The Bible reveals to us:

Oh how the heathen press and the apostate church get their ire and fire burning and their smokestacks smoking, as they immediately attack any minister of God who makes a comment about God rolling up His sleeve and baring His arm of judgment against the great wickedness of peoples, cities or nations on planet earth. Just the concept of a “God of Wrath” dealing in judgment with sinful mankind sets off a furor of condemnation against those who even dare to suggest such a thing!

God is the ultimate and the quintessential Giver. He is "The Giving God." It is the nature of God to give. Nobody comes close to giving like God gives! Nobody comes close to giving as much as God gives. Nobody comes close to the continuance of giving as God continues to give. He is the only perfect definition of “Giver” and of “Giving.”

As a matter of fact, man by nature is not a “Giver” but a “Taker.” For God so loved the world that He gave. Man so loves himself that he takes. In short, God is the gracious giver, while man is the greedy taker. Corporate CEO's, who abscond with multi-millions of dollars while the company and shareholders go bankrupt, are today’s show-and-tell greedy monster-takers. It is worse than repulsive, it is damnable!They may seem to be getting away with it. They won't. The day of Divine reckoning will soon be here.

The third reason that my boyhood background gave for the contention that the gifts of the Holy Spirit no longer exist today is that they were temporary scaffolding. That is about as accurately as I can state it. It wasn’t expressed that literally, but it was always there by way of implication.

The Scaffolding Theory, as we may call it, stuck in my mind for years. It also affected my concept of the Holy Spirit considerably, and not just my concept of His gifts. The Holy Spirit became in my mind something like a “Heavenly Scaffolder,” someone who showed up very early on in the history of the Christian Church as the assistant to the Builder - Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit did so by surrounding the early church with His extraordinary and supernatural powers to support and enable the building process in these fragile infant, pre-adolescent and adolescent stages.

The “Scaffolding Theory” is bogus for another reason. Secondly, because the Divine Builder and His fellow laborers are still busy building Christ's Church, the supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit are not now and never have been temporary scaffolding, but rather are the ongoing essential tools of the Divine Builder’s trade. The Holy Spirit doesn’t give out religious trinkets or fun toys for the church to play with.

“THE GIFTS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT ARE TOOLS AND NOT TOYS.”

The Holy Spirit gives us mandatory and indispensable tools to build with as co-laborers with Christ. Without these required tools, the church will be weakened, ineffective and stunted in its growth. The church will not and cannot be built correctly without the Holy Spirit’s gifts-tools. Period!

I do not have the space to illustrate all of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. Just a few examples are in order. I hope and pray that you will find them as inspirational and helpful as I do. Biblical Christianity has, is and always will be made up of Divine truth and miracle. If you will, Christ through the supernatural healing of the Holy Spirit heals the body to convince the soul. That is how He builds His church.

There is nothing more natural for a man, even a religious man, than to have a spirit of fear and even fatalism when he sees an eminent danger, or when he has been diagnosed with a life-ending disease. He may believe in God, and yet find himself predominantly tied to his senses and therefore his fearful sense-apprehension of things.