Family and Youth Class

For my Family and Youth Ministry class, I am assigned to write three web-logs on issues affecting family and youth in the church. Hope you enjoy them! Feel free to comment.

Article One:

“Unity of the Faith”

Lately, I have really been thinking about the fact that God gave us various spiritual gifts for the purpose of unity. In Eph. 4:11ff, it says he gave us various roles/gifts for a specific purpose – “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ…” Paul goes on to say that we are to grow up into Christ, our head, from whom we are all held together. When each part is working properly, it makes the body grow and build itself up in love. I don’t know about you, but this is a hefty consequence of my using or not using the spiritual gifts God has given me! It’s quite a sobering realization!

Basically, when the body of Christ is functioning as it should – making full use of the spiritual gifts God gave us – we build the church up to unity, maturity and growth! And of course we know from Paul’s prayer in Eph. 3 that we do that through the power of God through his Spirit within. The question is… am I using my spiritual gift and yielding to the process of growth in those areas from the Spirit? And am I encouraging the use of spiritual gifts in those around me (particularly in families and youth striving to be more like Christ and have more involvement in the body)?

I think answering these questions is going to take a lot of prayer, submission to God’s will in my life, spending time in the Word of God to seek growth in my areas of giftedness and consciously making an effort to encourage giftedness in others! I was made keenly aware of this during our team’s MRN training this past week and have been more thoughtful about it since.

For an idea of various spiritual gifts, see Romans 12:6-8. It’s interesting to note that even giving is a spiritual gift! Surely all of us can pursue that at the very least! And at the most, pursue things God has blessed us with natural talents and passions for to benefit his body and help others grow in maturity and unity! My prayer is that you consider your spiritual gifts this week – and encourage the ones you see in others. You may want to take a free giftedness test online – http://www.churchgrowth.org/analysis/intro.php.