The New Testament never once warns us that humbly seeking and praying for spiritual gifts will bring anything other than a blessing.

Worship without wonder is lifeless and boring. Many have lost their sense of awe and amazement when it comes to God. Having begun with the arrogant presumption of knowing about God all that one can, they reduce Him to manageable terms and confine Him to a tidy theological box, the dimensions of which conform to their predilections of what a god ought to be and do.

A simple definition of prophecy is that it's when we speak forth in merely human - and thus often fallible - words something that the Holy Spirit spontaneously brings to mind.

God created you for the first and greatest commandment, to be a lover of God.

Whatever and whenever God blesses, Satan curses. What God creates, Satan counterfeits.

Sometimes people base their identity on their gifting. But our identity is in Christ and ultimately has no relation to whatever gift the Spirit may have granted to us.

Spiritual gifts, to put it as simply as I know how, are the more or less concrete and tangible ways in which the Holy Spirit manifests his presence in and through the individual members of the church.