Thursday, January 27, 2022

Of Penicillin and Fruit

 

Thursday, January 27, 2022

God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts.  Use them well to serve one another.  Do you have the gift of speaking?  Then speak as though God himself were speaking through you.  Do you have the gift of helping others?  Do it with all the strength and energy that God supplies.  Then everything you do will bring glory to God through Jesus Christ.  All glory and power to him forever and ever!  Amen.  1 Peter 4:10-11

Everything God created is a gift in some distinct way.  “Special” is a word that is usually reserved for something that is a cut-above the expected.  And anything God gives falls in that cut-above category.  That includes you, me, and everyone else in creation.  It is my belief that each of us is born with spiritual possibilities which God has given, and we are to develop, in accord with whatever God places in our pathway. 

The first of these gifts is love.  As we begin cooperating with God’s plans and promises, we first accept His offer of salvation, or, as John Wesley often reminded the troops, rescue from the wrath to come.  Past that, we are to put our spiritual gifts to work serving the One who loved and saved us.  As we do this there is a progression of working in God’s vineyard with differing gifts of prophesying (preaching), faith, healing, discernment, and the fruit which the Holy Spirit brings to the body of Christ:  love, joy, peace, gentleness, patience, and more.[1]

But what happens if we fail to cooperate with the gifts, and the spiritual fruit God expects?  Just like with the analogy Peter and Paul use of spiritual gifts producing spiritual fruit, unengaged gifts make for spiritual fruit mold.  Mold is like spiritual gifts unused…the fruit possibilities dry-up on the vine and become mold.

I met a man early in ministry when I served as pastor in North Central Florida.  He was serving on the grounds committee of the church.  The first time I met Henry[2] was at the back door of the parsonage in which our family would live the following years.  In the conversation I found he’d been a pastor…for a few months.  He was now earning a living with his carpenter skills.  I inquired why he was not pastoring any more.  His reply was just three words:  Couldn’t live it!  To his credit, I will say that Henry didn’t just walk away from the church, he found ways to serve God, even though the gifts and calling of pastoral ministry were there.  I never learned the details of “couldn’t live it” but over the years I knew him, it was sadly-clear something had happened to interrupt the development of fruit-production, as his spiritual gifts were left like unused tools on a workbench.

Apostle Peter’s admonishment to us in today’s Scripture lesson is to use them well to serve one another.  We are to use our spiritual gifts to produce fruit in the life of the body of Christ…and be a blessing to the entire world. 

For You Today

You are breathing!  And that is all the sign you need that God gave you spiritual gifts to be used in cultivating spiritual fruit, that which God uses to bless His creation.  If your fruit is a little moldy because you’ve been neglecting time in the vineyard, it isn’t too late to get busy.  You do know that God can take mold and make healing penicillin.  So, what will you do with the time you have left? 

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!  

[1] Title and Other Images:  Pixabay.com   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©   


[1] Study these passages for a deeper understanding:  Romans 12, Galatians 5:16-25, 1 Corinthians 12

[2] OK…so he wasn’t really named Henry…but he’s a real person, and so was the conversation.

No comments:

Post a Comment