; your thoughts are filled with confusion, doubt and fear. You wonder if it was all your imagination or whether you have gone mad and are out of control.

Many things come against you. Satan is launching his counter attack. If you had anything that was there before that was not from God, now is the time that it will manifest. And now is the time when you will have to deal with it.

I will show you shortly how to deal with these things and how to get rid of them in your life. But I want to look first at the gifts of the Spirit themselves. You should understand how they work and what they are.

Paul lists these gifts for us in 1 Corinthians chapter 12 under three categories. The first are known as the Revelation Gifts, the second are the Power Gifts, and the third are the Vocal Gifts. And there are three gifts under each of these categories.

I will not go into a lot of detail, but I would like to explain these gifts to you quickly. You need to understand so that if one of these gifts manifests in you, you will know which gift it is.

I have heard people claiming to have gifts that do not occur in this list of nine. I will show you the kind of confusion that takes place as we discuss each one.

The Word of Wisdom

Paul says that there is given by the Holy Spirit, the word of wisdom. It does not say the gift of 'wisdom', but the word of wisdom.

What is wisdom? It is an ability to use knowledge to make choices concerning the future. A wise person is someone who can look at a situation, assess it and come to a conclusion saying,

"Under these circumstances, I would advise that you do such and such a thing."

Wisdom always tends to have a future orientation. The word of wisdom is a little piece of God's wisdom being dropped on you miraculously at a point in time.

Except for two of the gifts that can affect you personally, most of the time the gifts are used to minister to other people.

If you are ministering to someone and God gives you a word of wisdom, it means that God will drop into you, by revelation, a piece of His wisdom concerning that person.

This means that God will tell you something about that person that you do not know. He will tell you what purpose He has for that person concerning the future.

The word of wisdom is often seen in the Prophetic Ministry as an ability to predict the future. In the demonic realm, predicting the future and fortune telling is really not an ability at all. It is Satan giving his word of wisdom.

The main difference between Satan and God in this is that God does know the future.

Satan tries to create the future. So the demonic counterfeit of fortune telling is an attempt to manipulate someone into a situation where Satan can control their lives. He then creates what was predicted.

For example, you can go to a fortune teller and the fortune teller says,

"You will meet a man with blonde hair."

He will then give you a description of the person. You then open your heart to look for this man with blonde hair, and you put yourself into a situation where Satan can manipulate you. He will lead you to his choice of the right person who has blonde hair and will fulfill his own prophecy.

That is why when you become involved in the occult, fortune telling, horoscopes and such like, you do not get a true prediction.

You are actually putting yourself into the hands of Satan and allowing him to control your life, and to make the thing predicted come to pass.

When the Holy Spirit gives a word of wisdom, God gives a combination, not just a prediction. Understand clearly that the word of wisdom is not just a prediction.

The word of wisdom includes, with a foretelling of the future, what you need to do because of what will happen. This is very different.

What God says through the word of wisdom is,

"This is what I plan for you in the future. Now this is what you should do in order to bring the fulfillment of this prophetic word."

Alternately, it could be a warning. God might say instead,

"The road that you are walking on right now will cause you to have a bad experience up ahead."

This is not God telling you that you will have disaster as the fortune tellers do. God is telling you that the path you are on now and the influences that you are allowing in your life are leading you to a specific destiny. But God says,

"It does not have to happen. I can change it."

So when you operate in the gift of the word of wisdom, do not ever think that because you have insight into a future event in the person's life you should reveal this. You do not need to tell the person what you see in the future and predict what will happen to them.

You should either be telling the person that God wants to lead them on this path to a place of blessing, or that they are on a path that is leading to a curse.

God wants to divert them from the curse, and wants to give them instruction on how to do that. This means you must move beyond the revelation.

Be careful therefore when you receive revelation by the word of wisdom that you do not simply blurt out what you saw. You will put people into fear or give them false promises. Here is such an example.

"The Lord says you will be a millionaire!"

The person now thinks this is wonderful and it will just fall into their lap.

No, they must follow a specific path in order to become that millionaire, and they need some wisdom on how to do this. So do not go spouting what you saw without adding more to the revelation.

The gift of the word of wisdom has a foretelling operation with it, but it takes wisdom also to present it. That is why it is called the word of wisdom, not the gift of foretelling.

You must explain the path God wants them to go on, and how He wants to lead them.

The person must know what God wants to do and be open to His leading. They may need to be careful how they go because there may be problems up ahead.

This gift operates especially in the Prophetic Ministry and we will discuss it in detail when we study the Prophetic Ministry.

The Word of Knowledge

Wouldn't it be great, if instead of going to school or college and studying hard, God could supernaturally drop into your head everything you need to know?

Imagine if you could get the gift of knowledge and be really intelligent? Imagine if you could know a lot about many different things? If this is what you thought this gift was, then you are wrong.

The word of knowledge is when God supernaturally puts into your mind, something that you did not know about a person concerning their past or their present.

The word of wisdom always has a future orientation, but the word of knowledge looks backwards.

With the word of knowledge God will show you something that happened in a person's life in the past; or God will tell you something that exists in the person's life at the present time.

The two gifts often tie strongly together. This is because sometimes it is necessary to know where a person has come from in order to know where they are going. God will use these for different purposes.

God does not tell us things about people just for our interest. It will never be a case of,

"Wow I did not know that about her. Thanks for telling me that, Lord. I can't wait to go and tell my friends."

Sign Ministries

God is giving a piece of something you need to know about that person. Sometimes it is a sign gift that will make that person open their heart to receive the ministry you are offering them.

People will often not believe that God is using you. Remember how Jesus handled the woman at the well? He told her to go and call her husband and she said that she was not married. He said,

"That is right, you are not married. You have had many men, and the one you are living with now is not your husband."

He told her something about her past. Jesus was operating in the word of knowledge, and when she heard that she said,

"Oh I can see you are a prophet; you know what you are talking about, so I had better be careful."

It was a sign that made her open her heart; a Samaritan woman opening her heart to a Jew, which she would not normally have done. So God used that as a sign ministry, and often all of the gifts will be used as sign ministries to open people's hearts wide.

God may even give it to you sometimes for an unbeliever, to open their heart and to see the supernatural. They will realize that they are dealing with someone who knows God well.

God can reveal things about people so that you can minister to them. Sometimes people will not come forward for prayer for their needs, and you need a word of knowledge to encourage them to do this.

So the word of knowledge will reveal itself in many different ways. We will look at this more later, and we will show some of the way that the gifts manifest and operate.

How does knowledge come to you and how do you receive these revelations? We will explain this well when it comes to developing and demonstrating the gifts, but God will reveal things in different ways.

He could show you that a person you are ministering to has had operations for a sickness or disease; that they currently suffer from a specific thing.

When you come to pray with someone for healing, God may show you what exactly is wrong with them.

I operate very much in this gift when it comes to healing. When I come to pray with a person I will find myself unconsciously moving my hand to the part of their body where the problem is.

I will sometimes ask the person if something is wrong there, and they will confirm that they have pain in that area.

I may also in the Spirit get a vision where I see their lungs or kidneys or another body part as though I were looking with x-ray vision.

Sometimes it looks like they are cut open on an operating table and I can look in and see what their body looks like. I can tell where there is a problem or inflammation or something that is out of order.

All of this comes by the word of knowledge. It is a very useful gift where healing is concerned.

You do not need to go through all the medical tests that cost a fortune and that the doctors put you through. And in the end they are seldom sure anyway.

With the word of knowledge God can reveal when you pray for somebody exactly what their problem is. You can tell them,

"I can see your heart and I can tell what condition it is in. I see you have a spot on your lungs."

Whatever it may be, God can show you things about the person through the word of knowledge and that is how it operates.

I have seen someone with a word of knowledge standing up in a meeting and saying,

"There is somebody here tonight; you have a pain in your right arm, reaching from the joint at the top and pushing down into the elbow."

He will describe it in detail and invite the person to come forward for prayer for healing. And sure enough, someone will stand up at the back of the church and come forward for prayer.

How did he know that? He knew it by the gift of the word of knowledge.

Discerning of Spirits

This gift is a tricky one. Many people think they have this gift, and they call it the gift of criticism. They claim that they can discern a person's spirit and know what someone else is thinking.

They claim to know what a person's faults and weaknesses are and have received this by revelation from God.

God did not reveal this; it was more likely a demon that revealed it. God does not tell you about other people's sins. Their sin is between them and God and has nothing to do with you.

The gift of discerning of spirits has nothing to do with fault finding and detecting other people's faults and weaknesses. It is quite simply the ability to detect the presence of angels and demons.

Mostly it involves detecting demons. This is because often in ministry when you come to pray with a person, you will find that there are demonic powers associated with their problem.

By the gift of discerning of spirits you can detect when a spirit is present. It can be detected in different ways. God could put the thought in your mind to let you know and He may reveal to you what kind of demon it is.

You could then say something like,

"There is an occult spirit here. Were you ever involved in the occult, because I discern the presence of an occult demon with you?"

You may also see it in the Spirit as I do. I can identify an occult demon because I have seen them many times.

The gift of discerning of spirits allows you to identify the presence of evil powers. When it first manifested in me, it showed itself in a totally different way. I will explain it more in future series as we look at developing and demonstrating these gifts.

So the gift of discerning of spirits is simply the ability to detect the presence of demonic powers in the lives of other people.

As you operate in it, you will gain insight into the realm of the Spirit and will begin to actually 'see' not only demons, but also angels.

All of these things are supernatural and operate under the anointing of God.

<-Chapter 20   Chapter 22->   Show Condensed Version

Post A Review For This Book