"The whole spiritual gift thing frustrates me."
"Spiritual gifts are just one more thing in my Christian life where I can fail."
These comments used to be how I thought or felt about spiritual gifts.
"Discover your spiritual gift," I would hear, but it seemed like an impossible task.
What was my problem? Why was my attitude towards spiritual gifts so bad?
I perceived almost everything in the Christian life as a demand to perform and to perform perfectly. I wanted to be popular and was constantly comparing myself to others. I wanted to be affirmed by public acknowledgement and praise, pursuing even ministries for that purpose.
Frustrated and discouraged, I finally settled on the conclusion that it just wasn't necessary to know your spiritual gift. I only needed to keep serving, doing what needed to be done, and God would "exercise" my gift through me, and knowing what the gift or gifts were wouldn't change that. Besides, where in the Bible does it say that we have to know what our gift is?
So there, on "the shelf", sat my closed book of spiritual gifts, which I hadn't touched for years because I no longer considered the subject of any use for my spiritual growth. Then I was given, from my commending church, a surprise invitation to a women's conference in Dallas. God had been behind the scenes of this surprise, orchestrating it like a well planned con game and I was the mark, only the benefit in this case, was mine. Having seen His hand in it all, I flew to Dallas wondering what special message God had for me, confident that He had something for me to learn that would revolutionize my life and help me overcome the depression I was battling with at the time. When I arrived and heard the topic, my heart sank into disappointment and confusion, because it was, you guessed it, spiritual gifts. I really wondered if God had "messed up" somehow, not understood what I needed. I was certain He wanted me there, so why would He have arranged this topic? Did He somehow get the scheduling mixed up? "How could this be helpful," I thought, certain that it was a mistake.
From the very first session, along with a good dose of humility, I knew I was getting exactly what God wanted me to learn. He had brought me there to know my spiritual gift, of this I am certain, and in doing so, changed my life completely.
Remember how awkward it was to grow up during the teen years, how self-conscious you were about everything that stuck out, how much you hated those things that kept you from fitting in. Some of us made it into the cool kid group, while others of us were excluded, pushed out to the fringes, taunted and laughed at by the "in crowd."
We enter and move through puberty hating almost everything about ourselves, angry at the genetic curse that gave us those ears or that nose, that gave us low metabolism or stringy hair, or really bad acne. Our gene pool was out of our control; our design was not by choice.
In the same way, my flesh was not content with the divine genetics that didn't give me the spiritual gifts I wanted in order to make me fit in, to be more accepted, more liked, admired or praised.
Just as I needed to learn to be content with God's sovereign wisdom in who I am and where I come from, I also needed to learn to be content with God's sovereign wisdom in who I am as His child and for what purpose He has placed me in His family.
People who get extreme makeovers on television often comment that now "the real me can be seen," as if what was visible before was hiding who they believed themselves to truly be. We can often approach spiritual gift surveys like a shopping list for plastic surgery, picking the way we wish to be perceived, trying to become the person we believe we are inside. "The real me is not like that," we tell ourselves when our ugly exterior of the flesh results in rejection.
Through discovering my spiritual gifts, the Lord helped me have better clarity about my flesh, helped me come to accept how He had made me, gave me a new focus of His purpose for my life, and brought me into a refreshing total dependence on the Spirit that I had never experienced before.
Spiritual gifts are practical. They are about the body of Christ, about unity and bonding, about growing, about needing each other as well as being completely needy on the Spirit to guide.
As your physical body is one body with many parts, so is the body of Christ, not one part, but many. So "if the foot should say, 'because I am not a hand, I am not a part of the body," that does not make it any less a part of the body, and "if the ear should say, 'because I am not an eye,'" that also does not make it any less a part of the body. What would happen to the body if the whole thing was an eye? (1 Corinthians 12:15-16)
Now that is an interesting question. Think about it. Is there any part of the body that we don't need? The appendix maybe?
I'll ask you to be honest with yourself, do you ever think this way? Do you ever think that because you don't have that spiritual gift like someone else has, you are less important in the church? Do you ever feel that you are not needed in the body, or have anything to contribute? Should you be thinking that way? Who is responsible for that kind of attitude? Are you sitting there longing for a spiritual makeover so that people can see the real you?
Paul says, "The eye cannot say to the hand (and this is really important, because you cannot say or even think this about your brother or sister in Christ!),
'I have no need of you'."
Here is the truth:
"the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable, we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it." 1 Corinthians 12:22-27
English Standard Version
Do you know what surprises me about this? Disparity exists among the many parts; some people in the church are going to have more honor than me. My premise has always been that unity in the body is achieved by having us all look equal in presentation, and therefore equal in honor. There should not seem to be, on the surface, that one lacks honor compared to another. That has always been my mindset, and yet, God isn't going to balance the scales. He chooses for us to learn to walk in the Spirit by reversal, by doing the opposite of what our flesh desires. Our flesh reacts to such inequality with jealousy, division and rivalry. Lamenting and moping about my lack of honor is not the way to unity; showing preference to those who have the greater gifts is not the way God sees the body. Unity is the job of each of us, whether that job is to change the way I see others, or to change the way I view myself.
Walking in the Spirit with gifts is not about me changing my nose so that it looks more like someone else's or doesn't protrude so much, it's about me being the nose and functioning as the nose for the good of Christ's body, the church.
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