Let the Body of Christ walk in their gifts

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last nigh at bible study God brought out that we should and need to be using our gifts that He gave us. it started with talking about my week with God. i have been thinking here lately that i do not really have a passion(s). i enjoy doing lots of things but i do not really have something that i am passionate about. i feel like for a while now that i do not have something that i get excited about, and with that i feel like God has been leading me to get excited/passionate about something. in my heart of hearts i don't want to devote my time to secular things. i don't want my day to be filled with things that i can come up with. i want my day to be filled with Jesus. see i started reading in Matthew (and will end with John) to see just what Jesus requires of me. i want to do the things that make Him happy..... anyway i am getting off topic. what i am saying is that this last week God has made me look at what my passions are. which in reality is serving Jesus (or at least that is what i want it to be).

as i sat down to look and asked God what we would talk about during bible study i felt like He wanted me to talk about our passions. so i asked Him what scriptures do i apply to this? at first i didn't get anything. so i started thumbing through my bible to see if anything would jump out at me. of course nothing did. so asked my wife what she thought about when i asked her about passions. (i thank God for my wife. He speaks through her so much) she thought about 1 Timothy 4:12-16. which tells us not to let people despise our youth, but to be an example to all, and to neglect the gift that God has given us. this lead me to 2 Timothy 1:6-9 where it tells us to stir up the gifts that we have. praise the Lord that He knows what He is doing. at this point someone asked "where in Corinthians does it talk about gifts?" so of course we looked at it and several others. here they are: 1 Corinthians 12:4-12, Romans 12:3-15, and Ephesians 4:11. there are many other verses that one could use for talking about the gifts but these are the few that we quickly looked at. now to start tying all this together let us first look at one last verse out of the Message bible: Colossians 2:6-10 "6 My counsel for you is simple and straightforward: Just go ahead with what you’ve been given. You received Christ Jesus, the Master; now live him.7 You’re deeply rooted in him. You’re well constructed upon him. You know your way around the faith. Now do what you’ve been taught. School’s out; quit studying the subject and start living it! And let your living spill over into thanksgiving.8 Watch out for people who try to dazzle you with big words and intellectual double-talk. They want to drag you off into endless arguments that never amount to anything. They spread their ideas through the empty traditions of human beings and the empty superstitions of spirit beings. But that’s not the way of Christ.9 Everything of God gets expressed in him, so you can see and hear him clearly. You don’t need a telescope, a microscope, or a horoscope to realize the fullness of Christ, and the emptiness of the universe without him.10 When you come to him, that fullness comes together for you, too. His power extends over everything." what a great verse!!! see God from a young age spoke to me about the gifts that i have in Him. and from a young age it has made happy to walk/operate in the giftings. after reading these several verses and hearing God speak to me about my "passions" it was and is clear as day to what i need to be doing. God wants me to (in His words) "Just start living it!" to let/make my passions be the spiritual gifts that He gave me. what a revelation! it may be a small one, and one that seems so obvious, but it is a blessing to know that God has found in me something that He wants to use. so here is where i count my blessings. i thank God that he has not forgotten about me and that He has counted me worthy enough (even through my filthy flesh)to be a minister for Him!