When Your Spiritual Gifts Make You Crazy

I grew up Southern Baptist. This means I learned to love, love, LOVE the bible. This means I learned to value sound doctrine. This means I learned to take everything anyone said back to the Bible and see if it were true. This also means that for roughly 25 years I believed in God’s theoretical ability to heal, speak to prophets, and move in tangibly miraculous ways, but I didn’t believe so practically.

Southern Baptists are great. I’m glad I learned to follow Jesus with them, and I don’t want to bash them. They get a lot of things right. They also miss some things. The church is a body, and if the whole body were an eye, the Southern Baptist understanding, where would the sense of hearing, charismatic gifts, be? If the whole body were an ear, charismatic understanding, where would the sense of smell, order and methodology, be? But there are many parts, and we need them all.

I was Southern Baptist for 27 years, all my life until God moved me to a non-Denominational church. As a Southern Baptist, you may wonder how I learned to exhibit charismatic gifts. You see, I have the gifts of prophecy, healing, and, well, something I couldn’t name three years ago. I’d never heard its name until four years after experiencing it. It is called discernment of spirits by the charismatic church, but my discernment is not the ability to judge wisely or know someone’s intentions. In fact, I am very bad at judging wisely and understanding intentions.

I tell you all this because Jesus is the best, as you will see.

Maybe you think I’m crazy, but that’s ok. Maybe you can see through those thoughts to see how awesome Jesus is, or maybe you can share this blog with someone who is like me, who thinks they are crazy and is afraid to use their gifts because they grew up believing the only people who exhibited such gifts were the crazies who had left the Bible and sound doctrine in a land far behind and jumped off the deep end into a wasteland of Godlessness. To those who are like me, who feel crazy and scared, I tell you, you are not alone. You are seen. You are known. You are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.

The first time I received a message from God was in 8^th grade. I was young enough to not be afraid of my gifts. I didn’t yet know their extent.

When I was a sophomore in college, God started telling me the future on a regular basis. He told me what songs we would sing in church that Sunday--nothing life changing. 

This makes me uncomfortable to tell you. You might say, “Maybe you heard someone on the worship team whistling the tune.” But this happened every week, and I know there are people like me, people who feel crazy.

When I was a junior in college I first discerned spirits. This was seven years ago. I discerned the spirit of suicide as a charismatic would. Being Southern Baptist, I had no idea what was happening. I wanted to kill myself. I wanted closure to my life. I wanted escape, and death was the open door. The overwhelming weight oppressed me. I felt smothered. I thought I was suicidal. And in the morning, my RA knocked on my door to let me know there was a student lying dead in the basketball court. He’d jumped off the building.

I was confused. I was scared. I’d believed these kinds of things were superstition, not real supernatural things God did in the world. And since then, I’ve felt depression weighing down on my coworkers, suicide coming for friends, and sudden bursts of fear as I walked past someone in the grocery store.

But what is the point of all this?

The point is I was Southern Baptist all this time. I had no access to teaching on these kinds of gifts. No one taught me to prophesy by placing me in front of another church member and asking me to reveal what God thought of them. No one preached on the charismatic gifts. No one took me on adventures of prayer and following Holy Spirit promptings. I had never experienced what the charismatics call Baptism of the Holy Spirit. The only Holy Spirit baptism I received was at the moment I decided to follow Jesus.

So how did I learn these things?

Jesus.

The anointing I have received from him is true and is no lie, and just as it has taught me, all I need to do is abide in him. 1 John says that. 

In the midst of my confusion and fear, I heard of the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry. I’d never heard of such a place before, but here was a place that would teach me to understand and walk in all the things that made me feel crazy and afraid. I wanted clarity. I wanted help. I wanted someone to tell me it was all going to be ok. This is normal. This is nothing to be afraid of. Jesus is the King of everything. He will move you to do the right thing. I wanted to feel rooted and built up in love. I didn’t want to feel blown and tossed about by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming. So when I heard there was a place where I could be trained and instructed in all the things I didn’t understand but experienced, I applied.

And then I prayed.

“You don’t need to go to Bethel,” Jesus whispered to my soul, “At least not right now. Maybe not ever, but we'll talk about that later.”

That was several years ago, and now I better understand why Jesus said that. I didn't need to go to Bethel because I had the Holy Spirit. I didn’t need anyone to train me, I had Jesus. I didn’t need anyone to be in authority over me to clean up the messes I made as I was learning, I had the Father.

I don’t know everything yet. I’m still scared and confused. But a few weeks ago I asked Jesus to send me a mentor. I added a long list of traits I thought she should have, and that week she came to church. She came on a prompting from the Holy Spirit. She wanted to go somewhere else that morning, but Holy Spirit said, “No. Go to Bridge Bible Fellowship.” So she came. She told me her crazy stories. She told me she felt crazy. She was afraid I wouldn’t believe her. She was afraid I would reject her. How could I reject her? We are the same.

And that is why I write this blog. I’ve met many people who feel crazy. They feel crazy because they don’t understand their gifts or because they have been told their gifts are schizophrenia. But they are not crazy. They are experiencing the Holy Spirit, and they have the anointing that will teach them everything.

Do not be afraid. Jesus will take care of you. You may not know how to use your gifts. You may be like me and try to cut them off only to find that Jesus is still speaking to you at least once a week. Ha! He’s so awesome, to not give up on us like that. You may find yourself in strange situations where you feel inadequate, but the Holy Spirit is actually sufficient, even when he doesn’t feel like it. You are not alone. I’m right there with you.

I often feel like Elijah, alone on a mountain after receiving supernatural food that carried me here. I stand in the wind, earthquake, and fire, and look out on the vast desert around me. I hear the wind howl and it sounds as if it were saying, “Alone! Alone! You are alone! Abandoned! Alone!”

I sigh and sit down, defeated, but the voice of God comes in a gentle whisper.

“You are not alone. I have reserved 7,000 for myself. I have reserved a great cloud of witnesses who are all just like you.”

Thins to pray for:

I'm in a lot of turmoil. Please pray that I will know the right thing and do it.