Redemptive Gifts Introduction

RGI – Dedication of a New Thing

In Psalm 81, verse 3, we read, Sound the ram’s horn at the new moon, when the moon is full on the day of our feast. This is a decree for Israel, an ordinance of the God of Jacob. He established it as a statue for Joseph when he went out against Egypt, where we heard a language we did not understand.

Based on this passage, it would appear as though one of the first ordinances or commands or edicts that God gave Israel was the blowing of the shofar, apparently right after the decree of Passover and before they arrived at Mount Sinai, with all the rest. And it was given in the context of leaving Egypt, coming out of bondage, and leaving the confusion, the language they could not understand. So as we blow the shofar this morning, as a dedication, we’re asking, first of all, that this teaching will be a liberating thing, a thing that will remove people from bondage.

And secondly, that it will be spoken in a language that people can understand, the language of the Spirit, speaking to the Spirit in their heart, bearing witness that these are the words of God that bring liberty to all. We’re looking in this teaching at the redemptive gifts, and the spiritual gifts from the very beginning of their impartation have been a source of great comfort, great freedom, great dignity, great joy, and great controversy to believers. And part of the problem with the controversy is that there was no way to anticipate what they would be like.

The disciples had experienced the power of the Lord Jesus Christ. They had seen people raised from the dead. They had actually done miracles.

They had cast out demons through the power of the Holy Spirit. There was some sort of an impartation that Christ did early on in His ministry. Then later on, right in the final week of His life, after the resurrection, He breathed on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit.

There seems to be something new and different that took place there. And yet when He was getting ready to return to heaven, He spoke to them, told them to return to Jerusalem, and to wait for the power that would come on high. In John 14, just before the Garden of Gethsemane, He had said that He was going to send a new comforter, someone to come alongside of Him, a paraclete.

And yet with all of that explanation, with all of their previous experience with the Holy Spirit, I don’t think there was anything that conceptually or emotionally could have prepared them for what happened that day in the upper room. There was an earthquake. There was the sound.

There were the flames of fire. There was no frame of reference for the impartation, nor was there any frame of reference for the gift of tongues that followed, nor was there any frame of reference for 3,000 people getting saved that particular day. That has been the nature of the gifts.

The Lord imparts the gifts. We ask for a moving of the Spirit. We anticipate a moving of the Spirit.

And we frame it in the context of the past. And when the Spirit moves, it is a new and unexpected thing. One hundred years ago at Azusa Street, there was a man who had cried out to God for years and years, hours and hours a day, asking for more of God.

And yet when the Spirit moved at Azusa Street, it was surprising in its manifestation, and the church reacted very strongly. Some embraced, and some were not able to embrace. This teaching on the spiritual gifts as it is found in Romans chapter 12 was first articulated about 30 years ago by Bill Gothard.

It was he that understood the distinct category of these seven gifts as compared to the other gifts. Some in the church were able to receive that. Others did not.

Twelve years ago, the Lord gave us some additional insight, additional clarity as to the actual inner workings of each of those gifts. And now today we’re launching this forth, but not in any way, shape, or form as the final word or the final statement about the gifts, but merely another expression, another explanation, another level of the work of God in the body, another understanding of the work of the Spirit, anticipating even more in coming years. A few weeks ago I was with Rich Marshall, and he expressed very simply the fact that one of the most difficult transitions for the body of Christ to make is from God’s order to God’s new order.

And so it is in that context, Father, that we come into your presence and we ask your blessing and your anointing upon this teaching. Lord, we speak in respect of your order. We speak with respect of that which the body of Christ has known for 2,000 years.

We affirm the foundations of the apostles and the prophets. We affirm the Word of God and the truth that has stood through the centuries of the church age. And yet in the same breath, Father, we embrace each new thing that you want to reveal to us from your Word.

And we ask, Father, to set aside the things that are perhaps poorly stated, the things that cannot be understood or cannot be received at any given time. But, Father, to see you, to know you. May Christ be lifted up, and as he is lifted up, may he draw all men to himself.

And, Lord, as he draws men to himself, may he fulfill his great desire, which is to reconcile us to the Father. We ask these things in Jesus’ holy name. Amen.

You need to understand in terms of background to this teaching that I come from an evangelical framework. I’m a man of the book. The denomination I grew up in has as their motto the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible.

And I share that with you because some of the things that I share today will come out of analogies and types and shadows within Scripture. There’s many things that we can look at Scripture, perhaps from a little different hermeneutical framework than I used to use 20 years ago, but still we see the types and shadows. Very frankly, there’s some things that I will share that cannot or I have not yet found the documentation in Scripture, and I share them as a matter of observation from working in the church, from being a pastor, from being in itinerant ministry, and seeing a great cross-section of the body of Christ.

And there are those who would reject any evidence that does not come from the Word of God. And I would encourage those of you to ponder John 5, 36 and 37, and also John 10, verses 25 to 38. In both of these areas, Jesus Christ gave a defense of his ministry, and he said that everything needs to be supported through the mouth of two witnesses.

And he gave us two witnesses. In one case, it was the work of the Father and his words. In the other case, it was his words and his works.

And he presented his works, the tangible outworking of what he did, as evidence of support, of validation for the fact that these things were of God. And so I embrace both sides, not one without the other, not pointing to works without any biblical support, neither do I reject the visible manifestations of the Spirit in those areas where I cannot fully find biblical teaching. As we go through, we will have a solid foundation of Scripture with analogies, types, and shadows, and then secondarily, my observations of how this plays out in the body of Christ.

RGI – Three Kinds of Gifts

To begin with, we go to a separation of the three different kinds of gifts. It was Bill Gothard, as I said, that first explained about 30 years ago the meaning of 1 Corinthians 12, verses 4 to 6, as he delineated the three different meanings of the three different Greek words there pertaining to the different kinds. And from that background, we see Romans chapter 12, verses 6 through 8, as one list of gifts that is distinct.

I call those the redemptive gifts. There’s a second set of gifts in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 that we call the manifestation gifts. There’s another set, another list in Ephesians chapter 4 that I do not believe are spiritual gifts at all.

I believe these are offices in the church, the apostle, pastor, evangelist, teacher, the five-fold offices in the church. I believe those are offices, not gifts. And my understanding at present, which I cannot prove from scripture, and I say this very candidly, is that everybody has one of the seven gifts that is listed in Romans chapter 12.

I believe we receive those at conception, not at salvation, and they define our entire soul and spirit, our personality, our outlook, the way we see ministry. Upon that foundation of those seven gifts, any one of those seven gifts, and we have only one, as a person walks out their Christian walk, they can receive one or any combination of the gifts from 1 Corinthians 12 and 14. Now, the standard teaching of the church is that we receive those gifts, the 1 Corinthians 12 to 14 gifts at the moment of salvation.

Quite honestly, just as I cannot prove from scripture that we receive the redemptive gifts at the moment of conception, so I do not believe anybody in the church can prove from scripture that we receive the manifestation gifts at salvation. In fact, we have two slightly different passages that refer to this. One is Paul speaking to Timothy, saying, stir up the gifts that you have within you that were received through the laying on of hands in the presbytery.

So there are some gifts, I believe, that are imparted by spiritual leadership, not necessarily received at the moment of salvation. We also have the very, very clear command in 1 Corinthians 14 that we are to seek specific gifts, as though in our walk, we begin our walk, we do not have all of the manifestation gifts that God wants to give us, and he gives us permission to pick and choose the ones we want and to cry out for him and to ask for them. There’s no guarantee in the passage that God will give us everything that we ask for, but clearly there’s the command for us to show initiative once we have knowledge and to request particular gifts.
RGI – The Seven Gifts
The timing of receiving the manifestation gifts, the number of gifts we have, all of that is open. It’s not spelled out clearly in scripture. My concern right now is with the seven gifts in Romans.

The language varies from translation to translation. So very simply, for the sake of uniformity, the language that I use is as follows, and the order is always important. First gift is the gift of prophet, then servant, then teacher, then exhorter, giver, ruler, and the gift of mercy.

Let me quickly say that I see a very distinct difference between the gift of prophet, the redemptive gift of prophet in Romans 12, and the manifestation gift of prophesying that is listed in 1 Corinthians. Understand that any one of the seven redemptive gifts can have the manifestation gift of prophesying, and the seven redemptive gifts transcend the Old and the New Testament. Isaiah had the redemptive gift of teacher, manifestation gift of prophesying, walked in the office of prophet.

Jeremiah had the redemptive gift of exhortation, manifestation gift of prophesying, walked in the office of prophet. Ezekiel had the redemptive gift of prophet, manifestation gift of prophesying, walked in the office of prophet. John the Apostle had the redemptive gift of mercy, manifestation gift of prophesying, book of Revelation, and he walked in the office of apostle.

So the manifestation gift of prophesying is completely different, distinct, separate from the redemptive gift of prophet. Thirty years ago when Mr. Gothard began to teach on this, he pulled together a group of people in one of his advanced seminars and had them separate out into different portions of the room. Everybody that thought they had a gift of giving went one direction, gift of mercy in another direction, gift of prophet in another direction, and he had them sit down and compile a self-portrait.

What everybody in the group could agree upon were the characteristics of a prophet or a mercy or a giver. Using that self-portrait compiled by a group, he then went to scripture and sought to find individuals that matched those portraits. This material is still available from the Institute of Basic Life Principles.

Very good material. I used it for many, many years as the foundation of my understanding of the redemptive gifts. I’m in no way demeaning it.

That was what gave me the beginning. Without that, we wouldn’t have had anything that follows. Then about 12 years ago, God brought a woman into my life by the name of Mrs. Lee.

She was sitting at my dining room table when the revelation came to her that the sevens in scripture paralleled the seven redemptive gifts. She spent the next year or year and a half researching the different lists of seven in scripture and drawing out the teachings that pertain to the redemptive gifts. By the list of sevens, I mean things like the seven days of creation, the seven items of furniture in the tabernacle, the seven compound names of Jehovah in the Old Testament, the seven voices of God in Psalm 29, the seven trees in Isaiah 4119, the seven miracles of Christ in the Gospel of John, the seven last words of Christ on the cross, the seven items of the believer’s armor, the seven letters in Revelation, and the lists go on and on and on.

There’s between 50 and 100 lists of sevens that we have identified in scripture and been working through in the last 12 years. She spent the next year or year and a half researching the different lists of seven in scripture and wrote two manuscripts. She gave a copy of it to me and a copy of it to Mr. Gothard, and so far as I know, she has walked away from the study.

I have not seen her for over a decade. But based on that, I took her research and have continued over the years. Different people have joined me and teamed with me in research, and what I share with you today is not solely the product of my study, but it is the composite of what the body of Christ has put together and God has seen fit to allow me to articulate the work of many other people.

RGI – Gift Development Influences

In addition to the basic foundation of the redemptive gift, which each individual has, there is a few other factors that color it. First of all is birth order. For those of you that are familiar with basic Adlerian psychology that deals with birth order, it’s been popularized more recently by Dr. Kevin Lehman in his book, The Birth Order Book.

We see that there are distinct imprints on a child’s personality based on where they are in the birth order. Some of the characteristics of birth order parallel mirror some of the same characteristics in the redemptive gifts. When you have that birth order and that gift, it creates an intensification of all of the strengths and an intensification of all the weaknesses of each of the gifts.

The three that are particularly affected are the prophet, the exhorter, and the mercy. When you have a firstborn prophet, you have an amplification of the strengths and weaknesses. The apostle Peter had the redemptive gift of prophet.

He apparently was firstborn. We speak of Peter and Andrew, and so you see the intensification of his zeal, of his passion, of his impulsiveness, of his being verbal expressive. He was the first one to speak in a group setting more often than anybody else in all the gospels.

You also see the weaknesses. We see the failing of faith in the midst of walking on the water. We see the unwillingness to embrace the cross as Jesus kept telling him that he was going to the cross.

We see the fierceness with which he disciplined himself and the breaking of his faith and his identity and his dignity after he betrayed Christ. All of these are characteristics of the prophet that are amplified by being firstborn. When you have a second born with a gift of mercy, we again have an amplification of the characteristics.

We have the apostle John as an example of that. James and John. John was the younger of the two.

He had the gift of mercy. He was known in the early church for his message of holiness and his message of love, an amplification of that. The third that is significantly influenced by birth order is the exhorter.

When you have a third born exhorter, especially a baby of the family exhorter, especially a baby of the family with an older brother and an older sister, you have a massive amplification of all of the strengths and all of the weaknesses of the exhorter. Our example for this would be Moses, gift of exhortation and a mighty man of God. As a matter of fact, that whole family had all three of them.

Miriam was a firstborn prophet and of course Aaron, the first high priest, was a second born mercy to have the greatest intensity of the anointing for mercy, and then Moses, the third born exhorter. God gave a special grace to their parents to raise three of the intense gifts. So birth order affects the playing out of the redemptive gifts, and we see many other more subtle variations.

If you have a firstborn exhorter, for example, there’s going to be a tidying up, a neatening of the randomness of the exhorter. A second influencing factor, variable if you will, is parenting. Amos said it quite succinctly when he was being chewed on by the king.

He responded and said, I’m neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet. That was a very indicative statement because the redemptive gift of prophet leaves a very, very significant imprint on all of the children, regardless of what their gifts are. So if you have a prophet who is the son of a prophet, you have an enlarging of the strengths and the weaknesses of the prophet.

If you happen to have a firstborn prophet who is the son of a prophet, you have a triple dose of the strengths and the weaknesses of the prophet. And a third characteristic that affects them all is the whole area of woundedness. Woundedness is a universal.

Depending on how we are broken, the pain in our soul and the coping mechanisms, the compensations, the wrong response to pain, all of those things will significantly influence the working out of our gift. I ministered to someone recently who came from severe brokenness and yet she had the redemptive gift of prophet. And the prophet basically does not do fear.

The prophet is very bold. The prophet is very impulsive, very aggressive, shows initiative, is not intimidated by circumstances. And it was fascinating to watch the turmoil within this woman whose overt drive was to be a risk taker and yet whose woundedness said, don’t take any risks.

And she would want to reach into something and then pull back. And the people that knew her couldn’t understand her because they never knew which side of the line she was going to fall on. They never knew whether she was going to be bold or intimidated, whether she was going to step forward or whether she was going to pull back.

And over the years we’ve watched the healing begin to take place to where the woundedness is healed and the natural boldness that has been there for 30 years is coming to the surface. And unfortunately the people around her don’t know what’s happening and they can’t figure out what’s going on with this individual that they thought they had all figured out. She’s just getting healed.

That’s all. Praise the Lord.

RGI – Behavioral Characteristics

Now, coming back to the sevens in Scripture, there are external behavioral characteristics that mark each one of the gifts. These are personality traits, if you will. These are things that are not related to ministry directly, and that makes an individual easy to spot by their behavior.

And once we have the behavior identified, we can go to the sevens in Scripture and look at the DNA. I describe it this way. Suppose I have a bag full of animals.

I reach into this bag full of live animals, grab something, and I pull it out and look at it and say, this thing has two wings, white feathers, orange beak, orange webbed feet, lays eggs, swims really good, and it quacks. In all probability, this is a duck. I do that based on external characteristics.

I don’t need to cut the duck open to see what’s inside. I can go to the anatomy books, because somebody else has already cut them open, and determine every bone, every organ, every disease, every natural process for the duck. In the same way as I minister to individuals, I look at their behavioral characteristics.

I’ll do Q&A for about five or ten minutes based on the behavior, whether you’re quiet or whether you’re verbal expressive, whether you prefer to work alone, you don’t have an independent spirit, or you prefer to be in a group, whether you’re task-oriented or conceptually focused or relationally focused. These kinds of diagnostic questions, behavioral questions, help me identify the gift. Then I can go to the sevens and explain the rest of what is inside you, how God made you tick, and what it is that he intends you to do.

It is important, as we look at the gifts, however, to never use them as an excuse for not ministering or not growing in particular areas. Every gift has a certain amount of free money. The prophet, for example, is born with a capacity for faith.

He doesn’t have to work at it. Other people have to work at it, but the prophet doesn’t. The mercy is born with a capacity for compassion.

They don’t have to work at it. They just are compassionate. For the prophet to shrug and say, ìWell, compassion isn’t my cup of tea because I’m a prophet,î is just flat-out sin.

All of us, without exception, are called to walk out the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit are not color-coded with exceptions and footnotes for the different gifts. The fact that we have some free money, character qualities that we didn’t have to work for, in no way negates the responsibility for us to work diligently on each of the other character qualities that don’t come easily.

Likewise, we’re all called to minister across the board. Everyone is called to have a servant’s heart, whether you have the gift of service. Everyone is called to show mercy.

Everyone is called to give. Everyone is called to be apt to teach, to be instant, in season, out of season. So we need to use these as tools for understanding, but in no way as an excuse for not growing.

RGI – Building Leadership Teams

I see a number of reasons why we should study the redemptive gifts and how they are beneficial to our ministry. First of all, as a leader, as someone who has been in the pastorate, as someone who works with pastors and leaders of intercessory networks, I found it extremely beneficial to understand the non-moral personality issues that affect staffing, so a leader can know how to best use the gifted people that God has brought to him. For example, many years ago when I was in the pastorate in a small church, one of the jobs that I did very briefly was to arrange the nursery schedule, just the number of women that were going to rotate through the nursery.

I had the regular schedule. I had two or three women that were substitutes. We talked to everybody.

Everybody agreed. The substitutes agreed to be substitutes. Unbeknownst to me, not knowing all of the nuances of gifts at that time, I had a lady with a gift of administration working as a substitute.

She was to be on call when somebody else canceled. We’d pull her in. I remember the first two times somebody called on Friday and canceled, and I called her on Saturday and said, you know, I need you to substitute on Sunday.

She got really upset and wasn’t very happy about doing it. I came to realize over time that the gift of service is designed by God to be very flexible, to move at the drop of a hat, to fix anything instantly that needs to be fixed. The gift of ruling does not.

The gift of ruling plans ahead. The gift of ruling is not that they’re not flexible. It’s just that they’re the ones that wrote that little saying, lack of planning on your part does not necessarily constitute an emergency on my part.

And all I had to do was to shift things around and put the ruler on the nursery schedule on a regular basis. And as long as she knew when she was supposed to be there, she was there. Absolutely no problem.

And I put a servant on the substitute role because a servant is wired by God to flex, to step in. Now, hear me well. Ideally, the ruler would have had the godly character to fulfill her commitment.

We definitely had a character problem there. She shouldn’t have committed if she didn’t plan to fulfill the commitment. But the reality is that as a pastor, a certain number of people in my congregation had not yet arrived at full perfection.

And therefore, dealing with the realities of the situation, I could achieve some peace by temporarily moving people around into a better slot while I’m waiting for them to get their character in order. Another difference between the ruler and the servant has to do with time management. You look in the church for the two busiest people, they will be both the ruler and the servant.

But there is a world of difference between the two. And the difference is that the servant can’t say no. The servant typically has their time out of control.

They take on too much and they have projects that are overdue and they’re always juggling to put out this fire and that fire, their fires and other people’s fires. And if you ask a busy servant to bail you out to do your project for you, they probably will, but it is going to cost them somewhere else. Somebody else is going to left out.

It’s not a good situation. On the other hand, the ruler by design is busy. A ruler craves being under pressure.

A two-week vacation for the ruler is torment. After about the first 24 hours, they are packing their schedule full of activities on their vacation. When a ruler retires, one of two things happens.

He either dies in three weeks or he finds something else to do to fill his time. They are designed by God to have pressure. This is not an idiosyncrasy.

It is a reality. They must be under pressure, but they are only under as much pressure as they want to be. So I can go to a ruler in the congregation that is absolutely maxed out, time full, and I can say, I’d like you to work on this project.

It’s going to take this amount of time. If he says yes, I know that it is extraordinarily simple for him to look at his schedule. He will figure out what to cut out.

He will know how to cut it out. He will do it very simply. It is no big deal.

On the surface, the two people look the same, the two busiest people in the church. The servant has lost control of the schedule. The ruler is totally under control of the schedule, and so time management is not an issue.

Another factor in staffing. The teacher, redemptive gift of teacher, does not like to impose truth or impose behavior on other people. He likes to reason, to explain, to patiently walk through the scriptural basis one more time, to persuade them, bring them to a point where they are willing to do the thing that is right.

And when you have a carnal teacher who is unwise in his administration, he typically will build rules and rules and rules, and you can end up with a legalistic organization where he is hoping that the rules will do the confrontation so he doesn’t have to do the confrontation. So you need to pair the teacher up with somebody else like either the prophet or the exhorter or the ruler who is willing to be the enforcer. I have seen untold damage to churches because the pastor is a teacher, and he knows that the head of the deacon board is cheating in his finances.

He knows that the organist and the choir leader have something going. He knows there’s sin in the camp, but he’s trying to love the person in the holiness. He’s trying to teach the person in the holiness, and so this drags on for weeks, months, years, without ever having the confrontation to remove an unholy person from leadership.

We must understand the strengths and weaknesses of the gifts. So staffing. Staffing is one of the first things that we can do with more ease and do with more accuracy.

RGI – Marriage Relationships

Another area that is benefited by an understanding of the gifts is the marriage relationship. Anytime you bring two people together, there’s going to be some areas where they flow naturally and some areas where they don’t. And when we understand what is going on internally, when we understand the nuances of the motivation, what’s driving the gift, we can adapt.

I ministered to a young couple who was in the process of moving from Texas to Massachusetts, and he was a prophet, she was a mercy. They were going to start a new work in Massachusetts. And I explained to him the difference in processing between the two.

A prophet processes very quickly, and he processes out ahead. Very simply, his emotions arrived in Massachusetts six weeks before his body did. He was already there, he was already emotionally engaged in the work while his body and his family and all his possessions were still in Texas.

His wife was a mercy, and the mercy is at the other extreme. The mercy needs time to grieve. The mercy would have her emotions still in Texas six weeks after she arrived in Massachusetts.

And it was really important for her to drive across country, not to fly. He wanted to be there to get there to get on with work. She needed a slow disengagement, the processing of her emotions.

His plan was to get all his ducks lined up in a row because he was very efficient, very organized, and they were going to put things in place ahead of them because part of the team had already arrived, and he was going to arrive in Boston on Monday and be going full bore on Tuesday. And I said, don’t you even do that. You’ll damage your marriage and hurt your wife.

I said, go to Boston and sit on your hands for a few weeks and wait until your helpmates’ emotions catch up with where her body is. Such a simple thing, but when we understand the difference in processing and that it is not carnality, it’s not lack of faith, it’s not rebellion, it’s not insensitivity, it’s just the way God wired people, we can partner with each other better in understanding that wiring. Another tension that I had to deal with in a couple recently was the tension between teacher and prophet.

Again, a prophet receives new truth very quickly. A prophet has within him a gyroscope, an internal truth indicator, and when the prophet hears a new idea, it takes about 1.6 seconds for the truth indicator to go up or down, and they’ve bought the idea. And as soon as they’re convinced it’s truth, they’re ready to move on it.

Now, as a counterbalance to the prophet, God has intentionally created the teacher. The teacher will hear a new truth, something different, something that’s outside of his frame of reference, and he will hold it out away from him for a period of time, as in days or even weeks. It’s not that he’s rejecting it.

It’s not that he sees anything wrong with it. After the prophet has explained until he’s blue in the face, after the teacher has no more arguments and agrees that, yes, this looks good and it’s right and it makes sense and I see your scriptural verses, still, it’s going to be a few days and weeks before he takes that thing that he’s holding out here in his hand and he brings it inside of himself. There’s a God-designed time delay.

God created the teacher to hold the impetuous, impulsive prophet and exhorter somewhat in balance because they tend to go chasing after every new wind of doctrine that comes into town. The teacher’s slowness in appropriating truth, not that the teacher rejects it instantly, he just holds it out there and weighs it for a season before appropriating it. That’s God’s design.

But this prophet and this teacher were chewing each other up in their marriage because one had an idea. It was right. If it’s right, we ought to act on it.

The teacher was saying, well, if it’s right, it’ll still be right in three weeks. Let’s look at this for a while. And she kept saying, but what’s wrong with the idea? I mean, if there’s nothing wrong with it, he had no objections.

He was just being what God designed him to be, cautious and just holding it there for a season. Another very common source of tension is between the ruler and the mercy. The ruler very simply does not accept guilt.

When something goes wrong, the ruler’s innate approach is to figure out what we need to do to fix it. The ruler is not into assigning blame. And the very last person that the ruler is inclined to blame is himself.

His basic approach is something’s broken, let’s fix it. The mercy, on the other hand, is very quick to blame himself or herself. The mercy is very quick to say, what did I do wrong? What did I do to cause this pain? Or I should have done something to keep this pain from happening.

And so in the tension between the two, it is very easy when something goes wrong in the household for the ruler to not receive blame for the things that he is overtly doing wrong, even when it is his fault, and for the mercy to take upon herself the blame for somebody else’s actions or inaction. And this can easily become skewed into an enabling kind of a relationship. So understanding that predisposition that the mercy has to wrongly take blame on himself or herself can help avoid that problem.

There’s hundreds of other nuances in the meshing of gifts in a marriage that when they’re understood can allow for more grace in the marriage. People ask me, what is the best pairing of gifts for marriage? My answer is, there is no such thing. There are gifts that fit together very easily.

For example, to use a musical instrument illustration, if you have two pianos playing a duet in the key of C, it is a relatively easy thing to do. It can also be a little bit of a boring piece of music when it’s so simple. On the other hand, if you have a piece of music that is written in the key of A-flat minor, if there is such a key, I’m not a musician, and it was a concerto written for the piano, the flute, the oboe, and the French horn, that would be a much more complex piece of music to make sound good, and yet there would be a richer sound coming out of it.

And so there are marriages such as the prophet and the mercy that fit together very naturally. In fact, 90% of the people with a gift of mercy end up marrying a prophet. There’s just a natural attraction.

Prophets are not quite as attracted to the mercy as the mercy is to the prophet, but that’s a very, very common marriage pairing. We see a good, simple, easy marriage pairing between the exhorter and the servant, and between the servant and the ruler. There are some other marriage combinations that take quite a bit more work to make them happen.

I’m not going to tell you what a single one of those are, but there is a richness to the texture of those marriages. They’re going to have to work harder. They’re going to have to be wiser.

It is going to take a little more pain to make it come together, but when they do come together and they make the music that God intended them to make, there is an elegant sound. There’s a beauty to the texture of those marriages.

RGI – Parenting Styles

We have the same thing in terms of parenting. There are very specific challenges that each gift has in parenting. There are natural weaknesses that make for a bad parent.

There’s also some natural strengths that make for good parenting. The servant, for example, desires to meet needs. And the servant typically serves the children and typically serves them too much.

It is very easy for a servant to raise children that have unrealistic expectations about how much their needs are going to be met. And when the children grow up and go out in the real world, they expect their bosses, and they expect their roommates, and they expect everybody else around them to step and fetch for them like mommy has for 18 years. And it can be a rude surprise when they find out that their roommate has no intentions of picking up after them like their mommy did.

And if they don’t grow up in the process between leaving home and getting married, they expect their husband or their wife to pick up after them like their mother did. So the very strength, the very core of the servant’s desire to meet needs can be used to the enemy to bring some damage into parenting if a parent is not aware of that dynamic. Another example would be the prophet.

The prophet sees right and wrong so clearly that he tends to react much more strongly to an offense than the child does. The child does not understand why there is such a severity in the punishment for the action. Because if the prophet fails to explain that the child is being punished for rebellion, not for the actual act that he did, it’s not that he didn’t stay in class in the afternoon.

It’s the fact that he rebelliously broke the rules and lied and cheated and so on. When the prophet fails to express the actual crime and the intensity of the parent’s anger, the child can feel very violated by the intensity of the punishment.

RGI – Insight into Battlefields

Another reason we look at these is to understand the specific battlefield that we have to win in order to possess our birthright. In Proverbs chapter 9 verse 1, it says, Wisdom has built her house, she is hewn out its seven pillars. I believe that all truth can be summed up under seven principles and that these principles specifically parallel the redemptive gift.

For the gift of profit, it is the principle of design. For the gift of servant, it is the principle of authority. For the teacher, the principle of responsibility.

For the exhorter, the principle of pain and suffering. For the giver, the principle of stewardship. For the ruler, the principle of freedom.

And for the mercy, the principle of fulfillment. I believe all truth can be summed up under those seven principles and that each one of the gifts must fight and win the battle at that particular point before they’re able to move to fulfillment. And as we go through each of the succeeding gifts, we will look at that principle, define what it means, and show why it is that that is the most difficult battlefield for the particular gift.

RGI – Contributing to the Body

A fifth reason to study the gifts is to understand the specific contribution to the body of Christ at large, because those are not always evident from the English language translation of the gift. For example, we think of the gift of giving, and whenever we think of gift of giving, people think dollar signs. And to a certain degree, the gift of giving is involved with money, but there’s far, far more than that.

There is an anointing upon the gift of giving individual for birthing and for nurture. And we see many churches that have a devouring spirit released within the church that kills new ministries. There’s a boy’s work that is conceived in the elder board that is birthed, and it starts out great, and six weeks later, it just kind of disappears in thin air, and nobody’s quite sure what happened.

It wasn’t there was any big fight. It just disintegrated. Or new women’s work, or new outreach to the poor, new evangelism programs.

Some churches are just battered with this devouring spirit. Every new ministry that is birthed is devoured in a few weeks. The giver has an extraordinarily high authority in the spiritual realm to do battle against that devouring spirit to protect and to nurture the new ministry that is birthed.

When we understand that from a staffing point of view, we can deploy the givers and the congregation to protect new birth. People look at the gift of mercy and associate the gift of mercy with wounded and hurting people. And in fact, the gift of mercy has a very special touch, a unique touch in ministering to the wounded.

But it’s far more than that, because the birthright, the anointing upon the gift of mercy is to worship, to be able to come into the very presence of God in a way that the rest of us can’t, and to bring back some of heaven to earth. And so understanding the nuances of the actual birthright of the gift enables us to go beyond the surface manifestation.

RGI – Spiritual Warfare Authority

A sixth reason to study the redemptive gifts is to understand the spiritual warfare authority. I’ve already commented on the giver, but consider the exhorter. Wherever there has been disunity or fragmentation, where there’s division in the camp, where there has been isolation or an independent spirit released into a city or into a congregation, the exhorter has the highest anointing to pray against that disunity and to restore once again harmony within the body.

Not just a token agreement, not just people no longer warring against each other, but to genuinely restore harmony. Nobody can do it like the gift of exhortation can. You look at the servant in terms of spiritual authority.

We will look at this in more depth, but the servant has the highest authority against the death spirit. Where there’s somebody that the enemy is trying to kill prematurely when it is not God’s time for them to die, the servant in spiritual warfare has authority over the death spirit. We look at the prophet.

The prophet has the highest authority over the poverty spirit in people’s souls. I’m not talking about money. I’m talking about a soul that does not believe that they can walk in dignity, a soul that is so bad that they don’t believe in the call of God in their life anymore, that they see themselves as washed up, as a has-been, as not able to step into it.

It is the prophet that has authority to come against the poverty spirit that strips away the dignity from the call of God on somebody’s life. So understanding the different facets of spiritual authority, or understanding the gifts, enables us to use those different facets of spiritual authority much better.

RGI – Possessing Your Birthright

There’s a seventh reason and the one that drives me the most and that is to help each one of the gifts understand and to possess their birthright. The book of Hebrews grieves me as we think of the whole issue of people not entering into their rest. They were in Canaan.

They came out of the desert. They crossed the Jordan River. They experienced the miracles.

There was Jericho. There was the Battle of the Valley of Eidolon. So many good things happened and yet they fell short.

And as I walk through the body of Christ, the greatest tragedy to me is not the people who have been overtly devoured by the enemy and they are broken and living in sin and in bondage. The greatest tragedy is all the believers that are living at plus 20. All the believers that are just good enough that God is not spanking them.

All the believers are just good enough that they’re walking in some measure of holiness and righteousness. But they have no clue what their birthright is. They have no clue who they are.

They have no clue what they have to do to possess their birthright and they die without experiencing fulfillment. The whole book of Ecclesiastes is the tragedy of one of the wisest men on earth who did not understand what he had to do to possess his birthright. He did not know what his birthright was.

I do and we’ll be teaching on that in another session. But he didn’t understand his birthright and therefore he ended up saying vanity of vanities, all is vanity. And that plaintive cry in the book of Ecclesiastes said it’s a real blessing from God for a man to enjoy his work, for a man to find fulfillment in what he does.

And I grieve over that because it should not be the exception. It should not be a rare occasional thing for somebody to know their birthright and to possess their birthright and to end their life with a sense of profound fulfillment of saying this is what I was made for and I accomplished what God called me to do. And again, the birthright is encrusted in the gift.

The gift of exhortation is seen primarily for their ability to communicate the word and their ability to build relationships and yet the birthright of the exhorter is to reveal God to people. And unless the exhorter understands that, unless the exhorter understands the particular steps and hindrances that Satan puts in his way to keep him from possessing his birthright, he will settle for the good. He will be very popular.

He will express old truth in new ways, but he will fail to find that profound fulfillment, that release for which he was made that comes from knowing God, knowing God in a way and on a level that others do not know God and revealing him to mankind. You look at the ruler and the ruler is commonly seen as someone who establishes organizations and puts people groups in order, builds new ministry fronts and all of those are good and right and true. That’s part of the work, but that’s not the birthright.

Solomon did that. Solomon built, built, built, built, built. He built the temple.

He built the palace. He built cities. He built aqueducts.

He built storing. I mean, he did all of this vast stuff. He extended a commercial enterprise throughout the whole world and he died wrapped up in futility.

As a matter of fact, he not only did not possess his birthright, but he went into negative numbers. He did the opposite because the birthright, the birthright of the gift of ruler is to establish generational blessings for his family line and for his ministry to establish blessings that flow generation after generation after generation. And Solomon, instead of doing that, established a curse on his family line to where Rehoboam, his son, had 10 out of 12 tribes ripped away from him.

Because the man did not know his birthright, he did not possess it. And I see that all through the church today and the greatest triumph of the devil is in keeping believers who have great anointing, who have a great call of God in their life, piddling along, doing small things, being busy in the Lord’s work, seeing a little bit of fruit here and there, but failing to walk in the dignity of who they are, failing to experience the joy and the fulfillment of possessing their birthright, failing to understand how to get from point A to point B. So it is my passion to help people see God’s plan for their life, to understand who they are from God’s point of view, to step beyond the pigeon holes that the religious society has established for them, and then to know what price they have to pay to be able to get from where they are to where they possess their birthright. Because God’s design is for a win-win proposition.

God’s design is for the body of Christ to experience the greatest benefit at the same time that we experience our greatest joy. There is a time for taking up the cross, there is a time for bearing burdens, but when it all comes together at the end, it is a win-win thing. We experience fulfillment, we experience joy, we possess our birthright, we walk in our identity, and the body of Christ is expanded.

That to me is what the redemptive gifts are all about, knowing your birthright and then possessing it for your joy and fulfillment and for the release of the body of Christ as a whole.RGI – Dedication of a New Thing
In Psalm 81, verse 3, we read, Sound the ram’s horn at the new moon, when the moon is full on the day of our feast. This is a decree for Israel, an ordinance of the God of Jacob. He established it as a statue for Joseph when he went out against Egypt, where we heard a language we did not understand.