Every gift has its counterfeits. Every gift can become a way of serving the self rather than serving Christ’s body. This section is for the top three to five areas you identified in Part Five.
For each of your top areas, read the shadow-side description below, then answer the four questions honestly. Better still, ask your spouse or a trusted believer to read these with you and answer about you. We are very poor at seeing our own counterfeits; others see them more easily.
If one of your top areas is a “dormant — fan into flame” gift, the shadow questions are still worth doing — but read them as anticipatory rather than retrospective: “What shadows am I most prone to as I begin to step into this?” Naming the shadows before they form is part of how the Spirit prepares us to walk in the gift well.
Shadow sides of each gift
| Gift | Shadow side / counterfeits to watch for |
|---|---|
| 1. Mercy | Burnout from carrying others’ pain alone; difficulty saying no; rescuing others to feel needed; resentment when not appreciated; identifying so closely with the suffering that you cannot see clearly. |
| 2. Healing | Treating prayer for healing as a formula or technique; spiritual pride when answers come; loss of faith when they do not; pressuring those who are sick; speaking too quickly about why someone has not been healed. |
| 3. Helps | Serving as a way to be needed or to avoid harder kinds of relationship; martyr complex (“nobody else does anything”); resenting those who do not see; doing for others what they should do for themselves. |
| 4. Giving / Contributing | Pride in generosity; using gifts to control or obligate; giving instead of relating; neglecting one’s own household in order to give; treating money as the solution to every problem. |
| 5. Hospitality | Hospitality as performance or pressure to impress; exhausting your spouse, your home, or yourself; entertaining only those who can return the favour; using welcome to keep relational distance. |
| 6. Administration / Leading | Controlling others rather than ordering work; valuing efficiency over people; impatience with the messy work of formation; building structures that serve self rather than mission; pride in organisational success. |
| 7. Exhortation / Encouragement | Cheap encouragement without truth; flattery; pressuring people forward before God is moving; counselling without listening; speaking words you have not lived yourself. |
| 8. Teaching | Pride in knowledge; teaching that informs without forming; doctrinal harshness; loss of love for the people you teach; using scripture to win arguments rather than build up. |
| 9. Pastoring / Shepherding | Possessiveness toward your flock; control disguised as care; codependency; failing to challenge; burnout from over-involvement; resentment when sheep stray despite your efforts. |
| 10. Word of Wisdom | Mistaking your own opinion for the Spirit’s voice; pronouncing on situations you do not know enough about; overconfidence in impressions; sharing too quickly without testing. |
| 11. Word of Knowledge | Performance and showmanship; “revelations” that humiliate or expose; mistaking intuition or memory for the Spirit; spiritual eavesdropping; pride. |
| 12. Discernment of Spirits | Suspicion masquerading as discernment; seeing demons everywhere; harshness toward those who differ; pride in always seeing through things; loss of charity. |
| 13. Apostleship | Pioneering as escape from the patient work of staying; control over what you have founded; competitiveness with other ministries; treating people as means to a mission; spiritual celebrity. |
| 14. Evangelism | Reducing people to projects; high-pressure tactics; counting decisions rather than disciples; loss of love for those not yet responding; pride in numbers. |
| 15. Prophecy | Speaking from your own heart and calling it God’s; spiritual abuse through “prophetic” pronouncements; failure to subject prophecy to scripture; pride; using prophecy to get attention or authority. |
| 16. Tongues and Interpretation | Spiritual pride; treating tongues as proof of deeper spirituality; ignoring Paul’s order in 1 Corinthians 14; using tongues for show rather than upbuilding. |
| 17. Faith | Confusing presumption with faith; pressuring others to share your conviction; refusing to accept God’s no; testing God; manipulating circumstances and calling it faith. |
| 18. Miracles / Workings of Powers | Sensationalism; manufactured reports; spiritual pride; eclipse of ordinary means; confusing emotional experience with miraculous event; using power without character. |
For each of your top three to five gifts, answer these questions:
Repeat this section for each top gift area. Take it slowly. The honest naming of shadow sides is itself part of growth.
Top gift area 1: ___________________________
Looking at the shadow sides for this gift — which of these do I recognise in myself, even occasionally?
How might this shadow be hurting others, even subtly?
Which facet of the Spirit’s fruit (see Part Seven) especially comes into its own as this gift is exercised — and how will I walk more closely with the Spirit so that He expresses it through me?
What practical step will I take, with God’s help, to walk in this gift more humbly?
Top gift area 2: ___________________________
Looking at the shadow sides for this gift — which of these do I recognise in myself, even occasionally?
How might this shadow be hurting others, even subtly?
Which facet of the Spirit’s fruit (see Part Seven) especially comes into its own as this gift is exercised — and how will I walk more closely with the Spirit so that He expresses it through me?
What practical step will I take, with God’s help, to walk in this gift more humbly?
Top gift area 3: ___________________________
Looking at the shadow sides for this gift — which of these do I recognise in myself, even occasionally?
How might this shadow be hurting others, even subtly?
Which facet of the Spirit’s fruit (see Part Seven) especially comes into its own as this gift is exercised — and how will I walk more closely with the Spirit so that He expresses it through me?
What practical step will I take, with God’s help, to walk in this gift more humbly?
Top gift area 4: ___________________________
Looking at the shadow sides for this gift — which of these do I recognise in myself, even occasionally?
How might this shadow be hurting others, even subtly?
Which facet of the Spirit’s fruit (see Part Seven) especially comes into its own as this gift is exercised — and how will I walk more closely with the Spirit so that He expresses it through me?
What practical step will I take, with God’s help, to walk in this gift more humbly?
Top gift area 5: ___________________________
Looking at the shadow sides for this gift — which of these do I recognise in myself, even occasionally?
How might this shadow be hurting others, even subtly?
Which facet of the Spirit’s fruit (see Part Seven) especially comes into its own as this gift is exercised — and how will I walk more closely with the Spirit so that He expresses it through me?
What practical step will I take, with God’s help, to walk in this gift more humbly?