Our Role in God’s Kingdom Part 4
Posted January 26, 2009 – 6:57 am in: Messages
This week’s message continues our look at the spiritual gifts from Romans 12. I tried to think of a clever way to tie these two gifts together, but everything I thought of seemed too contrived. Think of these as two mini-messages (click the title to listen):
Every time we look at a gift I share some character traits of people whom God uses in that area. I was curious: if God has gifted you with serving or teaching, what sort of character traits do you see that go along with the gift?
Tags: gifts, serving, teaching
3 Comments
One of the main character traits that needs to go with all the gifts is humility. When we have humility we know two things: 1. the strength that we use our gifts in is not ours – it’s Gods and 2. we realize that since we are doing it in the strength that God gives we are not to judge when others don’t seem to be seeing the same “need” as we do. When we truly wrap our heads around this concept it frees us to use our gifts, not until we are overwhelmed and anxiety ridden, but only to the measure of strength God give us.
Jeanetta,
I like what you had to say about humility. It is so true. I’ll be “chewing” on your words today as I reflect on my gifts and ask God how He wants me to use them.
I find it interesting that the Greek word diakonia which we translate for serving is also translated to minister or to be in ministry. So often the pastor or ‘deity’ gives the impression that in order to be in ‘ministry’ one must be ordained or have former training in order to minister, but as the Scripture plainly teaches here, we are all to minister and be ministers. We are all in the ministry. I think that great harm has been done in the modern church when we reserve the title of minister to those who have been trained for such a task and make a separation between laity and deity. I fear that God’s people sitting in the pews feel that it is the pastors job to minister and it makes it easy to just be pew sitters/warmers and not be the engaged ministers of the gospel that we are all called to be, in prophecy, serving, teaching, encouraging, giving, leadership, showing mercy…
On his talk on teaching and teachers, I like how Steve used the example of Apollos as the teacher. Even though he was teaching Christ Apollos had not experienced Christ. As Steve brought out we must be diligent to study God’s word, check out references, etc. and not be so willing to accept all that a teacher has to say just because he is a good teacher.
I heard recently a talk on knowledge and the availability of knowledge, via written word, media, internet etc. and how that we are more knowledgeable as a whole than any other generation, but we have no greater numbers of great minds/thinkers per capita in our generation than in any other generation of the past…just something to think about. Thats a free one Wayne! LOL