Most Christians have heard of spiritual gifts. They’ve taken the personality quiz, discovered they have the gift of encouragement or administration, and filed that information away somewhere between their Myers-Briggs result and their Enneagram number. But the Bible’s description of the gifts and abilities God made available to His people goes so far beyond that framework that the two are barely comparable. What the Bible actually describes — particularly in the New Testament but rooted deeply in the Old — is a range of supernatural capabilities that most churches have either minimized, spiritualized into irrelevance, or stopped expecting altogether. This post is about what the text actually says, and why it matters more right now than at almost any other point in history.

NOTE: I’m using this blog to cast an unusually large net by covering basic level topics and grouping them in a way that I normally avoid. The purpose is to cover content gaps for readers who may not understand the larger primary themes I frequently write about.

Made in God’s Image — And What That Actually Means

The starting point for understanding supernatural gifts is Genesis 1:26. God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.” Those words have been preached thousands of times, almost always in the context of morality or personhood. But the verse doesn’t stop there. It continues: “and let them have dominion.” The image of God was not primarily about what we look like or even how we think. It was about what we were designed to do. We were made to reflect God’s creative, authoritative, problem-solving nature in the physical world. That is the foundation for everything the Bible calls a supernatural gift.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth.

Genesis 1:26 (KJV)

Dominion is not a passive concept. It implies active authority, governance, and capability. God didn’t create beings made in His image and then withhold the tools they would need to operate in that image. The gifts are not bonuses or rewards for good behavior. They are part of the original design — capabilities built into the human architecture that become accessible as a person grows in their relationship with God and steps into the purpose He designed for them.

The Three Gift Categories the Bible Describes

The New Testament identifies three primary groupings of gifts, each addressed in a different letter from Paul. Most Christians are only familiar with one of them.

The first is the motivational gifts described in Romans 12 — prophecy, service, teaching, encouragement, giving, leadership, and mercy. These are the foundational personality-level gifts that shape how a person is wired to contribute to the body of Christ. They are the ones most commonly taught in churches and assessed through questionnaires.

The second is the ministry gifts described in Ephesians 4 — apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. These are not personality types. They are functional roles in the church that God appoints people to for the purpose of equipping others. The tragic reality is that two of these five — apostle and prophet — have been almost entirely removed from practice in the modern Western church, leaving the body operating at roughly 40% of its intended leadership capacity.

The third — and most misunderstood — is the manifestation gifts described in 1 Corinthians 12: wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment of spirits, tongues, and interpretation of tongues. These are not personality traits or ministry roles. They are direct, in-the-moment expressions of the Holy Spirit operating through a person to accomplish something that natural ability alone cannot produce. They are the gifts that most resemble what we see in the movies — and that is not a coincidence.

A significant point of context — each of these categories are basic level gifts that reside in the realm of the church. These are not the gifts and abilities you get when you graduate from the church level to the kingdom level.

What the Movies Got Right (And the Church Got Wrong)

There is a reason that superhero films, fantasy stories, and science fiction consistently portray characters with extraordinary abilities — healing, supernatural perception, power over physical matter, the ability to know things they shouldn’t naturally know. These themes are not random products of human imagination. They are reflections of something the human race instinctively knows is possible but has largely lost access to. God put that awareness into us. The culture expresses it through fiction because the church stopped demonstrating it in reality.

The Bible records people walking on water, raising the dead, controlling time, receiving detailed intelligence about events happening in other locations, being transported supernaturally, healing the sick, and operating with levels of wisdom and discernment that no natural training could produce. Jesus described these not as unique miracles exclusive to His ministry but as signs that would follow those who believe. The early church operated in all of them. The question worth asking is not whether these things are real — the Bible is unambiguous on that point. The question is why most of the church stopped expecting them.

The Abilities That Go Beyond the Standard List

The three Pauline gift lists are the most commonly taught, but they are not exhaustive and they are only the very beginning. The Bible describes a much broader range of supernatural abilities that fall outside those categories but are clearly presented as real and accessible to God’s people.

When you get beyond the training wheels realm of the church, you step into a much larger and more powerful arena of the Kingdom of God. Within this higher and much more advanced level come powers that are not given within the church. When you learn to become a king, instead of a priest, you gain the ability to make decrees instead of waiting on a prophetic word from God. This may sound like a contradiction to many but it’s not.

And this is where the shift begins and where most people in the church get confused.

In the beginning, God made Adam and Eve to be kings at the sonship level of maturity. There was no church, no priests, no prophets or pastors because there was no need of them. Until sin came into the world, there was no need of the church. The church came into existence to deal with the sin problem as a manifestation of “all things added” as Jesus said in Matthew 6:33. It was an addition, not a replacement of God’s governmental structure and order.

In the church, you are to be trained by tutors and governors (Galatians 4:2) until you reach the point of maturity so you can transition into the kingdom. The church is for spiritual babies and children. The kingdom is for fully mature men (and women).

In the church, you must wait for God to guide and direct you as you grow up. This is the same as what we see in the natural realm with babies and children growing up in their parent’s house. The church, with pastors, prophets, etc serves as the spiritual “parents” who are to teach, correct, rebuke and instruct those who are growing up. This is not to say that the church completely stops serving a purpose once we mature into the kingdom realm — NO — it still serves a purpose but you have to realize that the church has NO authority outside of its 4 walls.

You don’t get power to change the world until you mature into the kingdom realm. And that’s when things really start to change. That’s the arena where you now gain the ability to make decrees and operate in dominion as a son of God (Romans 8:19). And this is the realm the church knows nothing about — which is why it is stuck in the realm of powerlessness and immaturity.

Dominion over creation — is the capacity to exercise God-given rule over the natural world — is perhaps the most dramatically underteached area of all. The Bible describes people parting bodies of water, calling down rain and fire, stopping the sun and moon, multiplying physical resources, and commanding storms to cease. These were not violations of the natural order — they were demonstrations of the dominion authority God embedded in humanity at creation and restored through Christ. This is where supernatural abilities jump to a much higher level of magnitude — it is where you leave the training wheels stage of the church and learn to operate in the Kingdom of God. This is where most Christians never reach.

Why Most People Never Operate in Kingdom Abilities

Let’s come back around in a full circle here and put this into a larger context…

There are several reasons why most believers never move into the fuller range of what God made available to them. The first is simply lack of teaching. If no one in your church environment has ever modeled or explained these things, you have no framework for recognizing or pursuing them. The second is theological — a false doctrine called cessationism, which teaches that the miraculous gifts ceased after the “apostolic era” 2,000 years ago. This position has no clear scriptural support and has functioned primarily to explain away the church’s own lack of supernatural activity rather than to accurately represent what the Bible teaches.

The third reason is the most personal: operating in genuine supernatural gifts requires a level of character development, spiritual maturity, and dependence on God that most people are not willing to go through the process of developing. God does not release significant supernatural authority through undeveloped character. The gifts and the person carrying them are developed together, through a process that is often long, demanding, and invisible from the outside. This includes the process of reaching full sonship maturity where you gain access to supernatural marvelic dominion powers over the elements of creation. Biblical examples of this are few but prominent: Elijah, Elisha, Moses, Joshua, David, Ezekiel and a few others.

This Is What You Were Designed For

The gifts and abilities are not perks. They are not spiritual bonus features that some Christians get to enjoy while others live a purely natural life. They are part of the design — the natural output of a human being who is actually operating in alignment with what God built them for. Every person who has ever been genuinely used by God in extraordinary ways was not an exception to the rule. They were a demonstration of what the rule was always supposed to produce.

All I’m saying in this post is just barely the beginning and there’s much more to say.

If you are curious about what all this looks like in practice — not in theory, not in theology, but in the actual day-to-day experience of someone walking through the development of these gifts — my Marvels & Glory Powers series goes deep on exactly that. And if you want to understand how these gifts connect to a God-given life purpose and calling, my Supernatural Entrepreneur series documents 100+ episodes of that journey in real time.

The abilities God designed into you are not fictional. They are not reserved for a special class of super-Christians. They are the inheritance of every person who takes seriously what God said when He made us in His image — and who is willing to go through the process of becoming someone who can actually carry them.

Have you learned about these gifts and higher level supernatural manifestations in your church? If not, are you sure God still wants you there? Now is the time to find out and get up to speed with where God is taking His chosen few in these end times.

Comment below if this has opened your eyes to a much greater understanding of your true divine purpose and nature.

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