If your gift is prophesying, use it in proportion to your faith.  If it’s serving, serve; if teaching, teach; if encouraging, encourage; if contributing to the financial needs of others, do it generously; if leadership, lead; if showing mercy, do it cheerfully (Romans 12:6-8, slightly adapted).

God has made you good at some things.  Things you think are “spiritual” and things you’re pretty sure are just ordinary, everyday stuff, and therefore not-so-spiritual.

God has made you good at some things. It doesn’t matter how you or we label or classify them.  God’s reason for making you good at some things?  Because there are people all around you who need you to do what God has made you good at.

Notice Paul’s list above.  Prophesying, teaching, leading – maybe those sound like pretty “spiritual” gifts.  But serving, encouraging, giving generously – those seem like the sorts of things “anybody” could do, right?

Notice Paul’s point: whatever God has made you good at, it’s because it is necessary, it is needed.  God’s gifts are given purposefully.  And that purpose: Love must be sincere (verse 9), love must be genuine, authentic, the real given-by-God deal.

The purpose of any and all of God’s good gifts is the development and cultivation of love. More and more people being loved, in whatever ways they need to be reached and rescued by the love of God.  And more and more people loving their neighbors and even their enemies, because each and every one of our gifts is to communicate and demonstrate something of God’s great love in Christ.

We don’t need to be ordained, to have a “church job,” or to be in “full-time ministry” to communicate and demonstrate something of God’s love to the world around us.  We simply need to acknowledge the ways God has made us good at something, and then follow the Spirit’s leadership in using our gifts.

The purpose and goal of our gifts is love, not being recognized or celebrated or awarded an “official” title or position.  God’s gifts have some interesting means of making a way for themselves: the more they are put to work, the more work they are put to!

How does God communicate or demonstrate something of his love through you?  Are you “sitting on” it?  If so, how might God be inviting you to put it to work?  Or if you’re already putting it to work, is there a way God is inviting you to “get better” at it?  How might you love better through what God has entrusted to you?