Activating Spiritual Gifts may be much more easy than you expect. And there are keys that help, keys that help hugely!
This key will make sense by hindsight. The key is service, or actually seeking to use your gifts. And there is another key that successful users of Spiritual Gifts do more than the rest of us – they ask questions.
The error I long made, and maybe you have, too, is to try to discover or use a gift without actually applying it in service or asking questions.
A useful way of thinking about this is to Follow Jesus. Model your ministry after what Jesus does.
Jesus ministers as he sees or hears from Father.
You can do this, too.
But how do we start, and get results? Simple: respond to a need. Bring the Kingdom of God to what is needed. Restoration is what Jesus did again and again. And, he destroys the work of the devil, the adversary.
You can do the same. How?
Look for needs, look for a need in someone’s life. Ask questions, such as:
- How do I help or minister to this need?
- What do you want me to do about this?
- How do I pray for this situation, this person?
Then simply pay attention to what comes to your attention next. Being careful not to let thoughts, associations, ideas, images, or any experience pass by without assuming and accepting that this is an answer to your question.
And, because, as Dan Pendergrass once told me when I was asking about why replies from God are so often surprising, he said simply that God knows more than we do.
What we miss, in activating our gifts, too often or easily, are things like this:
- Forgetting to bring God’s agape love to a person with a need.
- Neglecting to ask how to minister.
- Forgetting to ask how to pray for the person you are loving and for their need.
- Not realizing that what comes to your attention next is actually an answer and reply from God. It’s unexpected, seems too easy, seems too ordinary.
How do you get started, if you don’t see where or how to get started? Ask Jesus to point out to you or bring to your attention people who need ministry or service or restoration (of health or well being).
Ask and serve. Ask and minister. In serving or ministering, you are applying and using your Spiritual Gift where needed. A great way to be living.