I can still remember sitting at the desk, shading the tiny white bubbles gray as I made my way down the page, No. 2 pencil in hand. I was about 13 years old, and I had never taken a multiple-choice test quite like this. What would the results say about me, and what would that mean for my future?
The answers wouldn’t showcase my math or social studies skills but my spiritual gifts. The test was the culmination of a class I had been taking at my church. Over the course of several weeks, we sat inside a sparse, utilitarian classroom to learn about how the Holy Spirit gives each of us special abilities to use in ministry. I was eager to know how God would use me to build his kingdom.
When all the bubbles were tallied, I stared at the results with a mixture of pride and trembling. The gift of teaching came out strong. Giving scored high, too. The gift of mercy barely registered, which felt a bit embarrassing. Some other gifts I could scarcely define. What did the gift of prophecy mean? Would I be able to peer into the future?
Thirty years later, I can say the results were spot-on in some ways, especially when it comes to teaching. But I’ve also realized the test may not get a passing grade. Its individualistic approach to spiritual gifts misses the mark.
The apostle Paul focuses more on spiritual gifts than any other biblical writers do. And yet I can’t picture him poring over a self-guided spiritual-gifts assessment or proudly identifying as an Enneagram Type One. Paul wasn’t interested in personal empowerment or self-discovery.
The word gift is part of what confuses the matter. In English, a gift can be something we give to another or a strength possessed by an individual. We might say, “She has a real gift with words.” That’s not what Paul had in mind.
Paul used the word charisma to refer to various ministries to which God calls believers. Charisma, or “gift,” has its source in the Greek word for “grace” (charis). Spiritual gifts, as we call them, are grace with flesh on. We are gifts to one another.
To find out why Paul speaks of spiritual gifts in this way, we must consider how he understood grace. We usually associate grace with God’s unmerited favor in saving us—as we should. But first-century believers wouldn’t have been belting out “Amazing Grace,” because grace wasn’t a religious word back then. It signaled the social glue that bonded humans to one another in a mutually supportive relationship.
A little art history can help us understand what grace would have meant to Paul and the early Christians. The Three Graces from Greek mythology illustrate how people thought about grace in Paul’s world. A painting of the Graces features a trio of young women dancing, each joining hands with the others to form a circle. In this detail from Sandro Botticelli’s painting “Primavera” from the 1400s, the women’s clothing is nearly transparent; like the generosity of a gift, nothing is held back. Together, they represent the three dimensions of grace: the generosity of the giver, the gift itself, and the gratitude the gift evokes.

Grace, it turns out, always needs another. One grace by itself would be incomplete—a gift received without gratitude, for example. The women in the painting stand on tiptoes, suggesting motion. Their graceful dance of reciprocity illustrates their bond of friendship. That’s grace, first-century style.
In the modern West, we value a gift with no strings attached because it preserves our autonomy—we aren’t beholden to anyone. In Paul’s collectivist context, gift giving was never an isolated act but part of a perpetual dance between giver and receiver which created interdependency and ongoing delight.
A gift of grace was an invitation to enter into community, as well as the privileges and obligations that came with it. To accept a gift meant to accept all it entailed, including the duty to return grace to the giver by using the gift in an honorable way. In other words, gifts came with strings attached—in the best way.
Whenever Paul speaks of “grace” that is “given”—and he does so at least 12 times in his letters—he is referring to specific ministry assignments. He says, “To each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it” (Eph. 4:7). He’s not talking about salvific grace; neither is he focused on individual superpowers. He’s about to list ministry roles. His language here matches what he says about his own ministry earlier, in chapter 3, when he claims, “This grace was given me: to preach to the Gentiles the boundless riches of Christ” (3:8).
The circular dance of grace is evident in Paul’s writing. For him, the grace God gives is more of a ministry assignment than a particular ability. And Paul is explicit about the purpose of these ministry assignments:
So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. (4:11–13)
Paul doesn’t speak of spiritual gifts as divine packages that arrive on individual doorsteps but as people sent to build up the church. As we offer our service to our church communities, we give the gifts of those ministries to others. We become the gifts.
The gifts, or graces, God has given his church are people who cultivate collective maturity by doing what God called them to do. These gifts don’t work in isolation, and they aren’t ours to withhold. As we learned in Sunday school, our little lights weren’t meant to be hidden under bushel baskets. They were meant to shine.
Paul calls all of us to use our God-given gifts on behalf of others. We don’t activate our gifts by focusing on ourselves but by collectively stewarding God’s graces. The pressures of life or the dynamics of our congregations can make us into wallflowers, but we were made for the dance floor.
To withhold our spiritual gifts—our ministries of service and our very selves—is to impoverish our communities. Paul writes that “to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good” (1 Cor. 12:7). We don’t just receive the gifts of the Spirit; we are the Spirit’s gifts for one another.
And these gifts have strings attached. If the church refuses to receive someone working to fulfill their ministry assignment from God, the dance of grace comes to a screeching halt.
Paul’s grace—his calling from God—was to bring the gospel to the Gentiles. Grace compelled Paul to deliver the gift by serving a church that did not always know what to do with him.
Paul announced himself to the Galatians as “Paul, an apostle—sent not from men nor by a man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead” (Gal. 1:1). Paul understood his calling as divinely directed. He had been sent. He was a gift. He knew he had no choice but to respond to God’s grace by serving others, even when his service came with great suffering and personal sacrifice.
I wonder if our spiritual-gifts assessments and personality tests might limit us to our comfort zones when we could be meant for more. Graces don’t always align with our natural gifts and abilities; sometimes God calls us to serve the church in ways that are uncomfortable. The point is not self-fulfillment but service.
Mercy was my lowest score on the spiritual-gifts test I took in the ’90s. Based on that test, it was fitting for me to become a Bible professor rather than a hospice nurse. A caregiving role is not a natural fit for me. However, God recently gave me a new assignment supporting a family member with dementia. To my surprise, the journey has been sweet so far. I can sense the Spirit’s empowerment as I collaborate with fellow believers who are also there to help. I would have missed so much by saying no to this assignment.
That spiritual gifts assessment didn’t get it quite right. It assumed I needed to look within myself to discover a hidden spiritual superpower that would help me decide how to spend my life. A better approach is to prayerfully ask God, together with our community, where he wants each of us to serve and then seek to steward those opportunities faithfully. Callings are often discerned communally.
We need each other to become the kind of Christian community through which God’s presence is made manifest to the world. That’s the only way we can experience the fullness of God’s grace in every sense of the word.
Carmen Joy Imes is associate professor of Old Testament at Biola University and author of Bearing God’s Name and Being God’s Image. She’s currently writing her next book, Becoming God’s Family: Why the Church Still Matters.
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