Discovering Your Spiritual Gifts Part 1 Series

ILLUS: I borrowed Ken Mann’s truck a couple days ago to take some stuff to the dump. After he told me I could use it, I joked with him that I have some other friends with trucks that I might have called – but their trucks are way too nice and they’d probably never let me use them to take junk to the dump.

Ken then replied, “You know – birds by nature are meant to fly. And trucks by nature are meant to haul things.”

Beneath the surface this is a “deep thought”. Birds and trucks are designed for certain purposes. So are you and I. We’re created by God and gifted by Him to fulfill a certain purpose in the Kingdom of God – and if we fail to fulfill that function we lose the point of why we’re even here.

-no one person can do everything the Church needs to do.

In some churches, the pastor is looked up to as the “Great Man of God” who does everything well. Or at least he is expected to be that man who does everything well.

I know some pastors who feel compelled to do everything well, and often beat themselves up and condemn themselves when they find areas of need in the church that they don’t feel effective in meeting. In fact, I am one of those pastors.

I’ve been encouraged this week as I’ve prepared to speak this message with the knowledge that I don’t have to be good at everything. I don’t have to feel bad that I don’t feel real confident and skilled in some areas of leading this church. Because that’s why God brought YOU here! I’m doing the best to fulfill God’s call upon my life and to use the gifts God has given me to their fullest potential. But if CTK Oak Harbor is going to really change the spiritual landscape of Oak Harbor, it will take each member of our local body discovering and utilizing their spiritual gifts for the sake of others.

ILLUS:

The University of California at Berkley took on an impossible assignment. It agreed to coordinate an international effort to locate extra-terrestrial life. That is a daunting project. We live in a large galaxy, and the multi-million dollar radio telescopes looking at it suck in a lot of data. In fact, so much data is collected and forwarded to Berkley that no computer on earth is powerful enough to process it all.

To accomplish this impossible task Berkley asked home computer users around the world to contact them over the Internet and download a program called "SETI @ Home." The SETI software makes a connection over the Internet to a computer in California and downloads a "work unit"-that is, a set of measurements from a particular part of the sky. The work unit is not large, but it takes the computer a while to crunch the numbers.

When the work is done, the computer makes another Internet call to Berkeley, uploads its results, and downloads a new work unit. What today’s largest supercomputer could never do alone, over a million ordinary home computers do easily. Sometimes the best way to accomplish the impossible is to harness the help of the ordinary.

That is how the church works. God didn’t intend any one person to do all the work. No one can do it alone, but if we all do what we can, the unattainable becomes attainable; the church can be all that God intended it to be.