Are you refining your gifts?

In my last blog post, I focused on the concept of “dying empty”. Read the blog here for a more detailed breakdown and exploration, but to quickly summarise, to die empty is to use up all of our gifts, pouring out everything God has deposited in us and accomplishing everything He intended for us to do on this side of eternity. However, to truly attain this goal, simply using your gifts is not enough. There is another requirement, and that is: refining your gifts. I’d like to explore this concept in today’s post, but I recommend you read the last post if you haven’t yet before this one. Without further ado, let’s dive in!

So, God has given each of us a gift, a talent, latent potential, if you will, and if we want to see it manifest in its full capacity, we need to hone it. Just having a tool in hand doesn’t mean it can automatically perform its tasks effectively; it will often require you to sharpen it first. Likewise, God gives us the gift(s), and expects us to take the necessary steps, with His leading, to develop and refine it to be even more effective. This expectation is also reflected in the Bible, when we look at the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14-30. This parable describes the kingdom of heaven to be like a Master who entrusted his property to his servants, giving each of them different talents before going on a journey. When the Master returned, he was very pleased with the servants who had put their talents to work and multiplied them, calling them “good and faithful” servants. However, he was severely displeased with the one servant who had chosen to bury away his talent, calling this servant “wicked and slothful”. The Master in the parable represents God, and his reaction towards the different servants shows us what is acceptable to him when it comes to how we interact with our gifts; that is, to be diligent stewards over them. To God, burying your gift or not trying to improve it, is unacceptable.

Quick musing:

The parable of the talents also brings to our attention that the Master (representing God) entrusted “his property” to them. This teaches us that, though God gives us the gifts, they still belong to Him, and this realisation should encourage us all the more to be diligent in taking care of and developing these gifts – His gifts.

My personal experience of refining my gifts, and the results produced, is a great indicator of the impact and difference it makes. Take my dancing for example; I always knew I had a natural gift for dance, and always found myself getting involved with dance everywhere I went – school, university, church, parties, you name it. However, I never formally trained until my early twenties, after receiving a strong push from God to take the gift more seriously. Driven by this prompt, I started attending beginner dance classes, thinking I wouldn’t do too poorly because I was a “natural” and, after all, I wasn’t technically a beginner as I’d been dancing all my life and even did competitions, right? Wrong! I struggled in my beginner classes, sometimes questioning if I could really even dance; from my stiff movements to my inability to keep up with the choreography and techniques, it was a rude awakening, lol.

With time, though, I started to gradually improve the more I practised, and now I can safely say that I am a more proficient dancer, far removed from the version of myself at the start of my journey. The years of training, which is very much still ongoing, helped to nurture the latent talent that God had placed in me. The gift was there, but without nurture and refinement, I would not have been able to access more of my potential and develop actual skill. This experience was, and still is, a good reminder for me that having a natural knack for something will not automatically make you good at it. I hope it serves as a reminder for you too.

Final thoughts

I want to leave you with a couple of the benefits that come with cultivating and stewarding your God-given gifts:

• It pleases God. We could stop there as this takes precedence over everything, but we also saw in the parable that in the Master’s pleasure, He was compelled to multiply the fruit of their hands. How about that? When you live to please God, He blesses you even more.
• It prepares you. When God brings an opportunity to you, you won’t be caught lacking the skills and expertise you need to execute and excel. I can personally testify of this, because there are some opportunities I would have missed out on if I hadn’t made the decision to refine my gifts.

I sincerely pray that these words will encourage you to invest in and improve your gifts – to truly play your part in stewardship. God has a plan for each of us, and being a good steward along with aligning yourself with His will, will allow you to fulfill it.

xoxo