Every Christmas, my wife and I give our sons several identical gifts and some unique gifts. We select these diverse gifts to fit our boys’ respective personalities and interests. Some are for their enjoyment and some are functional—like socks and undershirts.
Similarly, there is both diversity and commonality among the gifts of the Spirit. The apostle Paul sets out a catalogue of gifts of the Spirit: “Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, 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” (Rom. 12:6–8).
As we’ve seen, the extraordinary gifts—like knowledge, prophecy, healing, and speaking in tongues—served a purpose in the founding of the new covenant church. Sinclair Ferguson notes that they all served the ministry of the revelatory word of God. He writes,
There is no comprehensive list of the gifts of the Spirit in any one passage in the New Testament. But in the lists that do exist (Rom. 12:3–8; 1 Cor. 12:7–11, 28–30; Eph. 4:11; 1 Pet. 4:10–11), it is clear enough that the ministry of God’s revelatory word is central to the use of all other gifts; it stabilizes and nourishes them; they give expression to that word in various ways.
By contrast, the ordinary gifts (i.e., love, joy, peace, kindness, and self-control) continue to function in the lives of believers throughout redemptive history. When theologians categorize these gifts, they don’t mean there is anything ordinary about their nature or function. Rather, they’re ordinary in that all believers are made partakers of them until Christ’s return.
All the gifts of the Spirit first belong to Christ and then are given by the Holy Spirit to those who are united to Christ by faith. Both the extraordinary and ordinary gifts belong to the Lord Jesus (John 3:34). From his fullness, he sovereignly distributes them in measure to his people.
Prophetic, Priestly, and Kingly Gifts
All the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit helped the saints spread the gospel and establish the church throughout the nations, but there were distinctions among them. Vern Poythress explains:
All the gifts mentioned in Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, and Ephesians 4 can be roughly classified as prophetic, kingly, or priestly. For example, gifts of wisdom and knowledge are prophetic, while gifts of administration, miraculous powers, and healing are kingly. But some gifts could easily be classified in more than one way. For example, healing could be seen as priestly, since it is an exercise of mercy toward the person healed. . . . This classification is nevertheless useful in reminding us of our relation to the work of Christ.
The natural gifts of believers that the Spirit still sanctifies today—such as administration, hospitality, and mercy (Rom. 12:6–8)—also fall under the categories of prophetic, priestly, and kingly. For instance, many seventeenth-century Puritans associated the forth-telling (i.e., proclamation) of God’s word in preaching with prophecy. The gifts with which God equips certain individuals to teach and preach are prophetic in nature. The gifts of faith and mercy are priestly in nature; the gift of administration is kingly in nature.
Common and Special Gifts
Theologians have also made distinctions between common and special gifts of the Spirit. Common gifts are those which are exercised by believers and unbelievers alike (Num. 24:1–9; John 11:51; Heb. 6:5, 9). The writer of Hebrews speaks of professing believers who “tasted the powers of the age to come” yet who ultimately apostatized. They had the external working of the Spirit of God upon them, enabling them to exercise certain extraordinary gifts. However, they were not savingly united to Christ. This makes the extraordinary gifts common, whereas special gifts are those which God reserves only for true believers.
The special gifts of the Spirit are primarily the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22) and other virtues of saving grace—such as faith and hope (1 Cor. 13:13). God makes true believers the recipients of the special gifts of the Spirit. Jonathan Edwards teased out this distinction when he wrote,
The distinction of the gifts of the Spirit into ordinary and extraordinary, is . . . different from the other distinction into common and special; for some of the ordinary gifts, such as faith, hope, charity, are not common gifts. They are such gifts as God ordinarily bestows on his Church in all ages, but they are not common to the godly and the ungodly; they are peculiar to the godly.
This distinction is meant to encourage believers to seek God for “the greater gifts” and to follow “the more excellent way” (1 Cor. 12:31). In his book, Dynamics of Spiritual Life, Richard F. Lovelace explains that God always intended believers to value the ordinary gifts of the Spirit above the extraordinary gifts. He writes, “The graces and fruits of the Spirit are to be sought more earnestly than spectacular gifts. Gifts which edify the minds and hearts of others are to be given priority over those which nourish our own emotional experience.”
Footnotes
Sinclair B. Ferguson, The Holy Spirit, ed. Gerald Bray, Contours of Christian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 208.
An excerpt from Vern Poythress, “Modern Spiritual Gifts Analogous to Apostolic Gifts,” The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 39/1 (1996): 71-101: https://frame-poythress.org/modern-spiritual-gifts-as-analogous-to-apostolic-gifts-affirming-extraordinary-works-of-the-spirit-within-cessationist-theology/
Jonathan Edwards Charity and Its Fruits (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1852), 30.
Richard F. Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP Academic, 1979), 127.
