Stir Up The Gift

Stir Up The Gift

Scripture Reference: II Timothy 1:6 (KJV)

2 Timothy 1:6 Wherefore I put thee in remembrance that thou stir up the gift of God, which is in thee by the putting on of my hands.

-We need to stir up the gift that God has blessed us with.

-Many people are looking for something new but this may not

always be the answer.

- We need to take a closer look at what God has already blessed us

with

- We also need to consider whether or not we can stir that (what we

already have) up again to get to where God would have us to go.

One of my favorite summertime hobbies is having cookouts. In my opinion, I am the best cookout artist in the city. Of course my wife thinks she can cook better than me and that is mainly because she is from Texas and I am from Georgia but this is far from the truth. When I cook food on a grill outside using coals, I like to keep a nice fire at an even and hot temperature. After a couple of hours and a decrease in temperature, we take the coals that are dim or not lit all the way and mix them and turn them. This causes the coals to get hot all over again. To an inexperienced cook they would probably want to add new coals because they think that those have had it. That is not always the answer however.

- It is true that after continuous hours of cooking with the same

coals then they are burned out and they do need replacing.

- This often occurs much later than what we think though.

- After realizing that we need to change the coals we have to be

careful not to mix the coals that are not hot with the ones that are.

- If we put burned out coals on top of the hot coals it makes the hot

ones work harder. We need to quarantine the coals in separate

piles for maximum heat in minimum time.

We have to understand that coals can lie in low heat for a long time and to someone who doesn’t know any better they can seem as though they have been rendered ineffective and need to be replaced. This is not always true however because more often than not they are still good and they will only need a little stirring to get them going again. Almost as strong as they were the first time. To the novice cook they seldom get to see the results of stirring up the coals because they get rid of them far too fast. Just as we do with the coals on the fire, we lose a great deal of interest in things of God that we are not using making them seem useless to us.

If we render a thing useless then it is doomed to be left in the garage until deemed trash worthy and then thrown away. All the while we complain about how much we need that same thing we are complaining about not having.

If we are given a gift from someone, it is only polite that we use that gift. Especially when the gift is something that we need anyway.

ILLUSTRATION:

Let’s say that it is Christmas time at the Lane house and everyone is getting gifts. The gift I give my daughter is very special to me. It was a nice knitted sweater, of course it wasn’t name brand or anything exclusive. However, I noticed that the one that she usually wore was just a bit too small and she could not enjoy herself with her friends while she played outside. Seeing how it was the Christmas season and we always enjoy exchanging gifts during this season I took my time and went to the store and carefully selected what I thought was the perfect sweater for her to wear. After seeing the sweater and the lack of fashion that existed my daughter was not as enthused about it as I was about giving it to her. However instead of hurting my feelings and letting me know how much she did not like the sweater she actually acted as if she liked it and couldn’t wait to wear it. I was as proud as a father could be about this purchase and gift I had given.

I am glad that she chose to use this sweater. It would be very inconsiderate of my daughter for me to give her this new sweater as a gift and she go outside and complain about how cold she was but never chooses to wear the nice sweater I gave her. Now that she has chosen to wear the sweater I gave her, I am ready to take her to the store and buy whatever kind of sweater she really wants. As long as she makes sure that she always uses the one that I gave her, I am willing to give her more.