The Unopened Gift

The Unopened Gift

"For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of
God that is in you through the laying on of my hands."

Now that the roosters, hired here in the Philippines to wake me up by 4:30 every morning, have done their job, I thought it would be a good time to send out our weekly devotion.

The story is told of a young girl and her mom emptying out her grandmothers' house after she passed away. In the process of cleaning everything out, they came across some dishes and the mom offered them to her daughter saying "You can either keep them or give them to the Salvation Army". Upon opening the packages they were in, the daughter discovered expensive, exquisite, handcrafted china-individually painted, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and gold rimmed. Discussions with other family members revealed that the grandmother had received them as a young girl over a period of many years, as gifts on special occasions like birthdays and graduations. The unfortunate thing is that the grandmother, because they were so valuable, had developed a fear of breaking them and had never found an occasion special enough to use them. She had died with the precious gifts she had received still unopened and never used.

This would be a pretty good time to launch into a sermon about using the gifts and the talents the Lord has given each of us but I'm worred I might be too hard because of my current malice towards roosters. We are taught in I Corinthians 12 that the Lord gives gifts of a wide variety and degree to each of us as believers. They are given to be used as a blessing and and a help to other people. But like the grandmother in this story, we can allow fear to keep those gifts from ever being used.

In service last night, I saw a vision of a graveyard (no, I was not delusional from lack of sleep). As I approached the tombstones, instead of seeing the names of people, I saw engraved the names of gifts and talents that were buried there, gifts and talents given by God to be developed and used for His plans and purposes. I watched until a young man came along and began to dig up his talent that was buried there. What stood out was that it was as good as new, undiminished and waiting to be used.

The Lord through Paul had to remind Timothy that he had a gift that he wasn't using and that it was time to stir up the gift that had gone dormant within him. And he followed it with a warning about fear being the root problem in not using his gift. If the Lord has given you gifts and talents, it's time to unbury them, dust them off, kick fear out of the house, and begin to use them to bless other lives.

God Bless
Pastor Joe
Gateway Church