Gifts?

Last Wednesday, during the book study that JtM and I teach, we had a "side" discussion about gifts. It wasn't the main point of the class, but a few minutes were spent on the topic.

One woman, who has found her ministry in the church, serving food to our Common Grounds congregation, was speaking passionately about the Thursday night service. Someone else in the room mentioned that her own gifts did not lie in that area.

This evening, I was reading this post (that's a hyperlink) which is the main points of a sermon concerning 1 Corinthians 12. She called the post "Like Fingers Need a Thumb." We all have gifts from God. All of us. Gift discernment is important; we need to be self-aware and "God-aware" enough to figure out what God's gifts to us are. We also need to listen carefully to those around us who can see our own gifts better than we can at times.

The idea which worried me from the Wednesday class is that sometimes we look at what someone else is doing in church, and we say, "I can't do that -- that's not my gift." We forget, or we ignore, that we all have gifts. Just because we are not gifted to do one particular thing, doesn't mean we get a "pass" on doing anything at all.

The point of the sermon to which I linked above is that we need each other. We are a body of Christ. She writes:

The truth is, we do God no favors when we try to ignore/downplay/deny either our own giftedness or the reliance we have on the giftedness of others. And it doesn’t work anyway, not in the way God intends for things to work together for the goodness of all. In doing so, we deny the very inbreaking of the Spirit that we are promised in the gospel, and we attempt, albeit feebly, to subvert God’s plan for the church.

We need to find our gifts and put them to use. We also do no one any favors by denying that we have gifts. We NEED each other -- we need each other to use our gifts.

One of the gentlemen in the class that I taught this morning was discussing the benefits of a life lived with God compared to what society describes as a good life. What he was hinting at was that when we find our gifts, and use them for the benefit of the body of Christ, and to glorify God, we will find joy. We will be blessed beyond our imagining.