Abraham Kuyper wrote that Phariseeism is like a shadow—it can be deepest and sharpest closest to the light.
–Tim Keller

In the world of ministry, gifts are what we do. They are our talents, our God-given abilities to serve others: speaking, serving, encouraging, evangelizing, hosting, teaching, leading, administering, counseling. Graces are spiritual fruit. They are elements of character which come from growth in Christ: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, humility, gentleness, self-control. Spiritual gifts are what we do; spiritual fruit is what we are.

Tim Keller writes that it can be dangerously easy to confuse the two:

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.

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. And perhaps, away from the public glare, we will indulge in secret sins. 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.

Here’s how this danger can begin. Your prayer life may be nonexistent, or you may have an unforgiving spirit toward someone, or sexual desires may be out of control. But you get involved in some ministry activity, which draws out your spiritual gifts. You begin to serve and help others, and soon you are affirmed by others and told what great things you are doing. You see the effects of your ministry and conclude that God is with you. But actually God was helping someone through your gifts even though your heart was far from him. Eventually, if you don’t do something about your lack of spiritual fruit and instead build your identity on your spiritual gifts and ministry activity, there will be some kind of collapse. You will blow up at someone or lapse into some sin that destroys your credibility. And everyone, including you, will be surprised. But you should not be. Spiritual gifts without spiritual fruit is like a tire slowly losing air.

In ministry, gifts can take you far. If you are a charismatic speaker, a brilliant teacher, an engaging communicator, a talented musician, people will come to your church. If you are a gifted listener and counselor, people will seek you for guidance. Far less easy to discern is the state of your character. This is probably the case for a variety of reasons: technology and social media make it easy to amplify and publicize the use of our gifts while cloaking the state of our inner growth. Sometimes, it is only the people closest to us—our spouses, our kids, a few close friends—who can even tell if we are growing in spiritual fruit.

And we live in a culture that maximizes utility over integrity, production over inner cohesion. It is easy to live off ministry success rather than God’s grace. Ministry results become our identity, the basis by which we define our worth and believe we are worthy to others. They become our justification, the means by which we achieve spiritual results, and the evidence of God’s favor and presence.

But living off gifts over grace is like eating a diet of spiritual sugar. Or like a tire with a slow leak. You’ll have results, highs, you’ll run for a while, but one day it will fall apart. Because our gifts are only ever meant to be expressions of grace; they can never replace it. Gifts can prop us up. They can keep the external wheels running. They can even impress others and achieve remarkable results. But only grace can reach us where it matters. Only grace draws us from addictive sexual or physical sins. Only grace transforms unforgiving or critical spirits. Only grace heals anger problems and insecurities. Only grace grows patience, kindness, humility. Only grace gives us vibrant prayer lives of communion with God. Only grace enables us to have that long obedience in the same direction.

How do we know if we’re confusing what we do with who we are? Here are three questions to ask:

1. How is my prayer life? Jonathan Edwards gave a sermon entitled “Hypocrites Deficient in the Duty of Prayer” in which he looks at the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6 and basically says, do you want to know how to figure out if you’re a hypocrite? Look at your secret prayer life. Does it exist? Or is our prayer life dead even though we’re effective in ministry? Are we too busy to pray? Are we praying less as our ministry grows more? Are we going through the motions, or do we genuinely desire times of connection with God?

2. Am I allowing feedback from those closest to me? Hebrews 3:13 says that we should exhort one another daily lest we are hardened by the “deceitfulness” of sin. Truth is, none of us mistake activity for character on purpose. We know all these things in our heads. The hard part is being honest about what’s going on functionally in our lives. So we need one or two people who can call us out on it. Maybe this is our spouse, or one close friend. We have to be willing to be called out, because in the end, we can hide anything from anyone if we want to. We’re only as accountable as we want to be.

3. How am I affected by ministry results? What is our response to either the praise or the censure of others? Do we struggle with feeling slighted? Do we compare ourselves constantly with others in ministry? Do we have pride in the form of either self-aggrandizement or self-hatred? Do we have the kind of inner constancy that David Brooks describes as “the integrity that can withstand popular disapproval or a serious blow”?

In ministry, it’s inevitable that we’ll be telling people about how great God is when we don’t sense it in our own lives. We’ll be exhorting and teaching people while being in various degrees of having to work out those same issues ourselves. We don’t have to be perfect in character for God to work through us; we don’t have to feel a certain way all the time. But we should have an overall trajectory of growing in grace, just as we grow in using our gifts, lest we mistake one for the other.