The gift of love

As well as the 'normal' gifts we have - like being good at piano or vacuuming in corners - God gives us spiritual gifts. Spiritual gifts like healing or prophecy come from him, and they make his Church strong and extend his Kingdom into the world.

Sometimes we get stuck worrying about which spiritual gifts we have. The problem is, when we get into a fuss over the gifts, we miss what they're all about in the first place: love. Paul says that we should be concerned about praying for spiritual gifts, and enjoying them, and letting them loose in the Church. But! He then says that the most important thing of all is love (1 Corinthians 12-13, for reference).

If we have a heap of spiritual gifts but we don't have love, we may as well write them all off. It's kind of like superhero films. We may notice that, despite their crazy-good giftings, the superheroes are often not too good at basic human decency? Iron Man's arrogant, the Hulk has anger problems, Batman's a bit of a rich playboy and Superman thinks he's the only one who can save the world. The same thing applies to us. If we've a heap of supernatural gifts, but we're hopeless at loving people... what's the point?



So what now? Putting people first isn't as glamorous as using your spiritual giftset. But if you've been worrying about your own spiritual gift, park that worry up for a while. Concentrate on where you can share your gift of love in simple, 'unsupernatural' ways. You never know where God might lead you.





— SCRIPTURE —

'I will show you the best thing to do.' 1 Corinthians 12:31 CEV
— SOULFOOD —

Mic 1-4, Mark 13:1-11, Ps 78:32-39, Pro 23:29-35