I encourage you to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, dedicated to God and pleasing to him. This kind of worship is appropriate for you. Don’t become like the people of this world. Instead, change the way you think. Then you will always be able to determine what God really wants—what is good, pleasing, and perfect. … God in his kindness gave each of us different gifts. [Romans 12:1b-2,6a (GW)]
When told that the gifts the Holy Spirit gives us are unique for our specific ministries, we get nervous. We already have a career, didn’t sign up for seminary, and aren’t interested in being ministers. While being a minister/pastor/priest is a vocation, the ministry is the work of every Christian. No matter what our professions, we are all called to minister and that doesn’t necessarily mean pastoring a church. It means serving God and His people in Jesus’ name, which is where those spiritual gifts come in. God is not about to send us off empty-handed.
In job interviews, applicants often are asked, “What do you bring to the table?” With God, however, it’s a little different. When we come to him, He doesn’t care about our resume, how much or little we know, or how many assets we bring to Him. When we come to His table, we receive our own personal coach in the way of the Holy Spirit who provides us with at least one spiritual asset personally designed for us.
In Matthew 9, Jesus spoke of the harvest being plentiful but the laborers being few. I wonder—is it the labor pool that is lacking or is it the willingness of the laborers to do His work that is missing? As Christians, we’re filled with the Holy Spirit and yet we often seem void of His promised gifts. Is it that we don’t recognize our gifts or are we simply unwilling to use them? Last week, while receiving Communion with others in the congregation, I wondered what gifts we each brought to God’s holy table and how many of those unused gifts we were taking back home with us.
I suspect that there are enough laborers but we’re just waiting for the ideal job, the perfect opportunity, or the ideal situation to arise. My brother remained unemployed for years because of that attitude; although there were plenty of opportunities, none were the precise one he desired! There should be no unemployment line in God’s Kingdom! We forget that God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness. Not only does He equip us but He also offers on-the-job training!
I’ve taken assorted Spiritual Gift inventories and, while they can be helpful, I doubt their necessity. All we have to do is look at the harvesting needs around us and show up for work. We’ll soon figure out if driving the combine, baling the hay, swinging the scythe, hand-picking the berries, cleaning the tools, transferring the grain to the silo, managing the logistics, marketing the wheat, bringing water to the thirsty, or feeding the workers is the job for which we’ve been designed. The important thing is to show up for the harvest; in God’s Kingdom, there should be no shortage of laborers! Let’s get to work!
Joe Btfsplk was a character in Al Capp’s Lil’ Abner comic strip. With a last name that sounds likes what’s known as a “raspberry” or “Bronx cheer,” the poor man had a dark cloud of perpetual bad luck hanging over his head. Btfsplk no longer appears in the comics but I think his dark cloud of misfortune has settled over the head of a dear friend I’ll call JB (in honor of Capp’s luckless character). Since JB’s retirement, if something could go wrong, it has and, as soon as one challenge resolves, another one appears. When I saw the photos from his most recent mishap, JB looked as if he’d been tossed around in a giant rock tumbler filled with broken glass and boulders.
Several years ago, two friends joined the ranks of widowhood within a week of one another. Because her husband surrendered to cancer several months earlier by stopping all treatment, one woman was not surprised when she joined the club. The other woman, however, went to bed a wife and awoke the next morning to find herself a widow. Despite his looking the picture of health, her husband, having suffered a fatal stroke while she slept, lay dead on the kitchen floor.
Psalm 119, the longest of the psalms, is a song in praise of the Word of God. Since we don’t read this psalm in its original Hebrew, we fail to appreciate its intricate construction. Each of its twenty-two sections begin with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet in sequence. Each of the eight verses in those twenty-two sections begin with the letter that introduced it. For example, the first word of the first section begins with alef, as do the next seven verses. In the second section, every line begins with beth. The psalm continues that way up to the 22nd (and last) section where every line begins with the final letter of the Hebrew alphabet, tav. 
Most of us breeze through (or skip altogether) the Bible’s genealogies. Nevertheless, when genealogy and all those “begats” seem so important in Scripture, what explanation is there for the difference between the genealogies of Jesus found in Luke and Matthew? Because Jews were meticulous about recording genealogies, it’s inconceivable to have two conflicting yet correct lists of Jesus’ lineage.
After feeding a multitude with little more than a handful of food, Jesus sent the disciples across the Sea of Galilee to Bethsaida. He stayed behind to send the people home and then, exhausted, went into the mountains to pray. During the fourth watch (somewhere between 3:00 and 6:00 AM), Jesus looked out at the water and saw that the disciples were struggling against the wind and waves to keep the boat on course. Seeing their distress, he walked on the water toward them. Seeing Him walking on water, they thought Him a ghost and cried out in terror. Phantoms of the night were said to bring disaster and it was thought that the last thing a boatman saw before drowning in Galilee was a ghost on the water! It’s no wonder they were frightened at first.
Devotions of the Heart 