Practicing the Power: Welcoming the Gifts of the Holy Spirit in Your Life

by Sam Storms

I’ve heard it countless times: “You can’t live with the expectation that the Spirit will speak directly to you apart from Scripture and at the same time build your life and ministry on the rock-solid foundation of what he has already said in and through Scripture. You can’t speak in authentic New Testament tongues and at the same time preach verse-by-verse through the books of the Bible. You can’t pray expectantly for miraculous healing and be devoted to the importance of Hebrew and Greek exegesis. You can’t be a Calvinist and a charismatic! And you certainly can’t expect anyone else to participate in a local church that purports to embrace both sides of this unbridgeable spiritual chasm.” So they say.

available for those who believe, pray for, and humbly pursue it. And it is my hope that this handbook on how to implement spiritual gifts in a local church will prove to be helpful and useful.

1 Corinthians 12:7. Spiritual gifts, said Paul, are a “manifestation” (Gk., phanerosis) of the Holy Spirit. They are not some thing or some stuff that is separate from God, something else sent by God. The gifts are God himself working in and through us. They are concrete, often tangible, visible and vocal disclosures of divine power showcased through human activity. A charisma or gift of the Spirit is the Holy Spirit himself coming to clear and sometimes dramatic expression in the lives of God’s people as they minister one to another. As I wrote years ago in my book The Beginner’s Guide to Spiritual Gifts, “Gifts are God going public among His people.”1

If you want your life to experience divine power, it needs to be a praying life. If you want your church to operate in the full gifts of God’s Spirit, it needs to be a praying church.

He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry. As soon as he hears it, he answers you. (Isaiah 30:18–19) This is stunning, to say the least. If God is gracious and loves to show his mercy to his people, then why doesn’t he just do it? Why does he wait to be gracious? Why does he first require that he hear “the sound of your cry”? For heaven’s sake, Lord, or perhaps we should say, for our sake here on earth, just do it. Just give it. Just pour out your mercy and whatever other blessings or help or provision we need. Why do you insist that we first “wait” on you in prayer? It’s important to God that we ask him for things he knows we need. From a human perspective, it might seem quicker and far more efficient if God were simply to bypass prayer and get on with the giving!

“God does not ask us to tell him our needs that he may learn about them, but in order that we may be capable of receiving what he is preparing to give.”

One reason is that they often confuse praying expectantly with praying presumptuously. Prayer is presumptuous when the person claims healing without revelatory warrant or on the unbiblical assumption that God always wills to heal then and there.

Instead, we should pray expectantly, offering a humble petition to our merciful God for something we don’t deserve but that he delights to give

biblical truths about God in tension: God’s goodness and his sovereignty. God is good and loves to give gifts to his children when they ask (Luke 11:11–13). But he is also sovereign and cannot be bullied to act in a way that is inconsistent with his eternal purposes (James 5:13–18). We must allow room in our theological framework for a redemptive purpose in suffering as well.

Fasting is about ingesting the Word of God, the beauty of God, the presence of God, the blessings of God. Fasting is about spiritual indulgence! It is

ultimate sense we prefer the Giver to his gifts.

It is crucial to understand the difference between being seen fasting and fasting to be seen.

there is a vast difference between faith in divine mercy and presumption based on an alleged right.