A good warning from Tim Keller:

“Gifts are abilities God gives us to meet the needs of others in Christ’s name:

speaking, encouraging, serving, evangelizing, teaching, leading, administering, counseling, discipling, organizing.

Graces, often called spiritual fruit, are beauties of character:

love, joy, peace, humility, gentleness, self-control.

Spiritual gifts are what we do; spiritual fruit is what we are.

Unless you understand the greater importance of grace and gospel-character for ministry effectiveness, the discernment and use of spiritual gifts may actually become a liability in your ministry. The terrible danger is that we can look to our ministry activity as evidence that God is with us or as a way to earn God’s favor and prove ourselves.

If our hearts remember the gospel and are rejoicing in our justification and adoption, then our ministry is done as a sacrifice of thanksgiving—and the result will be that our ministry is done in love, humility, patience, and tenderness.

But if our hearts are seeking self-justification and desiring to control God and others by proving our worth through our ministry performance, we will identify too closely with our ministry and make it an extension of ourselves.

The telltale signs of impatience, irritability, pride, hurt feelings, jealousy, and boasting will appear. We will be driven, scared, and either too timid or too brash. These signs reveal that ministry as a performance is exhausting us and serves as a cover for pride in either one of its two forms, self-aggrandizement or self-hatred.”

This sounds a lot like the things I’ve learned the past 5 years in our church.