All gifts come from the same source

This is the first reason why spiritual gifts should promote unity, because they all come from the same source. They all come from Jesus Christ through his Spirit. He is the Giver of them all. They are not to be found anywhere else. Therefore, there is a fundamental, essential, underlying unity in the spiritual gifts. They are inherently united; they are essentially one. They all come from Jesus Christ by his Spirit.

The word we looked at in the previous article was charismata. The Greek word gives us our word charismatic today and it simply means a gift of God’s free grace. All the gifts we have, we have received from the hand of Jesus. As one writer puts it: they are gifts; they are not choices. They have been given to us. There is a passiveness in us: we have received them from Christ’s hands. We may wish that we had other gifts than the gifts we have, but we have not. Christ has given us the gifts we have.

To go back to the other words that we looked at in the previous article, we may wish we had other spheres of service than the spheres of service Christ has given. We may say, I wish I could use my teaching gift in some other way, or my gift of administration or of helping or of witnessing. But Christ has given us the spheres of service. We may wish that our gifts were used in other ways, and that there were more blessings. But all depends not on us, but on the sovereign will of God.

Paul says of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12:11: He apportions to each one individually as he wills. So, there is a basic unity. They all come from the same source. All of us, in that respect, are in exactly the same position. We are all needy; we are all weak; we are all naturally ungifted; and we are all coming to our common Lord to receive what he chooses to give us. Thus, in that respect there is no difference among us at all. We have all stood in the line. We have all held out empty hands, and the Lord Jesus has given to each one of us the gifts he wanted us to have. So, no matter what differences there may be in the gifts, there is this profound underlying unity.

We see it when we go to church. We are all brought together by God in a common worship. We all come to the same place for the same purpose. To worship the same God through the same Saviour. We have all come to have dealings with the same divine persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We are all living our lives by the same law of God. We are all seeking not to grieve the one Spirit. We are all desiring to be filled with the one Spirit. We are all seeking to produce the same fruit of the Spirit—it is not any different for you than it is for me. There should be no fragmentation in the church. There should be no competition. This is a profound unity. How good it is when brothers dwell in unity!

One of the problems of our modern lifestyle is that there are not natural focuses of unity. In previous generations, people met at the village hall, in the local church, or even at the post office. There was somewhere where people met. They expressed their common humanity. They got to know each other. But that is gone today. Even the so‑called community centres are only used by a fraction of the community. People live privatised, isolated lifestyles. They drive in their hermetically sealed vehicles, usually in a pretty antagonistic competitive way to work, seeing the other cars on the road not as fellow travellers but as enemies. They work in their offices; they come home; they close the door; they turn on their full entertainment system. So, you live in your little cell and you are cut off. There is no real sense of a common purpose and a common community. It is become very privatised and individualised.

And this is the great blessing and benefit of the church of Christ. In the church we belong to a family of people who in many respects are very different from us. We meet people and we love people whom otherwise we would never meet or come into contact with. Our paths would not cross. But our lives are enriched, we are brought together, and we receive gifts. That is the first unity: the gifts all come from the same source.¹

Edward Donnelly