While all gifts are important to the functioning of the Body in general, some of the gifts are clearly more important than others for the GROWTH of the church. In the total plan of God, miracles, helps, tongues, hospitality and exhortation are highly important. But for church growth they are not as important for example as, evangelist ,pastor, missionary and apostle.
When I was in the States I had the opportunity to link up with the Department of Church Growth at the Fuller Evangelistic Association Pasadena , CA and deeply appreciated the specially developed materials that were given to me and with a result have devoted many years studying the Spiritual Gifts, ministering in many churches and conducting workshops.
It is with this in mind that I want to spend a little time on a little unknown Gift that is SO IMPORTANT……………………”HELPS”.
One could describe the Gift of HELPS as the special ability that God gives to certain members of the Body of Christ to invest the talents they have in the life and ministry of other members of the body, thus enabling them to increase the effectiveness of their own spiritual gifts .
For example, every Saturday night we would go to the beach front on a ‘Outreach” haven’t seen one of those in many years, any way we had a huge Bedford truck that we converted into a mobile stage with a canopy over three sides and a roof. One side was left open to minister from and on the outside we painted “TURN OR BURN’ .
We would turn up at the beach front and start ministering the Gospel , while the brothers and sisters would run around leading people to the Lord and then we would take them back to our coffee bar and council them.
Now … what would we have done without the gifts of “HELPS”? the truck had to be filled with petrol, and in running order, a driver with instructions where we were going to have the outreach, the sound equipment and amplifiers had to be loaded’ guitars ,drums and a generator to supply energy . all this had to be preplaced and set up two or three times per night as we would drive around to the ice rink and the putt-putt courses as well. Without the gift of HELPS THIS WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE! 1 Cor. 12:28, Rom. 16 : 1-2 , Acts. 9 : 36
Raymond Ortland once described people with the gifts of helps as “The glorious company of stretcher – bearers” He referred to a person with the gift as the “Fourth man with the stretcher”- the stretcher taking the paralyzed man to Jesus in Mark 2: 1-12
When spiritual gifts are mobilized in any given local church , a large percentage of people will undoubtedly find that their gift is the gift of HELPS. And what a relief they will be to many a pastor who is over-worked by a hundred jobs ( I know) which have little to do with ministering his own spiritual gifts.
A better translation of Acts 9: 36 is”……….this woman was abounding with deeds of kindness and charity, which she did continually”.
Explain her:
A) Quantity of deeds…………………………..
B) Quality of deeds…………………………….
Weimer Wisdom 