Monday, September 5, 2011

Spiritual Gifts: Chapter 6.1 - Natural v. Spiritual Gift? by Jay Quine

Your Gifts, Your Values -- Quine

Are They Natural or Spiritual Gifts?

Many wonder about the difference between a natural talent and a spiritual gift. Does God just change our natural abilities or tendencies into spiritual gifts when we become Christians? No. A spiritual gift is the endowment of a special ability for service given by the Holy Spirit upon a member of the body of Christ. There are similarities, but spiritual gifts are different than natural talents.

Natural Talents; Inclinations

Spiritual Gifts

Source:

from God; from the time you are born

from God; from the time you are born again

Purpose:

for your benefit; the good of others

for the common good of the church body (1Cor 12:7)

Process:

must be recognized, developed, and practiced

must be recognized, developed, and practiced

Goal:

to glorify God; provide livelihood; joy

to glorify God; serve and mature the church body (Eph 4:13)

Certainly God uses natural abilities or tendencies for His glory and to serve the church as well. While, for example, a person may be a gifted teacher (saved or unsaved) there is nevertheless the spiritual gift of teaching given by the Holy Spirit for service in the local body.

There are several other natural abilities or personality traits which add to the confusion. A strong case that they are spiritual gifts can be made for some; less of a case for others. Here are a few of them.


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Saturday, September 3, 2011

Spiritual Gifts: Chapter 5.8 - To Thine Own Self be True, by Jay Quine

Amedeo Modigliani - Portrait de Pablo PicassoPicasso: Capitulating to the Critics, posted by Jay QuineYour Gifts, Your Values -- Quine

Examining these gifts challenges us to discover who we are as God has gifted us. We then need the courage to employ them. Whether a natural or spiritual gift, the challenge is to live for the glory of God rather than for the service of self or in an attempt to satisfy the world. Read the sad yet revealing words of a famous artist, who lived his life pleasing the world.

From the moment that art ceases to be the food that feeds the best minds, the artist can use his talents to perform all the tricks of an intellectual charlatan. Most people today can no longer expect to receive consolation and exaltation from art. The refined, the rich, the professional do-nothings, the distillers of quintessence desire only the peculiar, sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today’s art. And I myself, since the advent of cubism, have fed these fellows what they wanted, and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that passed through my head. The less they understood them the more they admired me. Through amusing myself with all these farces I became celebrated, and very rapidly. For a painter, celebrity means sales, and consequent affluence. Today, as you know, I am celebrated; I am rich. But when I am alone, I have not the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titan, Rembrandt, Goya, who were great painters. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity and the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine; more painful than it may seem. But it at least and at last does have the merit of being honest.[1]

In contrast to the wasted talents of Picasso, a desire to first serve and please God should be our motive. The words of Daniel Webster are fitting: “The most important thought to ever occupy my mind was that of my responsibility to God.”

[1]From an interview with Picasso in Il Libro Nero by Giovanni Papini (1951), translated in Robertson Davies, What's Bred in the Bone, New York, Penguin, 1986, pp. 406-407.


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