What Is Your Spiritual Gift?

00:00 - Speaker 1 Real Life presents the Jack Hibbs Podcast with intention and boldness to proclaim truth, equip the saints and impact our culture. 00:09 - Speaker 2 Can you imagine if everybody in the church was a pastor? They'd all kill each other. Think about it. God is so brilliant, God, the Holy Spirit, regarding His church. He specifically places people in a local church that has a gift that they're to use in that body of believers. That strengthens the whole. He's brilliant, you see why it's important for you to find out, for you to be able to write down with confidence. That's my gift. 00:38 - Speaker 1 You can get the outlines of this podcast by going to jackhibbs.com/podcast today. If this podcast lifts you up and encourages you to live a more fulfilled life in Christ, then make sure you leave us one of those five-star ratings. To us that's like saying amen or yes. Then that rating will encourage others to listen Now open your hearts to what God's word has to say to you. Here is Jack Hibbs. 01:07 - Speaker 2 Raise your hand. If you are a follower of Jesus, if you love the Lord, God, raise your hand. You are somewhere in Ephesians 2.19. You're in the household of God. And now, look, if you brought somebody here today who is not a Christian, you were saying I'm just hoping this is an evangelistic message today, that my friend that I brought will accept Jesus. Let me talk to your friend for a second, your unbelieving, non-Christian friend, your pagan pal. I want you, I want you friend, to keep an eye on your Christian friend. 01:44 Non-believers keep an eye on those who name the name of Jesus, because out of their lives should be convincing evidence that they love you. Oh, I know they bother you. I know they say things to you like won't you come to church? You want me to pray for you, want to read the Bible together, and they just drive you nuts. The reason why they drive you nuts is because they love you actually more than you love yourself. They're going to heaven and they know you're not, but they want you to be with them there, even though you don't even care about it. And that is our great fault. We love you. We even love those who hate us. Go figure, we love you. We even love those who hate us? Go figure, that's impossible. And yet God does that in our lives. I can't explain it. Supernatural work of God where we love our enemies, and that's the part of Jesus that's coming out of us. To really love is to love with the love of God, which is impossible, but the Holy Spirit. And he does that by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, so that what we do can be even, so to speak, measured. It can be felt, it can be known. Colossians, chapter one, verse 13, says that he has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us, transported us, transferred us into the kingdom of the son of his love, in whom we have redemption through his blood and the forgiveness of sin. You can say amen to that. Wow, your sins, christian, have been forgiven. That alone should be a great accelerant to get you up and going. 03:28 Now I want to make something really clear. I don't believe and I thank God for the church I grew up in never did Pastor Chuck Smith ever pressure us into doing anything. Chuck Smith believed that if you taught the word of God, it would get inside people's lives and it would change them, and so there was never a if you don't sign up to help the fire victims, then you're a loser. There was never that. There was never any pressure to do anything. You know why Pastor Chuck Smith was a big fan of telling you what God has done for you. 04:04 How about this? Maybe it's manifested this way. There's churches who haven't learned that yet, so they have the thermometer for the building project, and I always I have a hard time with that when I see that, because they'll say you know, everybody, we're 20% below our target for this month. I'm so ornery. My thought is who set that target? You're probably wrong. You should have lowered the target. So we're going to pass the plate again. 04:33 Everybody, what are you doing? You're causing people to be manipulated by pressuring them to build the kingdom of God. Excuse me, if the kingdom of God must be built by our support, we got the wrong God. I mean, come on. But I tell you what God does build his kingdom using his people, and he uses them by the gifts of the Holy Spirit. God gets all the glory, all the credit, and I'm going to be honest with you using the gifts of the Holy Spirit active in your life, as God gives you one, or maybe a couple, is joyfully terrifying. 05:20 It's like I am not adequate for this. And God says that's right, you're not. Let's see how this goes. Oh Lord, help me that. A boy, God, this is too much for me. Yes, it is. I can never do that. No, you can't. 05:35 Christian, I want you to embrace the world. Oh, listen, here it comes. I want you to embrace the world of being uncomfortable. You're gonna grow the most when you're uncomfortable. Why? Because once you can manage uncomfortable, you can do anything, and the church should be uncomfortable in this world. We need to be uncomfortable. If we find ourselves comfortable in this world, something's wrong. But God will bring us to that moment where, Jack, I'm going to do this and I'm terrified and you're terrified, and this will never work, and God says you're exactly correct to all those things. 06:13 But God and so all of us need to make sure that, when asked what is your gift given to you by the Holy Spirit to strengthen and build up the body of Christ, you ought to be able to answer them. My dear friends, listen, if you don't know the answer, you must find the answer. This is your pursuit in life after being born again is to find out from God what is my function, what's my purpose in the church? Do you remember? Last week I told you guys, stop being little bees that go from church to church and think you've gone to church. You ain't going to church until you find a church and get involved in that church. Yeah, but there's a church, you know, and there's no good churches in my area. So go to one that at least comes close to honoring the word of God and change it. Change it by being a godly witness. Let them throw you out. If they throw you out, open up the Bible and do a home group, but by all means make sure that you are functioning in a living, breathing way, very, very powerful. 07:20 And so, church, as we look at this, we're talking about this love that God is worthy of us giving to him. So give God your love. That's what he wants. And how do you make someone? What can I say to somebody regarding that? You know this is impossible for me to say now, listen up everybody. Second service love God. I can give you reasons why to love him, but I can't make you love God. It's a choice you make and in that choice we honor listen, we honor God by honoring one another frankly. 07:56 And it says in verse four, for as we have many members in one body but all the members do not have the same function, it means that a healthy church that's experiencing revival, the believers in that church, no matter how small or how big, they know their place and they function in the beautiful apparatus of their calling. Listen, I'm a big fan of this. Hear me out. You say well, I don't know. I've been praying about it. I don't feel peace about it. Pete, you want to feel peace about it. What do you mean? Peace about it? 08:28 Evangelism is terrifying. So what do you do? You get equipped to go. Try it when God says pray for that person, right there, they're sick. Look at them, they're sick and you're at the store and God is prompting your heart. Pray for them, they're sick. If you look around for somebody, maybe I can find somebody to pray for that person. God is speaking to you and he wants you to go minister to them. Is it terrifying? Absolutely. But when you step out in obedience, guess what you're doing? You are exhibiting the love of God and your love for God Because, listen, it's for him and that communicates love to him. You'll do it for him. Why would I do that Because you're forgiven, because heaven is your home and, in the short term, you and I are in this world to live out our lives to point as many men and women and boys and girls to the kingdom of God. 09:23 Did I tell you last week, regarding this particular point about honoring God by honoring one another in the body of the believer, is BLM? Did I say BLM last week, did I? If you missed it last week, I am a fan of BLM. You ever heard of BLM? You mean the Bureau of Land Management, not the government agency BLM. You ever heard of BLM? You mean the Bureau of Land Management, not the government agency BLM the acronym Believers Lives Matter. 09:50 You thought I was going to say something else, didn't you? By the way, I got in trouble in DC. I said this this has nothing to do with the Bible study. I said at a gathering. I said if you've got to shout BLM, if you've got to say listen, if you're black and you have to say black lives matter. I said in this gathering of black pastors I said don't. I told all those pastors don't let anybody do that to you again. Think about it. 10:19 If I say Portuguese lives matter, I'm not stupid. I know Portuguese lives matter. Does that make sense? I don't have to have you tell me that. I know it. Don't degrade me. 10:37 And the believer has been degraded. In this world of ours, believers' lives matter. How have we been degraded? In this world of ours, believers' lives matter? How have we been degraded or downgraded? Much of it is because of us. We've either not stepped up and shown the love of God when we should have, or maybe we misrepresented God by some other means. The world, believe it or not, is hurting to see a godly witness through all of us as we love, on those in the fire zones, or those on our street, or the man behind us on the next avenue over who had a stroke and he's barely able to walk, and you can get his mail for him every day. Do you know? Getting the mail for your neighbor opens up a door of evangelism that Billy Graham couldn't have gotten, because God wants to use you and it's supposed to happen first here among the believers. We are to be falling over one another to love one another, it says in verse five. So we, being many, are one body in Christ and individual members of one another. This is the unity of the body. This is the church. It's true, I'm not a handicap here in this church. 11:55 These services at this church multiple services, and during the week they're large services. So it feels like a Herculean lift every time. And then God says, Jack, what are you doing? You're not lifting anything. I didn't ask you to lift anything. I'm speaking to them. I will speak to my people. That's not my responsibility. My job is to give him, to give you his voice. This is his voice. What you do with that is your business. But when he speaks, listen. This is a big church. Big church, big blessings, big impact. Big church, big problems, big hardships. A lot of death happens here in a week. Babies are born every week, people getting married, people dying Are you hearing me? It's the church. 12:51 Everything I just described to you happens in a church of 12 people over time. It's just in a big church. It happens all the time. So how do we ever catch up? There's only one way, and that's for you and I to decide to exercise the gift of the Holy Spirit that God has given you. And here's the amazing thing about God he's so cool at what he does. He doesn't give one church, all one gift. That would be a freak show. Can you imagine if everybody in the church was a pastor? They'd all kill each other. What if everybody in the church was an evangelist? Think about it. God is so brilliant, God, the Holy Spirit, regarding his church. He specifically places people in a local church that has a gift that they're to use in that body of believers that strengthens the whole. He's brilliant. 13:48 You see why it's important for you to find out, for you to be able to write down with confidence. That's my gift. Can I ask you this? I'm going to get some hate mail for this. I encourage you not to go online to fill out a questionnaire to find out what your gift of the Holy Spirit is. That's not only cheating. You're going to get the wrong answer. God takes no shortcuts in area. But for you to get on your knees and say Lord, show me. And when he shows you, and you know it, no one will be able to stop you from doing it. There could be a pack of wolves, a pride of lions. You can't back away from your calling because you know what you're supposed to do. There's no greater way to live and serving one another is loving on God, and so I want to run through this. 14:47 You might ask yourself what does that look like? How do I practically love one another in this place? Look, you should first of all start out by getting people's names around you, because I look at you other than the front row, because you guys are visiting from all over the world and all over the country, so you guys are off the hook, but you guys always sit right there. So do you guys? You guys, too, you see what I'm saying, you know you do? You guys sit over there, always closest to the exit. I know, I know, I know I can see a lot from up here. I see this too. 15:27 When I say something, the wife goes listen. I wish I had like a pastor cam. It'd be amazing. What does it look like when we're operating in our calling and we're gifted? Listen, God calls you into his family. Did you know that? He knows you. He invites you into his family. He knows Listen, because God lives in the world of foreknowledge. All of the stuff about predestination and all of that, it's all based upon his foreknowledge. It's all based upon his foreknowledge. He knows you and he knows what gift you have, and you're supposed to know it too, and he wants you to use it. And when you use it, listen. All of a sudden the Bible stops being theoretical and it goes practical on you, and when that happens in your life, you'll have a revival. Everybody around you could be dead as a doornail and you'll be flourishing With joy and exuberance and almost boundless energy. Why? Because you're in the lane you're supposed to be in and he supplies all that's needed. He calls you and then he equips you. Isn't that beautiful. He's so good. So here's what it looks like. We're to love one another. You've been hearing all about that, but what does that look like? 16:55 The Bible tells us in this verse of Galatians 6, brethren, if a man is overtaken in any trespass, you, who are a spiritual restorer such a one in the spirit of gentleness, I should qualify this when a man is overtaken in a fall, if a man has sinned, if a Christian brother has sinned his way out of fellowship, right, so he's fallen. Christian man, christian woman, doesn't matter. Listen to me. They have sinned their way out of fellowship. They're not going to church anymore because they're spending too much time sleeping with bubbles and they're sinning. You do not go to that guy and say we want to restore you. Listen carefully you don't knock on their door and say, hey, I know you're sleeping with bubbles, but come on back to church. Did you know you can't do that? Did you know you're not Listen? You'll sin by doing that. What are you supposed to do? 17:49 This statement presupposes something Confess what God says about the sin and change your mind. That's the person you restore. Are you hearing me and so considering yourself? Don't get arrogant about it, lest you also be tempted. Bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ, For if anyone thinks himself to be something well, aren't you something? He deceives himself. Verse four. But let each one examine his own work, your own life, and then he will have rejoicing in himself alone and not in another. Verse five, for each one shall bear his own loads. I'm to stay in my lane and to make sure that I love you Very important. What about? What does this love look like? For God, it looks like this Don't devour each other. 18:48 Did you know that the Bible says in Galatians 5, verse 14, we shouldn't devour one another. What do you mean devour? I think it's pretty graphic devour, like some Christians I think they're Christians, not sure they're. Like Pac-Man have you ever seen a Christian. That's everything's criticizing everybody. They're like termites. I don't know if you can live long as a Christian like that. You go to church on Sunday, but you criticize everybody six days a week. Something's wrong here. 19:22 The Bible says listen, for all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. But if you bite and devour one another, beware lest you be consumed by one another. In Philippians 2, verse 3, that we are to care for one another, or care, I should say one another's burdens, burdens. What does that look like? 19:46 Philippians 2, 3 says let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind. In other words, have the right view. Let each esteem others better than himself. Wow. Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interest of others. One of the great great things about who we are is that we're to love our neighbor. That's not only the neighbor sitting next to you right now. It's the neighbor that you live next door to. It's the neighbor that you live next door to. It's the neighbor that you come in contact with. You're to love your neighbor, and the whole thing is this help, carry the load, find out. Ask them, what if they're not a believer? That's how they become believers. 20:53 - Speaker 1 This Jack Hibbs podcast, as well as all the broadcast outreach opportunities. Become believers.