When we talk about the gifts of the Spirit in the Church most people can’t relate. We have become accustomed to honouring talent and abilities over the gifts of the Spirit. Let’s be honest, most of us wouldn’t know the difference. We live in a society that honours education degrees, skills and talents, and it is this that we have adopted in the Church as well.
The gifts of the Spirit are not reserved for the beautiful, the gifted, the talented, the educated:
“All these things are produced by the one and same Spirit who gives what he wants to each person.”
Because we don’t understand this we end up experiencing spiritual poverty because we are shutting out the people who were given to us to enrich our life in Christ. Most of these people are the unexceptable ; the wrong gender, the wrong colour, the wrong background, the wrong sins, the wrong education level, the wrong carisma, the wrong relationship skills. We forget that we don’t choose but he chooses us and that he chooses each of us for a different purpose with a different gift. From the heights of the halls of Harvard or the lows of an elementary education, no one is left on the outside looking in because he has designed it in a way that we need each other to grow into what he has designed us to be.
When he called me I was a messed up kid with no leadership skill. I had no great love for people but I had fallen in love with Jesus. I would have been very content to have been left alone, with just one good friend, a pile of books and some writing paper. It was not my idea or desire to enter into full-time ministry. I did not have the skill set, no natural ability for public speaking nor an ability to lead people. It was actually a bit of a nightmare for me to realize he was calling me to be a pastor.
Leadership is not natural to me. He did not place me in the body according to my comfort level or ability. It was only over a time of exploration that I discovered I had been given the gift of teaching. But that’s not even my dominate gift. The thing I have been given that has become as natural to me as breathing is the gift of encourager, but that took decades for me to realize because people wanted to emphasize other parts of me and ignore what the Lord was doing.
The difference between ability and gifts is that there is power in the gifts. Anyone can be an encourager but the gift of encouragement has the supernatural power to lift people up and fill them with a desire to press on and reach for greater heights. Anyone can teach given enough knowledge, but the gift of teaching has the power to bring understanding and paint with the vivid colours of the Spirit things that could not even be imagined. What about the gift of administration? That’s a weird one to me that I definitely do not possess, but it is a gift with power that cannot be had through any study in this world.
I could disqualify myself by simply assessing it according to the level of my ability. How many have lost out on the experience of their gift simply because they thought they did not have the ability? It’s not ability we should be looking for but the mark of the Spirit that can be seen through a humble, willing and surrendered attitude. These things can be lost on a Church that lifts up talent, ability, charisma as well as education. Those may be great but they do not come with the redeeming power of Jesus Christ. The gifts set us apart from all other religions and groups in the world, because they are Christ working through us, not us working toward Christ.
If we want to see Father’s glory shining out from the Church we have to leave off our pursuit of professionalism and seek out the gifts once again. This is not to say that we do not press into excellence but let’s check the root and make sure it is excellence in the Spirit and not excellence according to the world.
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