Monday, October 14, 2013

Thoughts on I Timothy 4: Don't neglect your gifts

When I was younger, vv. 12-16 of the fourth chapter were some of the most important to me in the Bible.  Now I am middle aged and not quite sure what to do with them.

When I was in high school and college, I did receive confirmation of my spiritual gifts through prophesy.  I never had a blueprint for what I was supposed to do with these gifts, so I spent my early adulthood doing things that I thought would put myself in a position to both fine-tune the gifts and give myself more credibility.  I earned a master's degree in philosophy and a Ph.D. in government.  I served in the churches I was in and did gain credibility within those churches. 

Then I got married.  My criteria for getting married for as long as I can remember is that I should be able to better serve God with my wife than without my wife.  I found a woman who had strengths in my areas of weakness and we married.  I have since found that I am serving God less effectively.  The marriage drains my energy and I am constantly doing things to fix things for her because she has glaring weaknesses in my areas of strength.  But it saps up all of my energy and I am no longer serving God.  In addition, my spiritual gifts have been neglected and I feel like they are weakening.

That's primarily why I am doing these "thoughts on" posts.  I am trying to exercise some of my spiritual gifts and get them back into shape so that hopefully I can get back to serving God and live up to the potential He gave me.  I'm not even remotely close to being there yet.  I look back on some of my older writing and listen to some of my old talks and am in wonder of what I was once able to do.  Now I just feel tired and hopeless that I can never get back to where I once was, let alone to where I know I should be.  I neglected my gifts and now I feel the consequences of that neglect.

No comments:

Post a Comment