Have you ever wondered if your personality quirks could actually be gifts from God? What if the little things that make you unique are, in fact yours by design and are meant to be a unique vehicle for God’s purposes? The fascinating reality is that often even our seemingly negative traits have an original intent in God’s plan which has gotten corrupted over time.
This is the explanation: God has made us what we are. God has created us in King Jesus for the good works that he prepared, ahead of time, as the road we must travel. And yet, O Lord, you are our Father. We are the clay, and you are the potter. We all are formed by your hand. You formed my innermost being, shaping my delicate inside and my intricate outside, and wove them all together in my mother’s womb. I thank you, God, for making me so mysteriously complex! Everything you do is marvelously breathtaking. It simply amazes me to think about it! How thoroughly you know me, Lord! You even formed every bone in my body when you created me in the secret place, carefully, skillfully shaping me from nothing to something. You saw who you created me to be before I became me! Before I’d ever seen the light of day, the number of days you planned for me were already recorded in your book.
That parargraph was a set of quotations from Ephesians 2:10, Isaiah 64:8, and Psalm 139:13–16. Reading that, it becomes clear to me that, Biblically there is a precedent for examining how we are made and seeing the results through the lens of God’s original intent.
Getting There
Some of the things that make you who you are are unique to you. Some are inherted. Some are a combination of the two. The unfortunate downside of this is that you have inherited both good and bad from your ancestors.
As an illustration, imagine this: one day you realize you’ve been given an inheritance of a storage container full of boxes. Hundreds of boxes. Each box is full of the items that make up the inheritance. As you start to unpack the boxes, you discover gold coins, precious jewels, 10-year-old rotten fruit, the keys to a new car, a dead rat, the deed to ownership of a succesful business, a pile of radioactive chemical waste…the list goes on. Some of those things are good and valuable. You want to keep those. Others are bad and dangerous, and should be rejected immediately. So it is with our spiritual & emotional inheritances: we get good stuff and we get bad stuff. We want to identify both so that we can accept and rejoice in the good and reject the bad.
Another thing that holds us back is ungodly beliefs about ourselves. People in our lives (and our own negative experiences) can lead us to discount/talk-down our unique giftings. We can look at ourselves and instead of agreeing with God’s good word over us, we can agree with lies of the Enemy or of other people. We can also come up with our own creative lies about ourselves and build a little castle of unbelief in our hearts. When we do this, we exchange the power we were meant to have for a de-powered and sad life.
So many gifts!
Now you together are the Messiah’s body, and individually you are members of it. In the church, God has placed apostles first, then prophets, then teachers, then powerful deeds, then gifts of healing, helpful deeds, organizational gifts, different types of languages. Not everyone is an apostle, are they? Not everyone is a prophet! Not everyone is a teacher! Not everyone does powerful deeds! Not everyone has gifts of healing! Not everyone speaks with tongues! Not everyone interprets! — 1 Corintiahs 12:27–30
Just as each of you has received a gift, so you should use it for ministry one to another, as good stewards of God’s many-sided grace. If anyone speaks, they should do so as speaking God’s oracles. If anyone ministers, they should do it as in the strength which God grants, so that God may be glorified in all things through Jesus the Messiah, to whom be glory and power for ever and ever. Amen. — 1 Peter 4: 10, 11
We at Global believe that the lists of spiritual gifts in the Bible are not exhaustive. When one examines the language of the New Testament passages regarding the spiritual gifts, there arises a picture that there are very many gifts. Way too many to list. The Holy Spirit can and does equip believers with a multitude of skills/callings/giftings which are our natural abilities plus His supernatural empowerment. This, therefore, means that you can look at your distinctives through the eyes of faith.
You’re Not Alone
One of the students in our online certification programs recently told us about how she began to realize that she has her own way of hearing from God. She hadn’t made the connection that her way of perceiving the world (a “multisensory” process the she thought was different from others’ process) was in fact a gift from God. As she began to get training in prophetic ministry through our courses, God showed her the connection (Note: she mentions CPCP, which is our Christian Prophetic Certification Program):
I knew before taking [any prophetic certification courses] that most of what I did in my life was based in or flowed from the prophetic but had no clue how to fully walk in it. I spent the next year learning more about the prophetic [by taking CPCP courses]. I learned to recognize how Papa God speaks to me. I knew that I was multisensory but had not applied it to my spiritual life. I learned [by taking the courses] to pay attention to the things I kept being drawn to. I learned to listen to and ask questions of Holy Spirit. My confidence in sharing prophetic words began to grow. I went from only sharing words with my church family to also sharing them with complete strangers.
I also learned more about who I am, my identity in Christ. I gained confidence in who I am in Christ, how He speaks to me, and sharing what He shows me with others. I began to see myself more and more as He sees me and because of what He did through CPCP. I gained the confidence to…become a Master Equipper [Global’s highest healing certification]. Without CPCP I would not be where I am today. It changed my life and am excited to share what Papa has done in me with those I meet.
— Penny Tucker, Master Equipper through Global Certification Programs
I love the fact that as Penny began to connect her innate quirks with the Holy Spirit, she not only grew in prophetic ministry, but she also saw every other part of her life improve. What a lesson to all of us, that the seemingly insignificant parts of our lives are all connected. As we engage with God in any one area, every other place in our lives are touched.
Next Steps
This should encourage you! You don’t have to become the world’s leading expert in whatever your life-dream is; you simply need to engage with the Holy Spirit, in faith, today. In some small way, ask God to show you how your personality, your desires, your quirks can be aligned with his original intent.
Allow God to show you any place you have believed lies instead of his truth, and exchange those lies for the truth. Jesus is ready, willing, and able to shine his light on your soul and to help you receive truth.
Earlier when I wrote about inheritances, if you felt a prodding in your heart, it may be that the Holy Spirit wants to walk you through rejecting negative inheritances and receiving his original intent for your family line (and by extension for yourself and your descendents). Perhaps you’re thinking, “That’s all under the blood of Christ! I am a new creation! Why would I need to think about what I inherited from my parents/grandparents/great-grandparents, etc?” Here’s the thing: if you inherited a predilection toward diabetes from your parents, you would then apply the blood of Jesus to said predilection. You would pray against diabetes. You might attend some conferences and receive prayer for healing from the DNA inheritance. You would apply the blood of Christ by faith to the sickness (or to the predilection toward sickness). It’s the same for emotional inheritances as it is for physical inheritances. If you’ve received a pressure toward anger, resentment, control, manipulation, etc (from your ancestors), it behooves you to apply the blood of Jesus, by faith, to those issues. Scroll down to the P.P.S. of this blog post to walk through that process.
Consider getting some training! Like Penny found with her online course, we often see people take a simple step into getting some sort of teaching, only for it to change their lives in dramatic ways. This sort of pleasant surprise can happen at your local church, by reading a book, or like Penny found, by taking an online ministry training course. And, of course, it can happen on your own when the Holy Spirit sovereignly guides you into all truth. As far as I’m concerned, I want to do it all, to take every opportunity available to me.
May God bless you and meet you in powerful ways as you take steps toward aligning yourself, your inheritances, your personality with God’s design for you!
P.S. Ok, I can’t close this blog post without pointing you to the very courses that Penny took, which led to her testimony. Penny’s a master equipper with the Global Certification Programs →. That means that she has completed all the courses in the entire program (physical healing track, inner healing track, deliverance track), then she also completed our Residency program and was awarded the top certification. You guys, that’s really impressive. There are two main tracks: healing and prophetic. All courses are online, have a dedicated proctor/facilitator, and you take the courses with other students for genuine human interaction. More about the Healing Certification Program → and more about the Prophetic Certification Program →. Penny took most of the healing courses and was planning on stopping, but then she took some of the prophetic courses and everything changed. That’s where her testimony picks up.
P.P.S. Inheritances: if you’re still reading, it’s because you’re curious about how to reject negative spiritual/emotional inheritances and replace them with God’s original intent for your family line. Here’s the process I would recommend for that:
First, you’ll want to invite the Holy Spirit to show you what he wants to deal with. Wait quietly until you get a sense from God of what he wants to look at. Fill in the blanks in the following prayers with the issue(s) that come to mind:
- I confess the sins of my ancestors, my parents, and my own sins of ___________, specifically including __________.
- I choose to forgive and release my ancestors, as well as all others who have influenced me, for these sins and any resulting curses, and for the consequences in my life. Specifically, I forgive ____________
- I ask You to forgive me, Lord, for these sins; for yielding to them and to the curses that resulted from them. I receive Your forgiveness.
- On the basis of Your forgiveness, Lord, I choose to forgive myself for entering into these sins.
- I renounce the sins and curses of _____________. I break these powers from my life and from the lives of my descendents through the redemptive work of Christ on the Cross.
- I receive God’s freedom from these sins and the resulting curses. I receive _____________ (Receive blessings from the Lord.)
Adapted from Restoring the Foundations material.