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?
[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.
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