If It's Yours, God Says, 'Use It!'

Commentary on 1 Corinthians 12:1-11

Khen Lim




Peter heals a beggar (Image source: shallwelearn.com)

Christmas celebrations always mean something very special to kids. It’s that time of the year when they dream of getting what they’ve been wanting the whole year. Christmas gifts therefore make their mark best with children and they want it so badly that you could taste it.

You can imagine when the kids race to the Christmas tree and tear at their gifts. More likely than not, kids would head for the largest gift first. No thought goes into how much time and effort went into choosing and wrapping it. When the boy opens the box and finds the very gift he’s been pining the whole year, he is beside himself. A girl who finds her first fluffy puppy cries with joy and gratefulness. A boy who now has his first ten-speed bike leaps towards his dad and mom and hugs them. For kids, gifts at Christmastime are often the highlights.

Now what about if we see things the other way round? How about when the kid opens a gift but has that unmistakable deflated feeling? He sees the gift and he sighs. “Ho-hum,” he quietly moans and rolls his eyes. Forget about gratitude. He’s sorry he wasted his time checking out the gift! Imagine how the parents would have felt. After all that effort, that’s what they got on Christmas Day and they thought they did well. Seeing the look on their kid’s face, it would be a surprise if they didn’t feel devastated by his ungratefulness.

What would God feel if we never make the effort to find out what His gifts to us are? What if we never even bother to thank Him? And how happy would He be if we never put those gifts to good use, never shared them with others and never gave it much thought? If you think this doesn’t happen, think again. Imagine God listening in on any of these sound bites:

“I know I have a gift but I don’t want to be roped in to do anything I don’t like.”

“I have the gift of graphic design but I don’t want to get involved because I don’t like the people I would have to work with.”

“I’m told I have the gift of evangelism but I’m too tied up with my work to commit and I have three screaming kids at home to stop me from doing anything else.”

“I believe I have the gift of healing but I don’t have the confidence to go out there and do anything about it. What if it doesn’t work?”

“How can I put my gift to good use when I myself feel so inadequate?”

There are also those who would be interested to know what spiritual gifts God has given them and with that, given the right tools, church leaders can help to identify them with the hope that once they know, they could be given the right jobs or ministries to put them to good use. However there are also those who despise being given a label and then feel hemmed into something they don’t want to do. They struggle to see how the gifts they have would work in the roles offered in church. Some might even feel freaked out and not know how to handle such gifts.

Since the days of the original apostles and the fulfilment of the prophecy of Joel, God has bestowed the Church with spiritual gifts to help fulfil her mission in the world. And even back then, there were those who were excited about it but also those who struggled to understand these gifts. Till today, this confusion remains in those we call ‘cessationists’ who believe that such gifts like speaking in tongues, healing and prophecy had ceased with the original twelve apostles.

Cessationists like to point to 1 Cor 13:8-10 to substantiate their claim in which Paul had declared unlike love, there is an end to all such gifts:

“Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever! Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! But when the time of perfection comes, these partial things will become useless.” (NLT)

But here’s the rub: As Scripture attests, we cannot deny that spiritual gifts will cease but the question isn’t whether it will but when. Will it happen when Scripture ends with the revelation of God through His written Word? Or is it when we come face to face with God, fully known and knowing fully at a time we know of Christ’s Second Coming?

Paul says this in verse 12:

“Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete but then I will know everything completely just as God now knows me completely.”

Given that cessationists distinguish such gifts as those pertaining to speaking in tongues, prophecy and healing, we call them miraculous gifts as opposed to the other gifts, which are widely in practice and very obviously present today such as teaching, evangelising, administrating as well as those covered in areas of hospitality, compassion and so on. 

Still it is hard to come to terms with spiritual gifts being segregated as in those that cease to and those that continue to work. Maybe then, 1 Cor 13 refers to spiritual gifts continuing side by side faith, hope and love and they only cease at the Second Coming of Christ in which case, we will know as we are fully known. If we see things this way, maybe we can witness a wide variety of spiritual gifts at work in our churches.

At any rate, it doesn’t matter if you believe in the way I interpret Paul’s verse. The key lies in the difficulty in validating the use of such gifts among our congregations not to mention the challenge in making certain that these gifts empower rather than enslave. To that end, as Paul encourages us to unwrap our spiritual gifts and bring it to good use serving others (1 Cor 12:1-11), let’s check out some things we should be mindful of.

Gifts are by grace

In other words, it is not by works that we are given such spiritual gifts. When we join God’s family in faith to help build His Church, He equips us accordingly to help accomplish His work. Oftentimes these are spiritual gifts. These gifts will, for most parts, match our character and personality, our passions and skills and they will also find a unique place within the roles we are to play in the church.

These gifts do not imply any particular labelling. We don’t have to feel boxed in as well. Perfection isn’t in how we see things but in how God times these gifts to work according to His plans. Of great importance is that we recognise that it is God’s grace to include our worthless selves in His plans so that we may seek to glorify Him in our daily lives. It isn’t because we feel obligated or compelled to but more because we desire it within ourselves to draw close to Him whose salvation has brought us into His eternal fold.

Gifts should never be glamorous

In other words, don’t ever let gifts redefine us. We aren’t celebrities just because God has given us spiritual gifts that might sound exciting to others. It doesn’t mean that with these gifts, we must sit on different chairs or we are more privileged than others or we are not to get our hands dirty joining others in doing menial jobs in and around the church. 

In other words, we must recognise that even when spiritually endowed, we are more than the gifts themselves. It doesn’t mean that a gifted teacher of the Word or a wonderful worship leader negates his calling to be a good servant to the needs of others. Similarly one who is anointed with the gift of healing doesn’t have hands that are too special to help out in washing the dishes after a pot bless session.

Take a look at Philip. Well known for his renowned work as an evangelist in Samaria, not to mention his witness to the Ethiopian eunuch in the desert that led to the latter’s nation coming to faith, he was also roped in to help distribute food to the widows albeit under controversial circumstances. It wasn’t that Philip was especially qualified in food distribution but because of his fullness of Spirit, he had what it took for the apostles to choose him to do something very important that might not involve his evangelistic skills.

Gifts must not stroke our ego

The spiritual gifts that God gave us is to benefit His Church. The worldly problem here is that some of these gifts might make our heads so big…and troublesome. When you’re big on prophecies or your healing ministry is turning out miracles, people come to view us as ‘other worldly’ and with that, our egos are stroked very pleasurably. Suddenly everything we say becomes special and revered. Everyone begins to look at us differently as if we have haloes around our swollen heads.

But we forgot something. That lady there who faithfully – and thanklessly – been the usher for the church every Sunday does a job that is just as important and useful as the one who speaks in tongue. The gift of hospitality might sound a tad lame compared to those who prophesy but if we think like that, we have a poor understanding of how gifts actually work and importantly, to Whom they work for.

In fact when we have preferential views in validating the wide variety of gifts, we forget that it is Christ who distributes the gifts as He deems fit (Eph 4:7). An usher is an usher because Christ finds that person perfect in temperament and hospitality for the role. A worship leader is similarly anointed by Christ for reasons He knows and not necessarily because of what we think. Therefore to belittle the gift or the person accordingly anointed is to dishonour Christ Himself because all such gifts are not to stroke our ego but to contribute to the building up of God’s Church and for His glory.

Paul says in 1 Cor 12:7 that, “a spiritual gift is given to each of us so we can help each other,” which is why “He alone decides which gift each person should have” (v.11). Gifts are therefore not for enhancing our personal image but to underscore the indispensability of other people.

Gifts are for the world

Not all spiritual gifts are publicly visual. We see people speaking in tongues on a Sunday service or a healing ministry done in hospitals. People prophesy and often, many would be witness to this amazing gift but we forget that there are also gifts in which we may not often always see. And even when we do, we might not even realise they are spiritual gifts.

People in church administration or evangelism are called to duty for God with spiritual gifts that are equally as undeniable. There are those who fulfil the less glamorous jobs with thankless responsibilities but their contribution to the running of the church is an assignation that many might not be interested in doing. Church workers who do mission work to spread the Word of God might do so under dangerous or life-threatening circumstances. Some might work in tiring shifts serving in the kitchen when the church opens their doors to the homeless for dinners or suppers.

In fact, there are endless numbers of other people who do the other jobs that glorify God but might not sound attractive to many of us. In some ways, these are the unsung heroes who quietly go about their work in the most unassuming manner without attracting attention to themselves. They might well be the ones who honour God in the most profoundly humble ways. And we should take notice that many of these people use their spiritual gifts to bless the world around them even if we may be too ignorant to know it.

Gifts set us up for mission

Spiritual gifts have a way of bringing all of us together in church no matter that our contemporary culture encourages us to be individualistic. God’s church is family oriented. We are in itself a community that thrives best when we relate to one another in deep love and in which we dig deep to serve and sacrifice for each other. In all of this, God’s wisdom is clearly seen in the variety of spiritual roles He has given to the church where each of us will experience how others work in us as much as we in others. This is where we begin to understand how indispensable our spiritual lives are towards one another.

In much the same way, we are, as a church, a Body of Christ. The different parts of our church fulfil different roles but we come together, united as one and unified in the Spirit of Christ. These parts integrate and co-function and thence, define productivity for God. Just as much as each hand is important, so are our legs, eyes, ears and so on. At the same time, each separate part of the body is essentially limited in its usefulness because without the others, their contribution makes no sense. But together, they do because the whole body works coherently.

However, what good is a functioning body if it serves no purpose? Indeed what is the point of a video player without movies to watch, a car without gasoline or a romantic relationship without marital designs? The same goes with spiritual gifts. God would have given all of us gifts that He sees fit and purposeful but unless we come together as a church and work out how to integrate them into a unified force for God’s work, then we are all wasting one another’s time and effort.

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It is one thing to discover our spiritual gifts but quite another to operate them the way God wants us to. Hopefully therefore we recognise the grace of God and our sense of belonging to Christ that we can then pool our spiritual gifts together, joined in the Spirit to carry out God’s work. Together and equipped with all that God has bestowed upon us, we can go forth and save the world. Remember, if the spiritual gift is yours, God says, ‘Use it!’