Today at Epiphany we talked about the difference between natural talents, passions, spiritual gifts, and ministries. For years I’ve heard these things confused, sometimes even in sermons where the preacher acknowledges they’re different, only to go right back to talking about them as though they’re the same thing!
They are related, of course, and it’s wonderful when they all line up. But sometimes our passions don’t match our gifts, our natural talents aren’t where we experience the greatest spiritual grace, and the ministry we’re called to serve in isn’t necessarily the thing we would have chosen for ourselves. Yet we serve faithfully, and God works through all of it.
There’s another part of this conversation I didn’t get into as much as I wanted for the sake of time, and I wanted to share it here because I believe understanding how God gifts His people ought to give us a couple of important permissions, along with a very serious responsibility.
The diversity of the Body of Christ, gives you permission!
1. Permission to Be Yourself
There’s something I call the Flanderization of the Church.
If you’ve ever watched The Simpsons, you know Ned Flanders, the ridiculously cheerful, squeaky-clean, relentlessly churchy neighbor. Over time, his character became more and more exaggerated until those few characteristics practically became his entire personality. I coined that term the”Flanderization” of the church. I was too much of misfit to even try to fit that mold. I found out later that the church really is an island of misfits.
We begin to imagine that spiritual maturity looks like adopting a particular personality. Always cheerful, always agreeable, always speaking in that soft, safe, churchy way. We start copying what we think a holy person looks and sounds like rather than becoming the people God actually made us to be.
And that’s a shame, because sanctification isn’t the replacement of your personality with a church-approved one. It’s the transformation of who you really are into Christlikeness.
One of my favorite little books on Christian spiritual formation is The Gift of Being Yourself by David G. Benner. Benner explores how knowing God and knowing ourselves belong together. Becoming more like Jesus doesn’t mean becoming less like yourself. In fact, as we grow in Christ, we become more fully the people God created us to be.
Some of us are loud, some quiet, some funny, some serious, some naturally cautious, and others adventurous. All of us have rough edges that need to be surrendered to Jesus, and some of those rough edges are really quite rough! But not everything that makes you different is something that needs fixing.
Paul’s picture of the church in 1 Corinthians 12 is helpful here. He doesn’t tell the foot to become a hand, or the ear to become an eye. He explains that God arranged the members of the body, each one of them, as He chose.
God isn’t trying to make an entire church full of Ned Flanders. He’s conforming a wonderfully diverse people to the image of His Son, and those are two very different things.
Thank GOD, you can be you. Everybody else is already taken!
2. Permission to Be a Little Weird
Here’s another thing I’ve noticed over the years: spiritual gifts don’t always line up with what we expect, and thank God they don’t!
I’ve known people who, by all appearances, you wouldn’t expect to have a powerful prayer ministry. They aren’t loud, particularly confident, or especially articulate. (Remember spiritual giftedness is not the same as natural talents!) They have their own quirks and idiosyncrasies, and sometimes even struggle to find the right words. Yet when they pray, there’s a spiritual gift of faith at work. Their prayers may not sound polished or particularly impressive, but they’re heard in heaven, and I’ve watched people receive healing through them.
Or consider the evangelist who isn’t remotely extroverted, doesn’t particularly enjoy talking to strangers, and would never be mistaken for a charismatic public speaker. Yet they’re faithful, they consistently introduce people to Jesus, and there’s just a grace on their lives to do it. People come to faith through their ministry.
We can spend so much time imagining what a spiritually gifted person is supposed to look like that we miss the gifts right in front of us, sometimes even in ourselves!
And then there’s the fact that sometimes the Holy Spirit leads us to do things that are just plain weird.
Not sinful, not contrary to Scripture, not unloving, but certainly outside what people expect of us. Walking in the gifts of the Spirit means there will occasionally be people looking at you twice, wondering what on earth you’re doing!
Think about some of the things God asked His people to do throughout Scripture. Naaman was told to wash seven times in the Jordan. Jesus put mud on a blind man’s eyes. Peter had to step out of a perfectly good boat onto the water. Speaking in tounges, wierd. Believing someone was cruicified, buried and rose from the dead, wierd, Believing that God speaks to you, or wants to answers prayers for the sick, is wierd. The Christian life has never been entirely concerned with making us look respectable.
Of course, we ought to be humble, discerning, accountable, and willing to be corrected. Not every unusual idea is from the Holy Spirit, and being weird is certainly not evidence of being spiritual! Paul tells us to eagerly desire spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 14, but he also tells the church to weigh what is said.
Somewhere between being reckless and being so cautious that we never obey, there’s a life of humble, Spirit-led adventure.
The gifts are gifts of grace, after all. They aren’t awards for having the right personality, being the most articulate person in the room, or fitting everyone’s expectations of what a spiritual person ought to look like.
Sometimes God delights in working through the very people we would least expect, and sometimes that person is you.
3. Extraordinary Gifts Require Godly Character
One of the things we talked about on Sunday is how remarkable it is that Paul places the great chapter on love, 1 Corinthians 13, right in the middle of his teaching on spiritual gifts. It’s not an interruption or a rabbit trail. It’s at the very heart of what he’s trying to teach the church.
You can speak in tongues, prophesy, have faith that moves mountains, give everything you own to the poor, and still miss the point entirely if you don’t have love.
The goal of spiritual gifts isn’t to collect impressive stories about ourselves. It’s not so that we can tell everyone about the amazing healing we performed, the incredible prophetic word we gave, how generous we’ve been, or what extraordinary leaders we are.
The goal is that people would walk away talking about how GOD SHOWED UP as we faithfully did what He gifted us to do.
People are the point. Loving them, building them up, encouraging them, serving them, and helping them encounter Jesus. If our ministry makes much of us instead of Him, we’ve gotten something terribly wrong.
And this is where we need to be especially careful, because the church has been plagued by people whose gifting has far outpaced their character.
Some truly horrible abuses have been committed in Jesus’ name by people with extraordinary natural abilities, tremendous charisma, and sometimes perhaps even people genuinely operating in spiritual gifts. Vulnerable people have been manipulated, robbed, spiritually abused, and sexually exploited by leaders who knew how to command a room, preach a powerful sermon, or convince people that God was working through them.
Some have even trafficked in the things of God, using what ought to have been a means of grace and ministry as a means of gaining power, money, or access to vulnerable people.
We have to stop confusing the presence of gifting with the approval of God upon someone’s character.
There’s a temptation in American Christianity to say, “Well, if the pastor can preach me happy, I’m willing to overlook a few things.” But Scripture gives us no such permission.
Gifting is not office. And gifting does not qualify someone for office.
When Paul describes the qualifications for elders in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, he doesn’t give us a list of spectacular spiritual gifts. He describes men of godly character: above reproach, self-controlled, gentle, hospitable, faithful, not greedy, not violent, and able to teach.
These are the men the church is to recognize and call upon to shepherd God’s people, and the church must also hold them accountable to those standards. Their character isn’t something we evaluate once at the beginning of their ministry and then forget about. It must continue to be evident in how they live, lead, love their families, and treat the people entrusted to their care.
No exceptions for the gifted preacher. No exceptions for the powerful prophet. No exceptions for the person whose ministry draws a crowd or brings in money.
Extraordinary gifting must never become a shortcut to authority in the church or an excuse for avoiding accountability. A person can be genuinely gifted and terribly immature, and that immaturity can do tremendous damage when we give them power over others.
We should also remember that the same Paul who tells us to eagerly desire spiritual gifts tells us that without love, even the most extraordinary gifts amount to nothing. And the Jesus who gave gifts to His church also warned us about those who would point to their impressive spiritual works while failing to truly know and obey Him (Matthew 7:21–23).
None of this should make us suspicious of spiritual gifts themselves. We should eagerly desire them, just as Paul commands! But we must be equally eager to grow in the fruit of the Spirit, submit to one another, welcome correction, and become people who can be trusted with the grace we’ve received.
The gifts of the Spirit are given to build up the church. The fruit of the Spirit helps us use those gifts in a way that actually loves the church.
The Church Needs You, and You Need the Church
All of this brings us back to where we finished on Sunday.
God has arranged His church as a body. You don’t have every gift, and neither do I. You weren’t meant to. No Christian is a complete representation of Jesus all by themselves, and we shouldn’t spend our lives trying to become some kind of supercharged Christian who can do everything.
We need each other.
We need the quiet people and the loud people, the cautious and the adventurous, the teachers, the servants, the encouragers, the prophets, the evangelists, and the people whose gifts we haven’t even discovered yet.
We need people willing to step out in faith, and we need people who love us enough to help us discern when we’ve gotten something wrong. We need both the extraordinary work of the Spirit and the ordinary, daily work of learning to love one another.
So be yourself, but keep growing in Christ. Be willing to look a little foolish as you follow the Holy Spirit, but remain humble and accountable. Eagerly desire spiritual gifts, but remember that love is the more excellent way.
And if we have to choose between being known as an extraordinarily gifted church and being known as a church that truly loves people, I hope we never hesitate.
Of course, I believe the Holy Spirit wants to make us both.
The church needs you, and you need the church.