Last meeting, she spoke on "The Fruit of the Spirit" and the Spiritual Gifts that God gives to us. She let us know that without the Fruit and filtering each of our gifts through the Fruit, that our gifts are just like a loud noise to God and won't matter. Just think of that: How good would it be to have the gift of discertion without kindness? Or the gift of serving without love? Music without joy? It all makes sense and I have never seen it that way before.
She explained that the Bible teaches that each of us has at least one gift, and the Lord calls us to use that gift in our lives and in the church. She spoke on several passages, including Galatians 5:22, I Peter 4:10-11, I Corinthians 12, I Corinthians 13, and Ephesians 4:11-16, and Romans 12:1-8. If you have never studied these, I encourage you to do so, as I felt like I learned so much from these.
She then passed out four pages to us, where we took a quiz to find out what our main spiritual gifts were. It was 78 questions long and took about 20 minutes to complete, but when I was done - WOW! - I was surprised about a couple of the results. I knew that I would probably hold a gift for hospitality and giving, but exhortation and knowledge was an amazing discovery about myself, but it makes perfect sense. I scored lower on prophecy and teaching, but that's OK - God gave me the gifts that he did for a reason, and I can use THOSE to lift people up in my own way, and he will send those with the other gifts that he gave uniquely to them to help in their own way that someone like me may not excel at.
If you would also like to take this quiz, it was very neat and I even brought one home for my husband. The link is posted below (I uploaded it to Google Docs, if it doesn't work, post a comment with your email address and I would be more than happy to email it to you). Although he hasn't taken it yet, it will be neat to see what God has blessed him with and how we each compliment eachother in God's perfect plan! :)
