The value of a personal gift often corresponds with the value of the person giving it. When I was a kid, our family had a close friend who was a famous rock musician. He would come to our home on St. Simons Island, GA bearing gifts, and he would drive me around the island in his DeLorean and bring me up on stage when he was performing. I treasured these experiences because of his status. He was famous! And he was sharing what he had with me!
In the same way, the value of spiritual gifts stems from their having been freely given to us by the triune God. Recognizing the source of the gifts of the Spirit raises our appreciation of them.
Just as parents thoughtfully hand-select gifts for their children, God has distributed the gifts of the Spirit to his people according to his wisdom and will (Heb. 2:4). The New Testament teaches that the Holy Spirit is himself the gift of the Father and the Son to the church. As he drew near to the cross, Jesus taught his disciples that “the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things” (John 14:26). He told them, “when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me” (John 15:26). Finally, Jesus said that it was to their advantage that he go away: “If I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7). The Christian church has long confessed that the Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son.” Just as the Son is the love gift from the Father to His people, so the Holy Spirit is the love gift of the Father and Son to believers.
The gifts of the Spirit are those blessings of God that come from the victorious, ascended Christ who has poured the gift of his Spirit out on his people. Sinclair Ferguson explains,
The correlation between the ascension of Christ and the descent of the Spirit signals that the gift and the gifts of the Spirit serve as the external manifestation of the triumph and enthronement of Christ. Paul underlines this by the way in which he cites Psalm 68:18 in Ephesians 4:7–8.
The gift of the Spirit is intrinsically related to the person and work of the Son. Christ’s victorious death and resurrection secured the giving of the Spirit to His people.
Jesus Christ possessed the fullness of the diverse gifts of the Spirit; he received the Spirit without measure (John 3:34). We see this in the miracles Jesus performed. He received and exercised the gifts of the Spirit to fulfill his messianic work. He then gave these extraordinary gifts to his people for the foundation of the new covenant church during the apostolic age (Eph. 2:20; 3:5; 4:11). In this sense, we can say that Jesus is the source of the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit.
However, he is also the source of the ordinary gifts of the Spirit. In the Upper Room, Jesus charged his disciples to abide in his “love” and said he would give them his “joy,” and leave them his “peace” (John 14:27; 15:9-10; 15:11; 17:13). These stand at the top of the list of the ordinary gifts of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22), with Jesus as the one who grants them to all his people. Together with God the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ is the giver of the gift of the Holy Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit.
But God doesn’t give the same gifts to each one of his people. Rather, he distributes them for the building up of his body, the church. Still, this diversity comes from “the same Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:4, 8, 9–11). In 1 Corinthians 12:5–6, the apostle acknowledges that “the same Lord” and “the same God” graciously distributes these gifts to his people. In 1 Corinthians 12:12, Paul notes that “as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ.”
Footnotes
Sinclair B. Ferguson, The Holy Spirit, ed. Gerald Bray, Contours of Christian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 207–208.
