The First Spiritual Gifting

The First Spiritual Gifting
EXODUS 31: 1-18

An amazing experience of parenthood is your children’s ability to do things you cannot do. Whereas I can just about play three chords on the guitar but have to think through where to put my fingers at each chord change, our younger son astonished me before he was in his teens with his intuitive ability to play. Whereas for five minutes I can understand how the internal combustion engine works but then have lost it again, that same son could disassemble a car engine and reassemble it without having been told how to do this. At the same time as he was dazzling me with his guitar playing, his older brother was among the first generation that grew up with computers and was writing me a program to enable me to incorporate Hebrew in things I wrote. These are all gifts; they become spiritual gifts if you give them over to God. In other words, spiritual gifts are not divinely provided add-ons supplementing what we would be able to do “naturally.” They are aspects of the way God in love and grace made us that can become gifts with which we serve God. (They may indeed be capacities that we never realized we had that get released and find expression in a way that would never have happened if the Holy Spirit not been at work in us in a new way.)...