Stewardship of Life · Stewardship Faith-Spiritual Growth
A Living Sacrifice: Romans 12 and 1 Peter 4 on Offering Your Life and Using Your Gift
Qunetin Robinson
God does not ask for your spare time. In view of His mercy, Romans 12 calls for your whole life on the altar, an honest view of yourself, and a gift put to work for others as a faithful steward of His grace.
After Eleven Chapters of Mercy
For eleven chapters of Romans, Paul has told one long story. All have sinned. Christ has died. Grace has come to people who did nothing to earn it, Jews and Gentiles alike. When he finally reaches the end of it, he stops explaining and starts to sing. Then he opens chapter 12 with a single word.
The word is therefore.
Everything Paul asks of you in the rest of the letter hangs from that word. He does not begin with a duty list or a call to try harder. He begins by pointing back at what God has already done, and then he asks what you intend to do about it.
What Are You Still Keeping Back?
Most of us have given God something. We give Him an hour on Sunday, a percentage of our income, perhaps a role at church. It is sincere, and it is also tidy. We have a part of life marked for God, and the rest we run ourselves: the calendar, the career, the body, the plans, the things we are good at.
Romans 12 does not leave that arrangement standing. It asks for the whole person, then it asks for an honest look at what God has placed in that person, and then it sends all of it out to serve someone else. Stewardship of life starts here. You cannot manage what you have never surrendered.
Lesson One: Mercy Comes First
"Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship." (Romans 12:1, NIV).
Notice the verb. Paul says I urge you. He is pleading, because what he wants cannot be forced.
Notice also the ground he stands on. In view of God's mercy. Look at what has come just before this verse. "For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all." (Romans 11:32, NIV). The last line before the chapter break gathers it all up. "For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen." (Romans 11:36, NIV).
That order is the whole gospel in small form. God gives, and then we respond. Most religion and every self-improvement plan runs the other way, asking you to give first so that you can hope to receive. Paul will not ask for one thing from you until he has shown you what has been done for you.
This matters for how you serve. If you offer your life to earn God's approval, you will always wonder whether you have done enough, and you will grow tired and resentful. If you offer your life because you have already been shown mercy, the offering becomes thanks. The work may be just as hard. But you are no longer trying to pay off a debt that Christ has already settled.
Ask yourself what is moving you. Is it fear of falling short, the approval of the people watching, or the mercy of God? Only one of those will hold up for forty years.
Lesson Two: A Sacrifice That Gets Up in the Morning
The phrase living sacrifice would have sounded strange to the first people who heard it. The animal sacrifices they had seen, on a Jewish altar or a Roman one, all ended in death. Paul's readers knew what an altar was for. He takes that picture and tells them to climb on and stay alive.
The instruction is to offer your bodies. Paul does not say your thoughts, your feelings or your Sunday mornings, though those are included. He names the body because the body is where life actually happens. He said the same thing earlier in the letter. "Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness." (Romans 6:13, NIV).
Every part. That leaves no compartment for yourself.
Then Paul calls this your true and proper worship. The word translated true and proper is logikos, which the older versions rendered reasonable. Given what God has done, this is the only response that makes sense. Worship is more than what happens when a band plays. It is what you do with your body on a Tuesday in a meeting, at a sink, behind the wheel.
The hard part of a living sacrifice is that it can crawl off the altar. A dead offering stays where it is put. You and I wake up each day with our own opinions about the arrangement. So this is not something you do once at a church service. You will be offering yourself again tomorrow morning, and the morning after that, for as long as you are breathing.
Lesson Three: Transformed From the Inside
"Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will." (Romans 12:2, NIV).
Paul gives two pictures of what can happen to you. One is conforming, being pressed into a shape from the outside. Nobody has to try to do this. Spend enough time in any culture, and you will start to want what it wants and fear what it fears.
The other picture is transformation, and here the Greek is worth seeing. The verb is the one the Gospels use for Jesus on the mountain, where He was transfigured before His disciples (Matthew 17:2, Mark 9:2). It appears only four times in the New Testament. Paul uses that same word for what God wants to do in an ordinary believer.
Be transformed is passive in form. You do not transfigure yourself. But Paul does name your part, and it is the renewing of your mind. What goes into your mind each day will shape what you want. If the only voices you hear are your feed, your industry and your fears, you will be conformed, and you will not notice it happening.
Notice the result. A renewed mind can test and approve God's will. Many people want to know God's will the way they want a weather report, as information for making plans. Paul connects knowing His will to the offering in verse 1 and the renewal in verse 2. The person who has already said yes is the one who begins to see clearly what he is saying yes to. And that will is good, pleasing and perfect. We often hold back because we suspect otherwise.
Lesson Four: The Honest Measure
Having put the whole person on the altar, Paul turns immediately to what that person thinks of himself.
"For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you." (Romans 12:3, NIV).
In the Greek, Paul plays on one word for thinking, using it in several forms in a single verse. The effect is something like this: do not overthink yourself, but think in a way that leads to clear thinking. Sober judgment is the opposite of being drunk on your own reputation.
Thinking too highly of yourself is the obvious failure. It shows up in leaders who cannot be corrected and who take every success as proof of their worth. Paul asks the question that ends that pose. "For who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?" (1 Corinthians 4:7, NIV).
There is a second failure, and it can pass for humility. Some believers think too little of what God has given them. They say they have nothing to offer, and they sit out year after year. If God has placed something in you, denying it is a poor report on His work.
Sober judgment means telling the truth in both directions. It looks at your abilities, your limits, your history and your blind spots, and it calls them what they are. Paul calls this measure something God has distributed, so nobody gets to take credit for the size of theirs.
Before you can steward your life, you need an accurate inventory of it.
Lesson Five: You Belong to the Others
"For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others." (Romans 12:4-5, NIV).
Read the end of that sentence again. Each member belongs to all the others. Modern people find this line difficult. We are used to thinking of our gifts as personal property, part of our brand, something to develop for our own fulfillment. Paul says that when you were joined to Christ, you were also joined to His people. Your gift has an address, and it is other believers.
Two things follow. The first is that difference is by design. These members do not all have the same function. The church was never meant to be a room of people who all do the same thing, and it is no failure that you cannot do what someone else does. When you envy another person's role, you are wishing the body had a different shape from the one God gave it.
The second is that isolation is a kind of theft. If each member belongs to all the others, then what you withhold, you are withholding from people it was meant for. A Christian who attends no fellowship and serves no one is like a hand that has gone off on its own. It may feel free, but it does nobody any good.
This is what separates a Christian view of gifting from the self-development advice most of us have absorbed. The world says find your gift so you can find yourself. Paul says your gift was given for the good of someone else, and you will find your place by giving it away.
Lesson Six: Stewards of a Gift You Did Not Earn
Now Paul gets specific.
"We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith; if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully." (Romans 12:6-8, NIV).
The word for gifts is charismata, built on the word for grace. A gift is grace in a usable form. Paul says almost nothing to define these gifts. His main concern is that you use them. If it is serving, then serve. If it is leading, do it diligently. He tells no one to wait until they feel ready. Each gift comes with a manner of use attached: generously, diligently, cheerfully.
Peter says the same thing and gives it the word this whole site is built on. "Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms." (1 Peter 4:10, NIV).
The word stewards translates oikonomoi, the managers of a household or estate who held what belonged to someone else. A steward answers for what was placed in his hands, and he gives it out for the good of the household. Your skill with numbers and your patience with children are the Master's goods on loan to you.
Peter then adds how it gets done. "If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen." (1 Peter 4:11, NIV).
The strength comes from God, and the glory goes back to Him. You are the one in the middle, handing it on.
For Business Leaders: Your Skill Is on the Altar Too
Too many Christians in business assume their faith applies to their ethics and their giving, while their actual work is a secular matter. Scripture says otherwise. When God wanted a place of worship built, He named a craftsman, and He spoke of that man's skill as a filling of His Spirit.
"and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills— to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of crafts." (Exodus 31:3-5, NIV).
Your skill at reading a market or running a crew came from the same Giver. Offer it to Him, and let people get the benefit of it.
Your Obedience Step
Write down the one skill you lean on most at work. Then name a person or ministry outside your company who could use that skill for free. Call them this week and give four hours of it this month.
For Community Leaders: Stop Running a One-Gift Room
Most churches and nonprofits drift toward the gifts of the people in charge. Teachers build teaching ministries. Organizers build more programs. Meanwhile, the quiet encourager in the third row has never once been asked to do anything, and the room is poorer for it. A leader's job is to help every member find their function, including the people who do not look like you.
"The eye cannot say to the hand, 'I don't need you!' And the head cannot say to the feet, 'I don't need you!'" (1 Corinthians 12:21, NIV).
Your Obedience Step
Pick three people in your group who are not currently serving. Sit down with each of them this month and tell them, specifically, what you see God has given them. Then ask them to take on one real responsibility.
For Home Leaders: Name What You See
Your family will hear a thousand voices telling them who they are. You get to be one of the voices that tells the truth. Children and spouses grow when someone who loves them notices what God has put in them and says so out loud. A home can also be where a person learns that their abilities are meant for others, starting at the dinner table.
"Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing." (1 Thessalonians 5:11, NIV).
Your Obedience Step
At a meal this week, go around the table and have each person name one gift they see in someone else in the family. Then choose one way your household can use one of those gifts for a neighbor this month.
For the Everyday Believer: Say It Again Tomorrow
You do not need a title for any of this. You need a morning. Before your phone, before your list, you can put your body and your day back on the altar in a sentence or two. It will feel small. Over a year or a decade, it is how a life gets changed.
"I desire to do your will, my God; your law is within my heart." (Psalm 40:8, NIV).
Your Obedience Step
For the next seven mornings, before you look at a screen, say this to God: this body, this day, this mind, these gifts are yours. Then ask one person who knows you well what they think God has given you.
The One Who Gave Himself First
Paul can ask for a living sacrifice because a greater one has already been made. The Son of God did not keep anything back. He took a body, and He gave it up. He told His disciples to serve one another "just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." (Matthew 20:28, NIV).
Every therefore in the Christian life points back to Him. He is the mercy we are viewing, and He is the Master whose goods we hold.
So stop keeping a corner of your life for yourself. It was never yours, and you will never be free in it. Climb back up on the altar. Then get up and go serve someone.
Questions for Reflection
- What part of my life have I kept out of God's reach, and why?
- Am I serving out of gratitude for mercy, or out of fear of falling short?
- Which voices have been shaping my mind more than God's word this month?
- Do I think too highly of myself, or do I hide behind thinking too little?
- What has God given me that other people are not getting the benefit of?
- Who could I ask to tell me honestly what they see in me?
Closing Prayer
Father, you have shown me mercy I could never earn. I bring you my body, my mind and my days, and I ask you to take all of it. Forgive me for the corners I have kept. Forgive me for thinking too much of what I can do, and for the times I have buried what you gave me and called it humility. Renew my mind, so that I want what you want. Show me plainly what you have placed in my hands, and teach me to hold it as a steward and not an owner. Thank you for Jesus, who held nothing back and gave His life for me. When I crawl off the altar, bring me back. In Jesus' name, Amen.
The Part You Can Spare
Tasha Underwood had been chief financial officer of a regional grocery chain for fourteen years, and she gave to her church the way she did everything else, on time and in full. A check went in the mail on the first of each month. She sat near the door on Sundays and left during the last song.
When the church treasurer died two winters back, the job had fallen to Leon Fitch, because nobody else raised a hand. Leon was seventy-four, a retired school custodian who still had keys to everything in the building. One Saturday in February he stood on the porch of her house on Sycamore Drive holding a shoebox.
"Pastor says you know about numbers," he said.
She let him in out of the cold and took the lid off at the kitchen table. There were receipts, envelopes, and pages from a pocket notebook, all in pencil. The benevolence fund had not been reconciled in two years.
"Mr. Fitch, I'm not really a church person," she said. "I'm glad to write a bigger check. You could hire somebody."
He looked at her for a while. He was not a man who hurried.
"That check's a real help," he said. "I've seen what it does. But that's the part you can spare, Miss Underwood. I was hoping for the rest of you."
She nearly laughed. Nobody had ever said anything like that to her in her own kitchen. She kept the shoebox mainly because he left it there.
It took her three weekends. By the second, she had stopped being annoyed and started being curious, because the fund would not balance, and it was off in the wrong direction. It held more than it should have. Rent had been paid for people on Delmar Court. Light bills had been covered, a prescription, a set of tires. Over and over, the church had paid out more than it had in the account, and then somehow the account had been made whole.
She found it in the pocket notebook, in tiny pencil, on the last pages. L.F. $40. L.F. $65. L.F. $120. She added it up twice. Over two years, a retired custodian had put nearly nine thousand dollars of his pension into that fund, and had written it down only so that he could keep track of who still needed a visit.
She had thought of him as a sweet old man who could not do math. She sat at the table for a long time.
The next Saturday she drove him home after she returned the box, and she asked who was on Delmar Court. He told her. He told her the name of every person in the notebook, and their children's names, and which ones were too proud to ask, and who had stopped eating to pay for insulin. He knew all of it. He had been going door to door for years with a toolbox, fixing things, and listening.
"I can't do what you do," she said.
"No, ma'am," said Leon. "I can't do what you do either. I've been scared of that shoebox for two years."
So they split it. She took the books, and within a month the fund had real statements and a budget, and a line that paid Leon back, which he argued about and lost. He took her with him on Thursdays. She was terrible at first. She asked people questions as if she were auditing them, and he told her so, kindly, on the drive home. She found out that a woman on Delmar Court could be saved four hundred dollars a month by one letter to the right office, and that she could write that letter in her sleep.
She started staying for the last song. Then she started staying after it.
At the annual meeting a man in the back asked who was keeping the books these days. Tasha stood up. "Two of us," she said. "He knows the names and I know the numbers. It takes both."
Leon drove with her that spring to pick up a load of donated groceries, and at a red light he saw her checkbook lying open on the console, the first of the month filled in.
"You still sending that check?" he said. "I figured you'd have quit, with all the hours you put in."
"Of course I'm still sending it," said Tasha, and the light turned green. "That's just the part I can spare."
Go Deeper
Ready to put this teaching into practice? Poured Out is a guided workbook drawn from Psalm 139, Psalm 39, Romans 12, Acts 20 and 2 Timothy 4. Work through four movements at your own pace and finish with one page you build for yourself: Your Finish Line.
God does not ask for your spare time. In view of His mercy, Romans 12 calls for your whole life on the altar, an honest view of yourself, and a gift put to work for others as a faithful steward of His grace.
After Eleven Chapters of Mercy
For eleven chapters of Romans, Paul has told one long story. All have sinned. Christ has died. Grace has come to people who did nothing to earn it, Jews and Gentiles alike. When he finally reaches the end of it, he stops explaining and starts to sing. Then he opens chapter 12 with a single word.
The word is therefore.
Everything Paul asks of you in the rest of the letter hangs from that word. He does not begin with a duty list or a call to try harder. He begins by pointing back at what God has already done, and then he asks what you intend to do about it.
What Are You Still Keeping Back?
Most of us have given God something. We give Him an hour on Sunday, a percentage of our income, perhaps a role at church. It is sincere, and it is also tidy. We have a part of life marked for God, and the rest we run ourselves: the calendar, the career, the body, the plans, the things we are good at.
Romans 12 does not leave that arrangement standing. It asks for the whole person, then it asks for an honest look at what God has placed in that person, and then it sends all of it out to serve someone else. Stewardship of life starts here. You cannot manage what you have never surrendered.
Lesson One: Mercy Comes First
"Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship." (Romans 12:1, NIV).
Notice the verb. Paul says I urge you. He is pleading, because what he wants cannot be forced.
Notice also the ground he stands on. In view of God's mercy. Look at what has come just before this verse. "For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all." (Romans 11:32, NIV). The last line before the chapter break gathers it all up. "For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen." (Romans 11:36, NIV).
That order is the whole gospel in small form. God gives, and then we respond. Most religion and every self-improvement plan runs the other way, asking you to give first so that you can hope to receive. Paul will not ask for one thing from you until he has shown you what has been done for you.
This matters for how you serve. If you offer your life to earn God's approval, you will always wonder whether you have done enough, and you will grow tired and resentful. If you offer your life because you have already been shown mercy, the offering becomes thanks. The work may be just as hard. But you are no longer trying to pay off a debt that Christ has already settled.
Ask yourself what is moving you. Is it fear of falling short, the approval of the people watching, or the mercy of God? Only one of those will hold up for forty years.
Lesson Two: A Sacrifice That Gets Up in the Morning
The phrase living sacrifice would have sounded strange to the first people who heard it. The animal sacrifices they had seen, on a Jewish altar or a Roman one, all ended in death. Paul's readers knew what an altar was for. He takes that picture and tells them to climb on and stay alive.
The instruction is to offer your bodies. Paul does not say your thoughts, your feelings or your Sunday mornings, though those are included. He names the body because the body is where life actually happens. He said the same thing earlier in the letter. "Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness." (Romans 6:13, NIV).
Every part. That leaves no compartment for yourself.
Then Paul calls this your true and proper worship. The word translated true and proper is logikos, which the older versions rendered reasonable. Given what God has done, this is the only response that makes sense. Worship is more than what happens when a band plays. It is what you do with your body on a Tuesday in a meeting, at a sink, behind the wheel.
The hard part of a living sacrifice is that it can crawl off the altar. A dead offering stays where it is put. You and I wake up each day with our own opinions about the arrangement. So this is not something you do once at a church service. You will be offering yourself again tomorrow morning, and the morning after that, for as long as you are breathing.
Lesson Three: Transformed From the Inside
"Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will." (Romans 12:2, NIV).
Paul gives two pictures of what can happen to you. One is conforming, being pressed into a shape from the outside. Nobody has to try to do this. Spend enough time in any culture, and you will start to want what it wants and fear what it fears.
The other picture is transformation, and here the Greek is worth seeing. The verb is the one the Gospels use for Jesus on the mountain, where He was transfigured before His disciples (Matthew 17:2, Mark 9:2). It appears only four times in the New Testament. Paul uses that same word for what God wants to do in an ordinary believer.
Be transformed is passive in form. You do not transfigure yourself. But Paul does name your part, and it is the renewing of your mind. What goes into your mind each day will shape what you want. If the only voices you hear are your feed, your industry and your fears, you will be conformed, and you will not notice it happening.
Notice the result. A renewed mind can test and approve God's will. Many people want to know God's will the way they want a weather report, as information for making plans. Paul connects knowing His will to the offering in verse 1 and the renewal in verse 2. The person who has already said yes is the one who begins to see clearly what he is saying yes to. And that will is good, pleasing and perfect. We often hold back because we suspect otherwise.
Lesson Four: The Honest Measure
Having put the whole person on the altar, Paul turns immediately to what that person thinks of himself.
"For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you." (Romans 12:3, NIV).
In the Greek, Paul plays on one word for thinking, using it in several forms in a single verse. The effect is something like this: do not overthink yourself, but think in a way that leads to clear thinking. Sober judgment is the opposite of being drunk on your own reputation.
Thinking too highly of yourself is the obvious failure. It shows up in leaders who cannot be corrected and who take every success as proof of their worth. Paul asks the question that ends that pose. "For who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?" (1 Corinthians 4:7, NIV).
There is a second failure, and it can pass for humility. Some believers think too little of what God has given them. They say they have nothing to offer, and they sit out year after year. If God has placed something in you, denying it is a poor report on His work.
Sober judgment means telling the truth in both directions. It looks at your abilities, your limits, your history and your blind spots, and it calls them what they are. Paul calls this measure something God has distributed, so nobody gets to take credit for the size of theirs.
Before you can steward your life, you need an accurate inventory of it.
Lesson Five: You Belong to the Others
"For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others." (Romans 12:4-5, NIV).
Read the end of that sentence again. Each member belongs to all the others. Modern people find this line difficult. We are used to thinking of our gifts as personal property, part of our brand, something to develop for our own fulfillment. Paul says that when you were joined to Christ, you were also joined to His people. Your gift has an address, and it is other believers.
Two things follow. The first is that difference is by design. These members do not all have the same function. The church was never meant to be a room of people who all do the same thing, and it is no failure that you cannot do what someone else does. When you envy another person's role, you are wishing the body had a different shape from the one God gave it.
The second is that isolation is a kind of theft. If each member belongs to all the others, then what you withhold, you are withholding from people it was meant for. A Christian who attends no fellowship and serves no one is like a hand that has gone off on its own. It may feel free, but it does nobody any good.
This is what separates a Christian view of gifting from the self-development advice most of us have absorbed. The world says find your gift so you can find yourself. Paul says your gift was given for the good of someone else, and you will find your place by giving it away.
Lesson Six: Stewards of a Gift You Did Not Earn
Now Paul gets specific.
"We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith; if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully." (Romans 12:6-8, NIV).
The word for gifts is charismata, built on the word for grace. A gift is grace in a usable form. Paul says almost nothing to define these gifts. His main concern is that you use them. If it is serving, then serve. If it is leading, do it diligently. He tells no one to wait until they feel ready. Each gift comes with a manner of use attached: generously, diligently, cheerfully.
Peter says the same thing and gives it the word this whole site is built on. "Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms." (1 Peter 4:10, NIV).
The word stewards translates oikonomoi, the managers of a household or estate who held what belonged to someone else. A steward answers for what was placed in his hands, and he gives it out for the good of the household. Your skill with numbers and your patience with children are the Master's goods on loan to you.
Peter then adds how it gets done. "If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen." (1 Peter 4:11, NIV).
The strength comes from God, and the glory goes back to Him. You are the one in the middle, handing it on.
For Business Leaders: Your Skill Is on the Altar Too
Too many Christians in business assume their faith applies to their ethics and their giving, while their actual work is a secular matter. Scripture says otherwise. When God wanted a place of worship built, He named a craftsman, and He spoke of that man's skill as a filling of His Spirit.
"and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills— to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of crafts." (Exodus 31:3-5, NIV).
Your skill at reading a market or running a crew came from the same Giver. Offer it to Him, and let people get the benefit of it.
Your Obedience Step
Write down the one skill you lean on most at work. Then name a person or ministry outside your company who could use that skill for free. Call them this week and give four hours of it this month.
For Community Leaders: Stop Running a One-Gift Room
Most churches and nonprofits drift toward the gifts of the people in charge. Teachers build teaching ministries. Organizers build more programs. Meanwhile, the quiet encourager in the third row has never once been asked to do anything, and the room is poorer for it. A leader's job is to help every member find their function, including the people who do not look like you.
"The eye cannot say to the hand, 'I don't need you!' And the head cannot say to the feet, 'I don't need you!'" (1 Corinthians 12:21, NIV).
Your Obedience Step
Pick three people in your group who are not currently serving. Sit down with each of them this month and tell them, specifically, what you see God has given them. Then ask them to take on one real responsibility.
For Home Leaders: Name What You See
Your family will hear a thousand voices telling them who they are. You get to be one of the voices that tells the truth. Children and spouses grow when someone who loves them notices what God has put in them and says so out loud. A home can also be where a person learns that their abilities are meant for others, starting at the dinner table.
"Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing." (1 Thessalonians 5:11, NIV).
Your Obedience Step
At a meal this week, go around the table and have each person name one gift they see in someone else in the family. Then choose one way your household can use one of those gifts for a neighbor this month.
For the Everyday Believer: Say It Again Tomorrow
You do not need a title for any of this. You need a morning. Before your phone, before your list, you can put your body and your day back on the altar in a sentence or two. It will feel small. Over a year or a decade, it is how a life gets changed.
"I desire to do your will, my God; your law is within my heart." (Psalm 40:8, NIV).
Your Obedience Step
For the next seven mornings, before you look at a screen, say this to God: this body, this day, this mind, these gifts are yours. Then ask one person who knows you well what they think God has given you.
The One Who Gave Himself First
Paul can ask for a living sacrifice because a greater one has already been made. The Son of God did not keep anything back. He took a body, and He gave it up. He told His disciples to serve one another "just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." (Matthew 20:28, NIV).
Every therefore in the Christian life points back to Him. He is the mercy we are viewing, and He is the Master whose goods we hold.
So stop keeping a corner of your life for yourself. It was never yours, and you will never be free in it. Climb back up on the altar. Then get up and go serve someone.
Questions for Reflection
- What part of my life have I kept out of God's reach, and why?
- Am I serving out of gratitude for mercy, or out of fear of falling short?
- Which voices have been shaping my mind more than God's word this month?
- Do I think too highly of myself, or do I hide behind thinking too little?
- What has God given me that other people are not getting the benefit of?
- Who could I ask to tell me honestly what they see in me?
Closing Prayer
Father, you have shown me mercy I could never earn. I bring you my body, my mind and my days, and I ask you to take all of it. Forgive me for the corners I have kept. Forgive me for thinking too much of what I can do, and for the times I have buried what you gave me and called it humility. Renew my mind, so that I want what you want. Show me plainly what you have placed in my hands, and teach me to hold it as a steward and not an owner. Thank you for Jesus, who held nothing back and gave His life for me. When I crawl off the altar, bring me back. In Jesus' name, Amen.
The Part You Can Spare
Tasha Underwood had been chief financial officer of a regional grocery chain for fourteen years, and she gave to her church the way she did everything else, on time and in full. A check went in the mail on the first of each month. She sat near the door on Sundays and left during the last song.
When the church treasurer died two winters back, the job had fallen to Leon Fitch, because nobody else raised a hand. Leon was seventy-four, a retired school custodian who still had keys to everything in the building. One Saturday in February he stood on the porch of her house on Sycamore Drive holding a shoebox.
"Pastor says you know about numbers," he said.
She let him in out of the cold and took the lid off at the kitchen table. There were receipts, envelopes, and pages from a pocket notebook, all in pencil. The benevolence fund had not been reconciled in two years.
"Mr. Fitch, I'm not really a church person," she said. "I'm glad to write a bigger check. You could hire somebody."
He looked at her for a while. He was not a man who hurried.
"That check's a real help," he said. "I've seen what it does. But that's the part you can spare, Miss Underwood. I was hoping for the rest of you."
She nearly laughed. Nobody had ever said anything like that to her in her own kitchen. She kept the shoebox mainly because he left it there.
It took her three weekends. By the second, she had stopped being annoyed and started being curious, because the fund would not balance, and it was off in the wrong direction. It held more than it should have. Rent had been paid for people on Delmar Court. Light bills had been covered, a prescription, a set of tires. Over and over, the church had paid out more than it had in the account, and then somehow the account had been made whole.
She found it in the pocket notebook, in tiny pencil, on the last pages. L.F. $40. L.F. $65. L.F. $120. She added it up twice. Over two years, a retired custodian had put nearly nine thousand dollars of his pension into that fund, and had written it down only so that he could keep track of who still needed a visit.
She had thought of him as a sweet old man who could not do math. She sat at the table for a long time.
The next Saturday she drove him home after she returned the box, and she asked who was on Delmar Court. He told her. He told her the name of every person in the notebook, and their children's names, and which ones were too proud to ask, and who had stopped eating to pay for insulin. He knew all of it. He had been going door to door for years with a toolbox, fixing things, and listening.
"I can't do what you do," she said.
"No, ma'am," said Leon. "I can't do what you do either. I've been scared of that shoebox for two years."
So they split it. She took the books, and within a month the fund had real statements and a budget, and a line that paid Leon back, which he argued about and lost. He took her with him on Thursdays. She was terrible at first. She asked people questions as if she were auditing them, and he told her so, kindly, on the drive home. She found out that a woman on Delmar Court could be saved four hundred dollars a month by one letter to the right office, and that she could write that letter in her sleep.
She started staying for the last song. Then she started staying after it.
At the annual meeting a man in the back asked who was keeping the books these days. Tasha stood up. "Two of us," she said. "He knows the names and I know the numbers. It takes both."
Leon drove with her that spring to pick up a load of donated groceries, and at a red light he saw her checkbook lying open on the console, the first of the month filled in.
"You still sending that check?" he said. "I figured you'd have quit, with all the hours you put in."
"Of course I'm still sending it," said Tasha, and the light turned green. "That's just the part I can spare."
Go Deeper
Ready to put this teaching into practice? Poured Out is a guided workbook drawn from Psalm 139, Psalm 39, Romans 12, Acts 20 and 2 Timothy 4. Work through four movements at your own pace and finish with one page you build for yourself: Your Finish Line.
Comments
Keep it kind and on topic. See something that doesn't belong? Tap Report under it and we'll review it.