Finding Opposition When You Stir Up Spiritual Gifts

When people start to grow and learn in their spiritual gifts, I think one thing in particular goes unaddressed, and that is spiritual opposition towards using and growing in it, after all, it's there to strengthen and help the church, and that's one of the last things Satan wants. When something is important in the production of good, it becomes a special target of Satan for obstruction.

My church just had a miniseries on spiritual gifts, and I honestly don't think we are prepared for the after math of the spiritual battle that is going to come.

I have had considerable resistance to trying to connect in my church, and it's so much of no one's fault and yet I feel neglected and isolated. Just what Satan would like. He would also like it if I got angry and indignant at these people who really haven't done anything wrong. But those feelings are distractions from the important thing that needs to happen. I need my church, and they need me, in matters of spiritual gifts and otherwise, and I can't possibly be the only one facing resistance.


1 Spiritual gifts produce important results. But they are important as God judges importance, and may not have the impact our small eyes want to see, or the attention our small egos want to hear. So have faith when your efforts do not seem worth the fruit, for it is ours to plant, and for God to make it grow.

2. If you call for spiritual gifts to be practiced, you will be resisted. Satan doesn't like God's important things, and tries to ruin them. This is no different. Expect opposition on every level, from the exsistence of spiritual gifts, the definitions, the growth, and the fruit. We face resistance from the lies we believe about ourselves, the trust in our inadequacies to fill our gifts more than God's actions through us, and the external resistence from others with or without malice. The exercise of our spiritual gifts is more valuable than the cost of our ego, we must sacrifice our expectations of how we are to be treated or respected and focus on the goal of the gift that is required of us. It is so easy to be tangled up in the lies of imagined slights and politics and destroy the opportunity to do God's work because the circumstances to producing the fruit were not politically correct or comfortable. Our fruit is more important, and Satan will do anything, no matter how cheap and petty, to prevent the exercise of our gifts. In fact, he loves the cheap and petty, so watch out for low blows and irksome tiny things that, really, don't have anything to do with Eternity.

3 Resistance is aimed at us. Nothing can prevent God from doing anything, he is God. So Satan must try to prevent us from doing God's will. Resistance is not a consequnice of our wrongdoing. Sometimes we have punishments and consequences for what we do on Earth, and that is not the same as being opposed or going through a hard time for something good.

 Satan will attack the discovery of our gifts with decit that they don't exsist, and lies that you are not good enough to weld them. Get up. Satan will fight at the growth of our gifts, he will attack every mistake and failure. Get up. He will attack the fruit of our gifts with put downs, neglect, and lies of unworthiness. Get up, we need you .



Fight, babies, as you take your first steps, fall and get up. Get mad at the inevitable gravity of our human nature. Fight and walk, and trust that one day you will run.

Spiritual Gifts and The Great Adventure

We all have a special part to play in the big story that God is writing, and I feel like spiritual gifts are his gift packet to us; tools we need treeto plaas Paul our part. When we don't use our gifts, we cannot fill our role, and miss out on our part in the Grand Adventure God is writing . God's Grand Adventure is the only true fairy tale, it is the only story that counts, and it is the one that tugs at your heart to do something meaningful, to play superhero, to change the world, to find satisfaction in a hollow world.
The desire to be a part of God's Grand Adventure, and the sour, bitter pang of lonliness and meaninglessness of our efforts in life to be a somebody when we don't participate with God's story, this is what drives us to addictions and escapism, and idolizing fictional characters with lives more meaningful to us than our real ones.

And at the moment, not using my spiritual gifts has distenced my fullness in playing in the big story, and I feel lonely and unused, unsatisfied, and unhelpful. I'm trying to connect at church, it's very hard when I work so much.

The gifts I have in my tool bag are knowledge, teaching, and visions. I'm not sure which gift these visions fall under, I was thinking prophecy.  But I want to use them more. I'm thinking that the book I'm very slowly working on works with most of them.  Painting during the church services, and the prep for that, has generated a few images from God, and sometimes a long teaching blog post to explain it, like the one above was specifically for my church.
The gifts of knowledge and teaching I know how to develop, they are more easy to discuss and practice in our Western culture of books and quantitative data. Visions, not so much. I don't know how to develop those, or "fan into flame" as Paul told Timothy, because it's so easy to just imagine something.

Why are visions important to me? It's a rarer gift, and kinda fun, and it strengthens my faith in the unseen, much more real world, with it's more real battles. It's a glimpse, a very direct confirmation of the more real world, and God's connection with all of us. With visions of spiritual war, I feel like my prayers are more effective when I see what I am fighting. They are metaphors and symbols; reminders.

I want my visions to go in the direction of being for specific people, or messages for the church. I need to get more involved with my church to do that.