Spiritual Gifts part 293: What you suffer for becomes precious to you.

Spiritual Gifts Part 293:

What you suffer for becomes precious to you.

The Doctrine of Spiritual Gifts

Point 4.
Developing the capacity you need to function effectively in your spiritual gift.

The major passages in the New Testament on the spiritual gifts all talk about how vital it is to develop capacity to exercise your gift effectively: Rom 12, 1Co 12-14, Eph 4, 1 Pet 4.

Am I growing in the grace and knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?

The spiritual gifts come in these two flavors - grace (administration, giving, mercy, helps, and service) and truth (Pastor-Teacher, evangelist, exhortation, and teaching).

There is only one fully heroic pursuit in this life, and that is to give your life for growth in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

2PE 3:18
but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory, both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.

2TI 3:12
Indeed, all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.

ACT 14:22b

“Through many tribulations we [disciples] must enter the kingdom of God.”

The church is always under siege to the extent it participates in growth in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

The fruit is the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, which manifests itself in loving one another as He has loved us, JOH 15:5-17.

It is by going through trials and difficulties, being cut back, redirected, that we find ourselves living the life that God has prepared for us.

The greatest advances in the spiritual life are made through the barrage of suffering.

Certain things they have come to possess of great spiritual value have come out of some dark and desperate and terrible experience in their own life.

The fiery British Christian teacher Derek Prince was quoted as saying “Don't trust anybody who doesn't limp.”
 

By the grace of God, we owe so much of our spiritual measure of increase to the suffering through which the Lord enabled us to go.