His Own Gifts in Us

I can play the piano moderately well (I was much better back in high school and college when I was practicing a couple of hours every day). I am a good singer. I have been given a mind that likes to grapple with difficult concepts and ideas and master them--and then I am able to communicate those concepts to others, whether the others are in a kindergarten Sunday school class, a junior high grammar class, a high school literature class, or an adult women's Bible study.

But I don't have a lot of wealth. I'm not good at any kind of crafts or arts like sewing, knitting, crocheting, or even photo books. I'm not one of those warm people that others run to when they need to pour out their souls' sadness, when they're looking for comfort or sympathy. And I'm not very good at connecting with people on a deeper level. It takes me a long time to get to know another person, to open my heart to someone else and be able to share a deeper bond. These are all abilities and gifts that I don't have, but others do.

Google "spiritual gifts test," and you'll find plenty of options for figuring out what yours is and isn't. One of the great issues in the church is the matter of gifts: what mine is, how I can use it, if I truly have a gift in a particular area. Some people suffer great anxiety because their gifts just don't seem to be readily apparent, and they wonder if perhaps God forgot to give them one. Sometimes gifts can cause real problems in the church, like when someone feels like he or she is more important than others because of a particular gift he or she has. I've seen other cases where people think they have a particular gift--for music, teaching, leadership of some sort--but they really don't, so the rest of the body suffers while that person inflicts the body with his or her  "gift," because no one else has the courage to lovingly tell that person that he or she really should be rethinking what gift God has blessed him or her with.

My first husband was diagnosed with acute leukemia when he was 34 years old. He endured a series of horrific chemotherapy treatments, extended hospitalizations, a bone marrow transplant, and the knowledge from December 1995 to April 1996 that doctors had nothing left with which to treat him, that it was a matter of time until he would lose this battle of leukemia and die. As a young husband and father, Jon suffered physical and emotional pain, but he suffered them as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. I will never forget the day that a minister friend of ours encouraged us by telling us that our suffering was a gift to the church. I wonder how often the gift of suffering is the bottom line on a spiritual gifts test. And yet who of us hasn't been blessed by watching a godly Christian suffer well.

Which brings me to the thought I had today regarding gifts, and how it is that we often fail to think of them properly. We wish we had a different gift, we covet the gift that another person has, we underestimate or fail to develop the gifts we have, we withhold our gifts, we overestimate our abilities in certain areas, we fail to realize that something we're experiencing in our lives, like suffering, is, in fact, a gift. I'm currently editing a book of historic Reformed confessions, and an article in a seventeenth century Polish confession addressed the matter of gifts in the church. The confession makes the statement that the good things that we do are God's own gifts in us.We ought never to boast of anything because nothing is our own. As Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 4:7, we have nothing that we have not received.

And so if we have wealth, musical talent, leadership skills, organizational skills, teaching ability, even suffering--we ought not think of them as anything we've generated, as something that belongs to us that we take great pride in, although it is important that we nurture and develop God's gifts in us. These gifts aren't ours. If I can sing, that's God's gift in me, so there is nothing to boast about. I didn't generate that gift. And if we know someone who has been blessed with financial resources and great wealth, and we wish that were us, we're coveting God's gift in that person. We ought not resent others for the gifts they have, and we should have an attitude of thankfulness when they use those gifts to encourage the church. Understanding that whatever we have is God's gift in us takes away the anxiety of discovering it; God will reveal that gift as we serve him faithfully in the church. And we must not think of a gift as belonging to us, but rather as God's gift in us, given not to us, but to his church, for his own glory.