Gifts may exist without grace. If you and I were arranging things, would we arrange things this way? We ask ourselves: why does God not limit his gifts to gracious and good people? Why does God just not give his gifts to people who are really good and godly? How can God use people who are at the best very, very flawed, perhaps even wicked? How can a holy God use a minister, who is a fake, to bring people to faith in Christ? Why does God do that?

Now, I do not have the answers—or at least I do not have all the answers—I do not think anybody has. Let me give you three reasons for you to think about. Why are gifts sometimes found when grace is not?

I think the first reason is this: to keep us from idealising people. Psalm 146:1–10 says, do not put your trust in princes or in the son of man. We tend to build people up, to make heroes out of them, and to give them the place that belongs to God alone. The Bible is warning us against that. We do not know what people are truly like. We tend to judge from the outward appearance, and we need to remember we cannot see the heart. You may see your minister standing on the pulpit, preaching a sermon, but you do not know what has gone on in his heart and life. We do not know. There is the tendency today to build people up, and to have our heroes. We have got to guard against it.

Psalm 115:1 says: Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name be the glory, for your love and for your faithfulness. Only God is great. Only God is good. Only God is to be fully and absolutely trusted. The Bible is saying to us here: do not put your ultimate trust in a human being; we are too weak for that.

Secondly, I think God allows this to keep us from trusting in our own gifts. That is a temptation: Look at what I am doing for God. Look at the good that I am doing in the world. All must be well between me and God. That may not be the case. God may have given you great gifts. Some people have very, very outstanding abilities, but that is no necessary evidence of grace. Other people have very limited abilities, and very few gifts, but that is no evidence of little grace. Those people may rank far higher in the eyes of God than some of the very gifted.

I am always struck with what Martyn Lloyd-Jones said just before the end of his life. He was one of the greatest preachers in the world in the twentieth century. A friend once said to him, You must miss preaching. That is what he gave his whole life to and what he did. But Lloyd-Jones said, I never lived for preaching. His wife said afterwards, He was a man of prayer and he was a man of communion with Christ—that is what he lived for. When he retired, he did not lose that; he did not stop that. In other words, he was saying that he never trusted in his gifts; he never depended on his gifts. God is more interested in what he is doing in you, than in what you are doing for him. It is so easy to focus on the outward and the external, isn’t it? We must remember it is not what I am doing out here that ultimately matters, it is about what is going on in your heart—the sort of person that I am inside.

Of course, the reverse is true. Do not be discouraged if your gifts seem small. God is far more interested in what is happening in your heart. We dare not trust in our gifts. We dare not trust in what we do for God; it is who we are with God.

Thirdly, and this follows on, I think this is allowed by God to keep us seeking grace above all. Giftedness is important; abilities are important; talents are important; but far, far more important is goodness, love, compassion, patience, honesty, trustworthiness, dependability, kindness, purity, the fruit of the Spirit.

So often we are working on our gifts, but I wanted to portray a balancing message in this article, which is that ultimately the gifts are not the important thing. At the end of your life you may find that most of your gifts have gone. Most of your abilities are over. You are not able to do anything more for God, but the heart remains and the relationship remains.

Do you remember how in Luke 10:1–42 the disciples came back from their preaching tour? They were so excited. They had these fantastic results! They said, Even the demons are subject to us, Lord! We have had a wonderful preaching trip. But in Luke 10:20, Jesus says to them, Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven. Rejoice in your salvation. Rejoice in your relationship to me, in the forgiveness of your sins, in everlasting life.

And so, in all these studies of the gifts, we must never forget that the basic question is not: am I gifted? but rather: am I becoming more like Jesus Christ every day? That is to be our goal. That is to be our great issue of concern. And we all have an equal opportunity. We are not all gifted the same way. We are not all gifted to the same degree. But ultimately that does not matter very much; what matters is that we all have the opportunity to be more and more like our Lord and Saviour. More than that, we have the assurance, that if we are trusting in Christ, the day is coming when we shall all be like him for we shall see him as he is.¹

Edward Donnelly