Spiritual Gifts and Weaknesses: Grow the Weak Ones

Take an honest look at your own spiritual gifts and you’ll notice something almost everyone notices: you’re strong in one area and kind of a mess in another. Maybe you can sit with someone in the worst week of their life and know exactly what to say – but ask you to write a check for the building fund and you go quiet. Maybe you trust God for the impossible without blinking, yet you can’t find one encouraging word for the guy who just lost his job.

Here’s a question worth considering: what if your strength and your weakness aren’t unrelated? What if the very gift that comes easy to you is actually the tool you’ve been missing to grow the one that doesn’t come easy at all?

The Body Was Never Built to Run on One Gift

No single believer gets the full set of spiritual gifts, and that’s by design, not an accident. Paul lays this out to the Roman church almost like a staffing chart – different people handling different parts, the same Spirit doing the assigning.

Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness. [Romans 12:6-8]

Notice what Paul doesn’t say. He doesn’t say to pick whichever gift feels most natural and quietly let the rest go. He assumes some gifts will be strong in you and others thin, and he still tells you to use what you’ve got – all of it, even the underdeveloped part. That is part of the process of sanctification … growing in Christ in the areas we are weakest in.

That’s the piece we tend to skip. We treat our weak spots like somebody else’s assignment. “I’m just not a giving person,” we say, as if that were a fixed personality trait instead of a muscle the Spirit intends to build. Scripture doesn’t let any of us off that easily.

Let Mercy Teach You How to Give

If mercy is your strong gift, you already own the raw material generosity needs – you just haven’t pointed it at your wallet yet. People strong in mercy feel other people’s pain almost physically. They’re the ones who show up at the hospital without being asked, who cry at the funeral of someone they barely knew because grief in the room is real to them.

Giving runs into trouble the moment it turns into a math problem – a percentage, a line item, an obligation checked off before the offering plate passes. Paul skips past all of that:

"Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver" (2 Corinthians 9:7).

Cheerful giving rarely comes from a spreadsheet. It comes from actually feeling the weight of a need in front of you – which is exactly the terrain mercy already knows how to walk. So if mercy runs deep in you, try this: the next time compassion tugs at you toward somebody’s hurt, don’t stop at a hug and a casserole. Let that same ache open your hand. You already know how to feel the need. Now let the feeling reach your wallet, not just your words.

I’ve watched people who never called themselves generous surprise even themselves once they quit treating giving as a separate skill and started treating it as mercy that happens to carry cash.

Let Faith Teach You How to Encourage

If faith is your strong gift, you already carry exactly what encouragement requires – you just haven’t been lending it out. Paul describes this kind of faith as its own distinct gift: “to another faith by the same Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:9).

That’s more than ordinary belief. It’s an unusual, settled confidence that God will do what He said, even when the circumstances in front of you argue otherwise. Some people simply have more of it than others, and it shows.

Encouragement, meanwhile, gets treated like a talent for finding the right words – and plenty of us genuinely don’t have that talent. Nothing clever comes out of our mouths standing next to a hospital bed. But encouragement was never really about clever words. Paul’s instruction to the Thessalonians wasn’t “say something nice.” It was:

"Encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing" (1 Thessalonians 5:11).

At its root, encouragement is loaning somebody your confidence when theirs has run dry. If you already believe, without much effort, that God is doing something in your own impossible situation, you have exactly what encouragement requires. You just have to turn it outward. “I don’t know how this works out, but I do know He hasn’t stopped showing up.” – that sentence, said by someone whose faith is already strong, carries real weight.

Fruit and Gifts Aren’t Quite the Same Thing

This approach works a little differently depending on whether you’re talking about a spiritual gift or a fruit of the Spirit. There is a difference and the difference.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. [Galatians 5:22-23]

Notice the word Paul uses – fruit, singular, not fruits. One fruit with nine flavors, all growing off the same root. Nobody gets to say patience isn’t their department because gentleness already is. The whole cluster is meant to show up in every believer over time, as the Spirit does His slow work.

Gifts work differently. Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12 both describe abilities deliberately handed out unevenly, so the body of believers actually needs each other. That unevenness is precisely why borrowing strength from one gift to grow a weaker one makes sense – it’s how the design already runs. Applying the same move to the fruit of the Spirit takes a bit more care. You can’t skip patience because gentleness comes easy. But you can notice that the self-control you’ve already built might be the very thing that helps you finally get a handle on patience, since both are growing from the same root and were never meant to grow alone.

Turning the Idea Into a Habit

This only becomes real once you name your strong gift and your weak one out loud and go looking for the connection between them. Start by asking someone who actually knows you where they see you come alive spiritually – not what you assume your gift is, but what they’ve watched you do. Then ask the harder question: where do you consistently avoid showing up?

I had to ask myself that not long ago, and the honest answer stung a little.

Try it this week. Take your strongest gift and ask what actually powers it – the real engine underneath. Then ask whether that same engine could run your weakest area too. Most of the time, it can. The Spirit who gave you the strength you already have is the same Spirit standing ready to grow the part you don’t. It’s all about sanctification, and there is really no excuse for allowing some gifts and fruit to atrophy just because of your pride or avoidance over successes in others.