You ever look at someone else’s life, their charisma, their talent and say, “I wish I was like that”? Sometimes we can fall into thinking we have nothing of value to offer. In America especially, we make idols out of other people’s talents, while minimizing our own gifts. It’s a wild phenomenon that we glorify only the abilities that big companies see as the most marketable.
As does most of the world, I LOVE Michael Jackson. No matter how many times I hear “Billy Jean” or “Bad”, I cannot resist the urge to start dancing and singing loudly (my family especially knows what I’m talking about). He truly was the performer of a lifetime, and while moonwalking is a very desirable skill of sorts, I can’t say that I have ever really envied his life. The weight that his fame created had a tremendous cost that I am sure I was not built to endure. With that being said, having a specialized talent is just one kind of gift.
You say, “Monique, I don’t think God gave me a gift.” And I say my love, you are so wrong . . . Truth be told, we all have gifts that God has buried inside of us for the purpose of serving and encouraging others. As I have said before, we need each other and work as an ecosystem in which everyone is designed to contribute. We tend to think that being gifted is only a thing that the holder of the gift is supposed to enjoy, and that it is a privilege for us to be witnesses to it. However, 1 Peter 4:10 says, “Use whatever gift each of you has received for the good of one another, so that you can show yourselves to be good stewards of God’s grace in all its varieties.” That essentially is saying that God has placed treasure inside of you, empowering you to manage it well for the benefit of other people.
The enemy loves to try to convince us that we have no value, and he does this mostly through the hurt we endure from others who treat us as if we are worthless. He counts on us building a shame filled narrative in our minds and ruminating on it, so that we are essentially ineffective and purposeless. There is rarely anything else (except possibly infatuation or greed) that makes us hypervigilant and externally focused like the shame that distracts us away from our usefulness. We surely would never see value in a place that we never look! Makes sense, right?
This makes me think about when God assigned Moses to bring the Israelites out of captivity in Egypt. He was a murderer with a stutter, who had been living away from everything and everyone he knew for 40 years. He was so convinced that he didn’t have anything to offer, that he told God to choose someone else. Yet he had observed leadership as the step-grandson of a Pharaoh. He watched his father-in-law as one of the leaders of the Midianite people. He had been practicing leadership by caring for his family and by herding large quantities of sheep. God had him in class for a while, and then at the right time, took what he thought was nothing on the inside of him and made him into the greatest leader Israel had ever known. Talk about the empowerment of God’s grace!
Since we need to use our gift to serve others, it would behoove us to take inventory of what is actually useful inside us. The same old ordinary things you do every day that you think of as nothing, are the very things that when empowered with God’s grace become phenomenal. Are you a good cook? Are you a natural organizer? An encourager? Do you thrive at telling people what to do? Do you tend to notice certain things before others do? Are you able to sit with people while they are hurting? Is hospitality and taking care of people an easy thing for you? Are you a fixer or a problem solver? I bet there are so many things about you that you never paid attention to that are designed to benefit those around you. Listen, we need whatever it is that God programmed you with! No matter what your gift is, you can bet that it is needed to:
(1) Glorify God and point people to Him
(2) Fulfill your assignments as a part of your life’s purpose, and
(3) Build up others so that they can also benefit others
Don’t declare that you don’t have gifts, when God says He gave them to you. Pray and ask Him to make clear what they are; and when He does, don’t deny them. Rather ask Him to give you discernment in how He wants you to use them. 2 Corinthians 4:7 says that the “treasures” you have show that the “surpassing power belongs to God” and not to you. In other words, we are not to be provers of our own worth, as it is such a futile pursuit and a huge distraction. That worth has already been built in. It’s the grace (God’s power) that lights up those gifts inside of you.
If you want to start thinking more about what your gifts could be, go to www.giftstest.com and take the survey. You may very well be surprised!
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