Rekindling the Flame // Rekindling the Flame, Part 3

It's one thing to have a God–given gift or ability – we all do. It's another thing entirely to use that gift for His glory when we're facing stiff opposition in life. When everybody and everything seems to be against us. Right there in that place is where we want to give up.

Rediscovering the Gift Over the past couple of weeks we've been chatting about "Rekindling the Flame"; the passion in our hearts for being about the business that God has left us here on earth for – His business, God's business. Many, many Christians love Jesus, they want to follow Him but they've lost their way. Not so much because they don't love the Lord but because the way they spend their life and their resources and their time isn't what God had intended. What we believe and what we do are meant to be linked. That's why faith without works is dead. What does that mean? It means that if we believe something with all our hearts and yet we fail to live it out with our lives eventually what we believe will start to die. And that's what's happening for many people who set out on this journey of loving God and following Jesus. Their faith has started to die because they've lost focus on what they're meant to be doing. Interesting how that strikes home. Interesting how we sometimes focus on our faith and forget about living it out. And then we wonder why our faith is dwindling, why we feel like a rudderless ship on an ocean being tossed this way and that way. Now can I say that's something that many people go through so this week we're continuing on our journey of "Rekindling the Flame" by opening up the second letter that the wise old Apostle Paul wrote back in the first century to his young protégé Timothy. It seems that young Tim was having the same problem. Timothy was pastoring a Church and as anyone who's ever tried to do that will tell you, that quite simply is not an easy job. And there are two verses in particular that really leapt out for me in what Paul was saying to Timothy. 2 Timothy chapter 1, verse 6. He says: For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that's within you through the laying on of my hands. And then down to verse 14: Guard the good treasure entrusted to you with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us. Coming back to this concept that each one of us has been given a special gift or ability by God, it's been handcrafted into our DNA by God Himself and He's done that with a purpose. In Timothy's case that gift was preaching and teaching so I guess I relate really well to what Paul is saying to young Timothy in this letter and clearly Timothy was finding things tough. He was facing quite a bit of opposition from all sorts of people. And when things are tough it's so easy for us to lose focus; it's so easy to forget that God has given us a special gift, that God means for us to exercise and to use that gift, that God's plans and purposes for this world and for the people around us and indeed for you and for me are intricately linked to the exercising of that special gift or ability that He's given each one of us. Is that really true, you might ask? Do I really have a gift and is it really important in the scheme of things? My answer to that is, "Absolutely you do!" and "Absolutely it is!" Today we're going to journey off to somewhere else to another letter of Paul's, indeed his letter to the Roman Church. And I want to share with you this passage that you might find familiar because while I was reading it the other day something leapt off the page for me and into my heart, something that I'd never seen before despite the fact that I've written a whole book that revolves around this particular passage. Have a listen. It begins in Romans chapter 12, verse 4. Paul writes: For as in one body we have many members and not all the members have the same functions so we who are many are one in the body of Christ and individually we're members of one another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given