“The Cure for the Common Cold” part 3 (Getting warm with your giving)
Brian A. Moon
Story – This is only our 5th week of existence and we have already had over 60 different people come through our doors, and most of them have all had the same thing to say, “Wow, that was different, it was pretty cool.” The reason they say that is not because of me, but because of the team of leaders we have that serve each week. On any given week you will find a set up team, a technical team, a first impression team, a vocal team, and a drama team all working to make sure people have a great experience. And the crazy thing is that they don’t get paid a cent, they are all volunteers that give out of their time and talents. They have found something that makes them willing to sacrifice every week, and tonight we will find out what it is…
This is the third part of a four part series called “The Cure for the Common Cold” which has been showing us how to cure those times when we are not so hot for God. We have learned that through things called spiritual disciplines, or spiritual exercises, we can keep our fire and passion for God all the time unlike this church in the book of Revelation.
Revelation 2:4 – 5 “But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember then from what you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first.” NRSV
The last two weeks we have looked at 2 of those works we should be doing. The first week we looked at our Bibles and found out what they were and how we can make reading them meaningful. Then last week we looked at prayer and said that we should pray clean, pray with faith, and pray constantly. We also looked at some common forms of prayer how they should be done.
If we continue doing these things and add what we are going to talk about tonight we found out that we can have an awesome passion for God that will not come and go, but that will stay strong!!!
Before we get any further, I want to say a word to anyone who might be here for the first time, tonight’s message is very important, but a bit longer than usual so thank you for bearing with us, and next week will be back to normal. So what are we talking about tonight? Tonight we are talking about giving… Now before you all run out of here fearing that I am going to ask you to give large amounts of money you can just relax… Tonight when I say the word giving I am not necessarily talking about giving money, but instead I mean this:
Mark 10:43 – 45 “but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” NRSV (italics mine)
Look at those last words Jesus says here, “not to be served but to serve.” When you put those two words together you are looking at what ministry is all about, Ministry is simply using your time and talents to serve others. That is what I mean when I am talking about giving, I am talking about giving of yourself.
“So why are you talking to us” you might be asking yourself, “I am not a minister, that is your job” Those are good questions so lets look at that for a minute…
Why should I give?
That kind of thinking, the kind that thinks only me or the leaders here are supposed to give of ourselves is wrong, We are all called to be ministers, each and everyone of us are to be in the ministry! We are all supposed to get off the bench and get in the game.
But why??? Here are some reasons why we are all supposed to give.
YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN
Just think about that for a moment, you have been chosen by God to be apart of his family. God has known you before you were even born, and he crafted you with a unique personality and a unique set of talents and gifts that can only be used to do, what only you can do! He placed you in this time period, in this community, in this ministry at this time for a reason!
Ephesians 2:10 “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life. NRSV
God created you just the way you are to do a certain task that no one else could have done, that is why you are here right now! In fact not only have you been chosen, you have been bought. Just like in football or baseball when a team trades a player they buy out his contract, you have been bought by God. You see when God saw our evil and sin that we brought into the world, and took it upon himself to correct this in the form of his Son Jesus Christ who died for our sins, when he did that he bought us. We no longer own the rights to our lives, Jesus Christ paid the price for them when he died on the cross to set us free from the penalty of sin, and we now belong to him! We belong to him now and are no longer held back by the power of sin, and guilt, but instead we have the power to go out and make a difference in the world. The next reason why we should give is because:
YOU HAVE BEEN GIFTED
Each one of you has a special gift from God inside of you! You have a spiritual gift, a supernatural ability to do something very specific in the kingdom of God.
1 Peter 4:10 “Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received.” NRSV (italics mine)
We are going to talk more about these spiritual gifts in a minute but realize that this gift has been given to you to serve God! Look at what that verse says, “serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received.” It also says to be a good steward of this gift, or be a good manager of that gift.
One time Jesus told a parable about this idea of managing our gifts. The story is found in Matthew 25:14 – 30 and my version goes something like this:
One time there was this really rich guy who was going out of town on some business, so called his stock brokers into his office. The first one he gives 1.5 million dollars, to the next one he gives $600,000, and to the last stockbroker he gives $300,000, each amount was according to their ability. The businessman now leaves for his trip. The first stockbroker took the money he had received and invested it and earned 1.5 million more dollars. The second stockbroker took his money and also earned double what he had been given. But the last stockbroker was afraid to invest the gift and went and hid it in a mattress. The businessman now came back and called the stockbrokers into his office once again. The first reported that he had doubled his money, and the businessman said good job my faithful employee. The next stockbroker came and said I too doubled my money, and again the businessman said good job my faithful employee. Then the final stockbroker came up and said, “I was afraid to lose your money so I hid it in a mattress and here is the $300,000 you left me with.” The businessman was furious and took the money from the third stockbroker and gave it to the first one. Then he said to the man, “You lazy, worthless person, you have wasted your gift!” He now has the man put fired and thrown out of his mansion.
The point of this story is that we all have been given a spiritual gift from God, and we are to be giving it away through serving people. In fact it is a sin to waste this gift! Realize tonight that you don’t own your life, or anything else for that matter, and every gift both physical and spiritual are to be used to serve God! That is why we should give, we have been chosen and gifted for service!
“But what about this spiritual gift you keep talking about, how do I know what it is?” Good question!
Finding your gifts
The extent to which you discover, put to use and develop your spiritual gifts is the extent to which you can get to the end of your life without any regrets or any desire to find a rewind button for going back! God has wired you with a gift and in the next few moments I would like to maybe help you begin to discover that gift. First of all what is a spiritual gift?
A spiritual gift is a supernatural ability to so something for God that he gave you when he made you his child.
Every one of us has been given at least one spiritual gift, and none of us have been given them all. Usually you have a top three that you can identify.
The gifts have been given to us by God to advance his kingdom, or to build the church, to reach and serve others, not for our own benefit. They can all be found in the Bible and all together we can get a list of 19 different spiritual gifts. Some of you may be scratching your heads going, this spiritual gift stuff is a little new to me, and in fact George Barna, a Christian researcher, says that only 31% of the people in American churches know their gift and use it! Look at what it says in 1 Timothy though:
1 Timothy 4:14a, 15 “Do not neglect the gift that is in you… Put these things into practice, devote yourself to them, so that all may see your progress.” NRSV
Ok, here we go we are going to breeze through these, when you here the top 2 or 3 that might match up with you put a check by it on your outline. The gifts are separated into four categories, the first are relationally intensive gifts, meaning you must work with people.
THE GIFT OF ENCOURAGEMENT
Some of you have the divine ability to present the truth to people in a way that strengthens them, comforts them, and urges them to action when they are discouraged or wavering in their faith. You like to come alongside of people who need reassuring, you like to strengthen, challenge, and comfort people. You constantly are painting a picture of God’s goodness and direction.
THE GIFT OF EVANGELISM
Sometime this gift takes an up front role like Billy Graham, but most of the time it looks like a person making relationships with lost people to use this gift.
These people are able to effectively communicate the Gospel so that unbelievers respond in faith and begin a relationship with God. Your witnessing and sharing are highly effective, and you love to seek out opportunities to talk with unbelievers.
THE GIFT OF HOSPITALITY
These people are able to love and care for people by hanging out with them, cooking them food, and having people use your house. You love to have people over, for them to come in and relax. You love to connect people with other people and create an atmosphere in which people can just be themselves. You make people feel comfortable when they are in new surroundings, and you are friendly, gracious, and caring.
THE GIFT OF LEADERSHIP
These people are able to cast a vision of what the future should be like and are able to motivate, direct, and influence people to get them to work together to accomplish Gods’ purposes. You love to move people along a clearly defined direction, and present the big picture through persuasion and motivation.
THE GIFT OF MERCY
These people are able to cheerfully and practically help people who are suffering or in need. You are compassion, moved into action. You can walk into a room and pick out the hurting people, and want to come alongside of them and help ease the pain and suffering. You look for lonely and forgotten people and are moved by them. You get knots in your stomach and want to help.
THE GIFT OF SHEPHERDING
This gift is able to nurture, care for, and guide people toward greater spiritual growth and spiritual maturity. You love to look after a small group of people and you are committed to helping them develop spiritually. You love to walk with and look after people through this or that, no matter what. These next gifts are in the next category of service.
THE GIFT OF ADMINISTRATION
These people have the ability to understand what it takes to make an organization work. The can plan and perform procedures to accomplish goals and love to develop strategies and plans to reach defined goals.
These people are highly productive and effective people who love to create order out of chaos. You like to organize task or events, but you just love to organize.
THE GIFT OF CRAFTSMANSHIP
If this is you then you love to design and construct items that could be used for ministry. You love to work with wood, cloth, paint, fabric, metal, and glass. You like to make things with your hands.
THE GIFT OF GIVING
This gift is the special ability to take the money and things that God blesses you with and then give them back to God to use, joyfully! These people experience great joy when they give and are always trying to see how they can give more.
THE GIFT OF HELPS
These people have the ability to accomplish practical and necessary tasks that free up other people. They love to just be given a job to do so that someone else can do something more. They don’t seek attention for their work, but just like to help out with whatever they can.
These next gifts fit into another category called “up-front” gifts, because they are used up in front of people.
THE GIFT OF APOSTLESHIP
If this is you, then you have the ability to start and oversee the development of either new churches, or new ministries within a church. You are the people with the entrepreneurial spirit who love to find out what is not being done and figure out ways to fill a hole. You love to get things started and once they are started you get bored and want to move on. You love to do new projects, and you can’t stop starting new things.
THE GIFT OF CREATIVE COMMUNICATION
These people love to communicate God’s truths in a variety of different art forms. They like to do drama, music, dance, do video or any other type of art form, and creatively express God’s truth in powerful ways. You are a creative person!
THE GIFT OF PROPHECY
No I am not talking about telling the future, but these people can reveal the truth by teaching in a timely and relevant manner. People can understand the truth better because of what you say and they can see what they are doing wrong and how to correct it.
These people challenge you when they speak, and give timely words of correction that cause the rest of us to look at our lives to see what is going on. When these people speak they call us to make a decision.
THE GIFT OF TEACHING
This is one of the gifts that God has given me and if this is you then you have the ability to understand and then clearly explain God’s word, the Bible. As a result people who listen grow and mature spiritually.
The mark of this gift is effectiveness, does anything happen when you teach? These people love to communicate biblical truths and challenge listeners to take what has been taught and apply it to their life.
You love accuracy and detail and cannot sit still when the Bible is used incorrectly. You also like to prepare in advance.
The last category tonight is support gifts.
THE GIFT OF DISCERNMENT
These people have the amazing ability to distinguish between truth and error, right and wrong. These people can pick up very quickly what is right or wrong in a situation. They can choose quickly and identify deception in other people, also they can pick up on inconsistencies and determine if something is from God or not. They are perceptive, insightful, intuitive, and challenging people.
THE GIFT OF FAITH
If this is you then you can act on God’s promises with incredible confidence and unchanging belief that God will do what he said he would do. You have complete confidence of God’s ability to overcome obstacles and because of your faith you can go forward when other people won’t. You will ask God for what you need.
THE GIFT OF INTERCESSION
You might remember this word from last week when we talked on prayer, but some people have a special gift. These people have the ability to constantly pray on behalf of other people and for other people. When they say, “I will pray for that” they actually do! These are people who pray. You have an awareness that there are spiritual battles going on and you pray in the midst of them. You would rather pray during a service than be in it…
THE GIFT OF KNOWLEDGE
These next two are closely related so pay close attention here. The gift of knowledge is the ability to bring truth to the situation in a relevant way using Biblical insight. You are constantly bringing truth to light and you are lovers of the truth. You have unusual insight or understanding that is useful to others. You point us to God’s truth.
THE GIFT OF WISDOM
These people love the truth too, but they love to apply it to specific situation, or in confusion or conflict. They take spiritual truths and apply them to your life in very specific ways. They are sensible, practical, wise, and smart people. They receive understanding from God’s word and use it to help people in a particular life situation. So there they are all 19 of them. Remember that you don’t have all of them, and all of you have one of them.
Take a second and look back over the list to see which ones are your top three…………………………………………………
Now that you have an idea as to which ones you might have here is the pay off.
Giving it away
Don’t forget what we are talking about, keeping our fire for God through spiritual disciplines like giving.
And that is the payoff tonight. If we commit ourselves to the development of our spiritual gifts, And then serve God with them in that specific place just for us we will find an amazing joy and love of God that comes through giving.
Galatians 6:7-10 “Don’t be misled; remember that you can’t ignore God and get away with it: a man will always reap just the kind of crop he sows! If he sows to please his own wrong desires, he will be planting seeds of evil and he will surely reap a harvest of spiritual decay and death; but if he plants the good things of the Spirit, he will reap the everlasting life that the Holy Spirit gives him. And let us not get tired of doing what is right, for after a while we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t get discouraged and give up. That’s why whenever we can we should always be kind to everyone, and especially to our Christian brothers.” The Living Bible
Some of you might be an active part of this ministry, and others of you might still be on the sidelines, but we all need to be in the game. We all need to get in there and get our hands dirty. If you are not serving in some way in this ministry then tonight it is real simple to gain the love for God that comes from giving.
On the back we have a sign up sheet for some of our ministries in which you can get plugged in and serve using your spiritual gifts. There is nothing like it and I challenge you all to get in the game tonight.
Prayer time --------------
God we thank you for blessing us with these spiritual gifts and we recognize that they are for you and not for our own benefit. We need you to come and show us how you have wired us and how we can fit in and serve you. Give us a passion for you, and help us to stay on fire for you through our Bibles, prayer, and giving. Amen.
