pAs well as the normal gifts we get from nature or nurture - like being good at piano or vacuuming in corners - God gives us spiritual gifts. Gifts like healing or prophecy come straight from Him, and they make His Church strong and grow His Kingdom out into the world. But sometimes we get stuck worrying about what gifts we have. The problem is, when we get ourselves in a faff over spiritual gifts, we miss what they’re supposed to be about in the first place. Which is love. Paul says that we should be concerned about praying for spiritual gifts, and enjoying them, and letting them loose in the Church. But! He then says that the most important thing of all is love (1 Corinthians 12 - 13, for reference). If you have a ton of spiritual gifts but you don’t have love, you may as well write them all off. It’s kind of like superhero films. Have you noticed how most of them are about how, despite their crazy-good giftings, the superheroes are not-so-good at basic human decency? Iron Man’s arrogant, the Hulk’s got anger probs, Batman’s a bit of a rich playboy (and even Superman’s got a bit murdery now). The same thing applies here. If you’ve got a ton of supernatural gifts, but you’re pretty pants at putting other people first… what’s the point?/p
pWhat now?br /
Simple putting-people-first isn’t as glamorous as a spiritual giftset. But if you’ve been worrying about your own spiritual gift for a while, this week put that aside. Concentrate on where you can muck-in at church in simple, ‘unsupernatural’ ways. You never know where God might lead you./p