November 18, 2007 Sermon

Develop Your Gift
I Timothy 4:11-16

A few years ago nine families in our church lived through a high school musical, Aida. It was exhausting, absorbing, and thrilling when we finally got to watch all of “our” young people perform. Moms and dads asked me when I would start using sermon illustrations from the show. I resisted. Our daughter had one of the roles; I did not want to make her squirm, and I did not want to seem as though I was bragging about her and all those other kids. Eventually, I used one illustration from Aida.

This fall my family has had a second child-related, all-consuming experience: our son’s cross country season. From late August until last week, the Riggins house lived cross country. We drove literally thousands of miles to meets. We gave up weekends and Tuesday afternoons to watch Dan run. We sent him to the doctor at the first sign of trouble. We ate a strict diet (though he was the only one competing). We did chores for him so he could train and keep up to speed on school work. And we do not regret a bit of the cost to us in time, energy and money.

I choose to use my son’s athletic experience as a sermon illustration for the same reason we do not regret supporting him through it: watching him—and his teammates—run was terrifically inspiring. His season actually started around Thanksgiving last year. His coach had challenged him to step up to the next level and told him doing so would require year-round training. So Dan ran. He ran outdoors when possible. He ran on our treadmill. He ran when we visited family at Christmas. He ran during Spring Break and the mission trip. He ran through a couple of mildly scary muscle and tendon strains. He ran through sleet and the humidity of Mississippi in July. He ran around Long Lake. He ran up that big hill from the Bay to the windmill. All summer long, every weekday, he met his teammates at 8:00 a.m. and they ran.

And he had a good season. But that is not the point. What inspired me was watching a crowd of teenaged boys so deeply dedicated to developing their abilities. God gave to only a few of them the body, the lungs and (most importantly) the mentality that empowered them to become top runners. The team had 45 boys on it. Only seven could run varsity. Most of the rest had no hope of wearing that yellow jersey. Yet they all worked like dogs over months.

Who watching this could fail to become inspired by the example these young men set?

Develop your gift. Develop your spiritual gift. We work to achieve high goals in many areas of life. Runners run. We spend thousands of dollars to send our children to college. We undertake serious financial strain to live in nice houses. Our church is working hard to add to our building. We make big sacrifices to develop ourselves and our church. Why, then, do we not dedicate ourselves to developing spiritually?

A pastor friend and I used to joke about how to grow Sunday School. We observed the incredible sacrifices parents make for their children’s soccer or volleyball (or cross country!) “careers” and dreamed about running Sunday School like a youth sports team. We would make the parents attend a boring opening meeting. We would expect church families to put our 36 events on their calendars first. We would make the children go door to door selling candy to fund the program. If they missed three classes they would have to sit out a week. We would require parents to drive on at least three Sunday School “road trips” and make them suffer for hours on hard metal bleachers to watch the classes. They would have to buy their kids’ uniforms. We would arbitrarily decide which children would start and which would languish on the Sunday School bench and if their parents complained we might just throw them off the team. My friend and I figured that if we ran Sunday School so demandingly families would beat down our doors to get their children on the roster.

But of course this is an absurd scenario. Sunday Schools across America are dying. Our own has a strong adult, but a weak children’s, program. The reason is simple: we do not value developing our children’s spiritual gifts to the same extent we do their academic and athletic gifts. No amount of protest against this conclusion can overcome the cold, hard facts. If you want to win medals in cross country, you train all year. If you want to develop your spiritual gifts, you train all your life.

I do not wish to lay a guilt trip on parents. I wish, rather, to get all of us to take with the greatest seriousness the call to develop our spiritual gifts. Children just make an easy illustration of the problem. We all face the same need. I do. You do. Will we answer the challenge presented to us in I Timothy, the challenge to develop our spiritual gifts?

I Timothy was addressed to church leaders. But its words apply to all Christians. Our passage urges us “to set a (Christian) example in speech and conduct, in love, in faith, in purity.” Young or old, church leader or follower, we must try to live as Jesus lived. We do this in order to inspire others to try to live that way, too. It takes spiritual training to live in the Way of Jesus. The text tells the church to read scripture, to exhort, to teach. These disciplines are public actions meant to help the whole Church to become more Christ-like. But how can the church hope to follow Jesus together if individual Christians are not trying to follow him on their own? Reading scripture publicly, during worship services, has great value. But unless we read and study scripture on our own, privately, we cannot develop spiritually nearly so well. Both we and the church suffer for it.

The passage continues, “Do not neglect the gift that is in you, which was given to you through prophecy by the laying on of hands by elders.” Prophecy and laying on of hands by elders sound too high and mighty for private, average Christians. Indeed, we do call church leaders to office through this process. It does not all apply to everybody. But receiving gifts from the Holy Spirit does. God has created each one of us to serve in some way. God has made us a certain way, with a certain shape to fit a certain ministry. In the coming months we will offer you a program to learn what your spiritual gift(s) might be. But rest assured, you have a gift. And in God’s eyes no gift is better than any other. Maybe you have the gift of humility that allows you to support more flashy gifts. Maybe you have the gift of caring about details in building maintenance. Maybe you have the gift of secretly and constantly praying for others. Whatever your gift, I Timothy tells us, do not neglect it.

Bill Hybels serves as pastor of Willow Creek Church. With a gifted group of lay people he developed the whole “seeker church” movement that has drawn such dramatic numbers of unchurched people. Two big seeker churches meet near us—one about three miles southwest of here and the other just across the road. Like Willow Creek these churches attract large crowds. But Pastor Hybels recently went public with a crushing admission: his church, and those that imitate it, have failed to disciple more than just a handful of the masses that attend them. He has written, “After all these years I must confess that we should have been much more aggressive in insisting that our people, new Christians and old, have the discipline to develop their spiritual gifts. If we had done that we would not be seeing so many leave so soon after coming to us.”

Northern Lakes Community Church is not a seeker church. But we certainly have problems of our own. To my mind we share this one with our brothers and sisters in all kinds of churches: we do not aggressively work with our people to have the discipline to develop their spiritual gifts. Let us change that right now. Develop your spiritual gifts. Train them. Exercise them daily. Push yourself. Run the race.