Your Gifts
Our church is starting a new class on spiritual gifts this Sunday. There could be some potential misconceptions about what spiritual gifts are and why you need to go t a class to learn about them. There’s only one thing you need to know to get started, EVERYONE has a spiritual gift. There might be some debate on whether every person has a spiritual gift or if only believers have spiritual gifts, but it gets into lots of semantics. Without giving too much away before the class, a spiritual gift is an affinity or talent given by the Holy Spirit to do something. There are some aspects of discovering your spiritual gifts that are reminiscent of a personality or enneagram test. Just like all of those other tests, learning about your spiritual gifts can open up a lot of self realization, explain homeports about yourself, and help you grow closer to God.
A part of the class will help people find the place where their gifts meets the church’s needs. Or in other words, it will help people find opportunities to use their gifts. At this point, people start to check out. Church and serving is wonderful… for somebody else. I know time is a precious commodity (by the way we have places for you to use your gifts that don’t add huge amounts of things to your list), but I think the even bigger road block to serving is thinking that you’re not good enough.
Several years ago, Right Now Media came out with a short recruitment video. It is one of my all time favorites and has stuck with me for nearly 10 years. It is well worth the three minutes of your time to watch it, even if it’s just for the laughs.
Our perceptions of what it takes to serve or lead in the church are flawed. We think we have to be someone important, wise, strong, or able to preform miracles. But most of the people we read about in the Bible with those characteristics were definitely not perfect, nor were they what we would think of as church volunteer material.
Here’s the critical detail though, in spite of all their flaws they were still empowered by God to do something. And it’s that same God who parted the sea through Moses and raised people from the dead who has given you unique gifts. I strongly encourage you to attend our spiritual gifts class to find out what those gifts are and how you can use them. Even if you can’t make it to this first class, our hope is to offer this class regularly because we believe that part of being a follower of Christ is using our gifts that he has given us.