Built Different | Discovering Your Gift — Jordan McClarnon

Built Different | Discovering Your Gift — Jordan McClarnon | 1 Peter 4:10

Transcript

Forrest 0:06

Hey, I'm Pastor Forrest, and welcome to the Multiply Church Podcast. Each week we open God's word together to help you meet God and multiply good in your everyday life. We're so glad that you've taken time to join us for this week's sermon. And if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and follow us on social media so you never miss a message. Now, let's dive into this week's sermon.

SPEAKER_01 0:30

As Becca mentioned uh just a few moments ago, my name is Jordan. My family and I are a part of an incredible church in Cincinnati, Ohio. And we love Multiply Church. It's an honor to be in the room with you this morning. This is my third time here on a Sunday with Multiply, and I think that's starting to mean that I would consider you family. I hope you wouldn't consider me family as well. And I was thinking the last time I was here wasn't really that long ago. It was just a few months ago in January, and there's been a very significant life event that has taken place in my family since the last time I was with you. So I gotta show you, if we're family, I gotta show you a picture of my family because we got a new addition to the family just two months ago. This is my amazing wife, Lauren, our daughter Sky. She turns four this summer. She's got somebody's kid in a headlock right now in kids' care. I can guarantee you that. And then this is my son, this is Justice. He was born two months ago. And uh it's a good-looking family right there. If I can say so myself. Some of you are like, I've never met this guy on the stage before. What's he doing? Showing me a picture of his family. Well, there are some studies that suggest that when a speaker communicates to an audience and shows them a picture of his or her family, that group of people is more likely to listen to them and to trust them. I don't know if that's even true or not, but I figured it's worth a try. So there it is. There's the family. I was talking with Pastor Forrest uh just a few weeks ago about my family coming in and me specifically speaking today, and we were talking about this series, this collection of messages you've been in as a church built different. He's like, Yeah, we're talking about the church. We're talking about how the church is different than the world, and he starts sharing me uh, you know, with me some of the vision for the series, and I'm like, okay, I'm tracking. This sounds great. And he says, Jordan, your week is gonna be on helping people discover their spiritual gift. I was like, wow, okay. Feels like we're going into the deep end a little bit. I'm I'm here for it. But to be honest, when he first was telling me that, I felt kind of like this weight of responsibility, like that seems just like a big thing. And as I was thinking about it, I think that the greatest service that I could do for you and for Multiply Church today is not to do like some really complicated, hard-to-follow theology lesson. My goal today is really just to take a concept that's often been ignored, avoided, misunderstood, and to just do my best to make it as simple as possible. So that's my goal today. It's not for you to walk out of here with some like seminary degree in spiritual gifts. You're not gonna get that today. My goal is just to help you discover what in the world spiritual gifts have to do with you. So that's what I'm here to do today. I'm gonna ask God to help us. God, we are open and receptive to what you want to speak to us in this moment. So if there's anything that's standing in the way of us hearing from you right now, we ask that you remove that barrier. We're open and we're ready. Amen. Amen. So we're talking about spiritual gifts. Now, I would ask what comes to mind when you hear that phrase: spiritual gifts. Just what immediately pops into your brain? As I was thinking about the the talk here, I was thinking, I think a lot of people are kind of gonna find themselves in like one of three different camps. The first camp is I don't know anything about this. Like, I've never even heard of spiritual gifts, or maybe I have heard of it, but if I'm honest with you, if I was gonna try to explain it, I wouldn't even know where to start. Like, I don't even really know what we're talking about, and that's totally fine. Second camp of people would be this sounds weird. Spiritual gift, like what? Like, this sounds weird. Is this some type of strange, like mystical, like voodoo stuff? Like, what are we talking about? Maybe what immediately comes to your mind is like a video of some pastor you saw on Facebook, and he was just doing weird like stuff. And you're like, Adam, is that kind of like what we're talking about? Like there was this moment, it felt kind of like forced or fake, or maybe even a little bit gimmicky, and there's maybe a little bit of a level of skepticism around the idea of spiritual gifts, and that's that's fine as well. And the last group of people, the last camp would be this must be for super Christians. Spiritual gifts, that sounds really elite. That sounds really special and important. So that's probably for pastors and priests and you know, all these people that were just on the stage a moment ago, the worship team, it's for them. But it's definitely not for me. And that may be a camp that you find yourself in this morning. I understand all of those camps, I resonate with all of those camps because I can identify moments in my own life where I have sat in each of those camps. And I think that as you get more into the Bible, as you begin to study it and open it and read it for yourself, I think that you begin to see that spiritual gifts are not quite as elusive or as complicated as we might think that they are. And so no matter what comes into your mind when you hear the phrase spiritual gifts, I just want all of us in the room to consider one question together collectively this morning. This is it. If God has given you a gift, wouldn't you want to know what it is? Like, if God, the creator of God, has actually given you a spiritual gift, would you not be interested in discovering what that gift is? The NFL draft has been going on over the past few days. I'll be honest with you. I haven't really been following it much, but I kind of get my news, my little highlight clips from social media, and I've realized one of my like favorite sports things is seeing those little videos of the draft phone calls. That moment when a coach calls a player and gets to tell them, congratulations, we're about to officially draft you onto our team. What that's a sweet moment right there. You see these guys, 18, 19, 20, however old they are, their entire dream has been get to this moment right here to get into the NFL, and then a coach gets to make the call to deliver that news. It's amazing, it's emotional, it's just incredible. I love it. And what you see, and what I love, is not just when a coach says, Hey, we're gonna pick you, but I love when they actually tell them why. Like we've chosen to pick you onto our team, and let me tell you why. It happens all the time. If you if you pay close attention, NFL Get players, uh players get drafted for all sorts of specific reasons. You can go back and look at this. There's times where the coach says, We are drafting you, we we love your creativity. You're just able to make plays, you're able to do things on the football field that people wouldn't even dream of or imagine. And it's like when the play goes south, you somehow are creative and find a solution, and people get drafted for that. There's times where guys get drafted because of their pure strength. It's just like, dude, we're picking you up because you are a beast. No one can move you around, push you around, nobody can take you down. You are just superhuman when it comes to strength. We're taking that. Or it's your effort, or there's guys who is like, we're drafting you because of your leadership. We need a leader on this team that people can rally around and behind, and you just get people motivated and excited to storm the hill. Like we need that. And there's guys who get drafted just because of their instincts. They think about the game in ways that other players don't think about the game. Now, one of my favorite draft stories, as I was doing a little bit of research, it's actually a weird draft story, is about um Taylor Swift's fiance. He also goes by the name Travis Kelsey. And I think they're still together. That'd be that'd be really awkward if they're not. I think they are. But um, regardless of what you think about Travis Kelsey, if you know who he is, if you don't know who he is, it doesn't really matter. Point is that Travis Kelsey was drafted in 2013 with the 63rd pick. The 63rd pick in the NFL draft. If you know anything about this guy, he is a polarizing figure. He had some, we'll call it off-the-field issues in college. Some people liked him, some people couldn't stand him, he found his way into a little bit of trouble. He had raw potential as a football player, but there were a lot of NFL teams that weren't so sure about his attitude or his mentality or his character. And so he was a little bit of a wild card going into the draft. A lot of teams passed on him, and with the 63rd pick, coach Andy Reed called him and said, We're drafting you because of your feet. That seems kind of odd. Andy Reed says, We believe that your X factor is your quickness, your athleticism, and the way you moved. According to that coach, this was his unfair competitive advantage, and he's on record saying, We're picking you for your feet. Okay, it's a little strange. I mean, you could have worded that a little bit differently. Point being, there are tons of stories like this in the NFL draft. The NFL draft's a beautiful picture of coaches and organizations and teams identifying gifts within individual players, calling them up and saying, we want you to bring that gift onto our team to develop it and to deploy it so that we can win. That's really what the picture of the draft is. So back to my original question: what if God has given you a gift? What if God's given you a spiritual X factor? And it's not something that's just for you to discover, it's actually something that you can develop and also deploy. What if God has given you a distinct advantage? What if God is saying to you today, I would like to draft you onto my team so that you can develop and deploy this specialized gift? If all of that's true, wouldn't you want to know what it is? Wouldn't you want to know what that gift is? I want to read you three quick sections of scripture, and my challenge for you is for you to identify what they all have in common. Three quick verses. This is it. 1 Peter 4, verse 10. God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts. Use them well to serve one another. 1 Corinthians 12. A spiritual gift is given to each of us so that we can help each other. And lastly, Romans chapter 12, verse 6, in his grace, God has given us different gifts for doing certain things well. Did you catch it? Three different verses, three different books of the Bible, two different authors, talking to three different Christian audiences, and they're all saying the same thing. God has given you a gift. God, in his grace and in his goodness, has entrusted you with something, and it's not something that you earned. It's not something that you could buy or manifest on your own. It's not something you obtained by your own strength. This isn't even something that you choose. It's just something that you discover. You excavate it, you unearth it. So God gives the gift, and then we discover it. If you know Jesus, the Bible says that God has given you a spiritual gift, and maybe no one has ever told you that before. I would love to be the one to tell you that God has given you a unique spiritual gift. You might not feel like a gifted person. Maybe you think that spiritual gifts or you grew up, you know, hearing, like, oh, that's that's for professional Christians, whatever that even means. And I believe that the first step for you to discover your spiritual gift is just believing that you have one. That's the first step to discovering it, is actually believing that you have it. Because if you don't believe that you have a spiritual gift, then there's gonna be no urgency or excitement in your life to work towards discovering that thing. But if you do believe that God has entrusted you with something special, if you believe that he's deposited something dynamic into your life that is set you apart from other people, how could you not have a drive and a desire and a determination to discover what that thing is? So the question you might then be asking is okay, okay, I got a gift. I'm I'm even with you on that part. How do I find out what it is? How do I actually discover it? Like, isn't that the hard part? There's two things that the verses I just read highlight for us about the unique function of a spiritual gift. I want to show them to you. So we're gonna reread some of these verses right here. The first thing these verses show is that God has uniquely graced you to do something well. God's uniquely graced you to do something well. Look at these verses, 1 Peter 4. God's given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts. Use them well to serve one another. Romans 12, 6. In his grace, God's given us different gifts for doing certain things well. God has uniquely graced you with the ability to do something well. So there is an aspect of your spiritual gift that is connected to something you have a distinct, God-given advantage in. Now, this doesn't mean that you're better than someone else. Doesn't mean that God loves you more than somebody else or that he's picking favorites. It doesn't mean that your value or worth is higher or lower than someone else's, but it does mean that God has infused an ability into your life to do something at a higher level than other people. It actually does mean that. It means that there are supernatural results that come when you do this thing and you don't even know how to explain it. All you know is that when you do this thing, it's just different than when other people do that thing. That's an aspect of a spiritual gift. And then, secondly, your gift always exists to help others and to glorify God. That's why it exists. So God's grace to you to do something well and in its proper place, the function of that gift is helping others and bringing glory to God. 1 Corinthians 12, 7 said it this way: a spiritual gift is given to each of us so that we can help each other. And then I'm gonna add on an extra verse onto the first Peter verse. It reads like this God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts, use them well to serve one another. It says this Do you have the gift of speaking? Then speak as though God Himself were speaking through you. Do you have the gift of helping others? Do it with all the strength and energy that God supplies, and then everything you do will bring glory to God through Jesus Christ. All glory and power to Him forever. Amen. Your spiritual gift is designed to bring glory to God, and when it's used well, it builds up, it cheers up, it stirs up other people. Your gift brings healing to other people. Your gift ignites passion and wonder into who God is, into other people. It builds their faith, it allows them to see attributes of God in a new and distinct way. Your gift puts the power of God on display. And when the spiritual X factor that God has given you is discovered, developed, and then ultimately deployed, it has the potential to change the world. Your spiritual gift isn't about your life being better or people knowing your name. It's actually the opposite. Your gift is about other people's lives being better and people knowing Jesus' name. That's why it exists. So back to the NFL draft for just a second. Trivia question. Do you know the football position that is the least drafted position in all of the NFL? The fewest number of players who do this position get drafted in the NFL. Anybody? Somebody, somebody had it in the first service. There it is. Long snapper. Some of you are like, what is a long snapper? Long snapper is the guy who's responsible for something very important. He gets down like this, he hikes the ball, he snaps the ball in between his legs, he throws it fast, about 15 yards or so, to the punter when his team is preparing to punt the ball back to the other team. That's the long snapper. The least drafted position in all of the NFL. The long snapper is the position that some men in this room, when they watch football on Sunday, go, Yeah, I feel like I can do that. Couple tries. I can probably figure it out. How hard could it be? That's crazy talk. Long snapper is an elite position. It's an extremely specialized skill in the NFL. The draft has been around for about 90 years, and only about 15 long snappers have ever been drafted. It's highly, highly specialized. And it's also not a high-profile job. If you want people to know who you are, pick a different position. I've never met anyone who has a jersey of their favorite team with the long snapper's name on the back. Haven't met that person. I'm sure they're out there, but I have yet to meet them. Now, there's sort of a mantra amongst long snappers in the NFL, and it goes like this. If you don't know their name, that means they're doing their job right. Like if you have no idea who they are, that's a good sign. But if you do know their name, chances are something has gone horribly wrong. And that's true for your spiritual gift as well. It exists to help the team win and then get out of the way so nobody knows your name. It does not exist to puff you up, to be the star player, for everyone to buy the jersey. That's not what it's for. So there's a list of spiritual gifts that Pastor Forrest showed, I think it was two weeks ago. And this is not an exhaustive list by any means. This is just a list uh quickly compiled from a few different areas of scripture. And I just want you to take a few moments to look at it. Maybe something jumps off the screen at you. Maybe it doesn't. That's totally fine. Maybe you feel like you have a little bit of an idea of what you maybe feel like your gifting is, maybe you don't. Just want you to look at it. And with the rest of our time together, I want to provide you a few questions that you can answer, you can pray on, you can ponder on for a little bit. And what we're looking for here is a convergence point where the truth of God's word about the function of gifts meets the answers to. These questions, I believe that you are going to narrow and dial in the scope of determining and discovering what your spiritual gift is. So you don't have to leave today with all the answers to these questions, but these are things for you to ask other people about, pray about, talk, talk with God about, just do some self-reflection on, and you are looking for where these answers overlap with one another. That's where your spiritual X factor is discovered. So a few questions for you. Number one, what has God spoken to me? Sometimes I think we make it a little more complicated than it needs to be. What if we just started with the gift giver himself? And just said, hey God, if it really is true that you've given me a spiritual gift, I would like to know what it is. So God, I'm just asking over the next few days, weeks, months, whatever the timeline is for you, that you would begin to reveal to me what that gift is. Here's what I know about God. He loves when his kids ask him for things. And God is not trying to make it hard or complicated for you to discover your gift. James 1, verse 5 says it this way If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking. He's not gonna make fun of you for asking. He's not gonna be disappointed in you for asking. He's not gonna be like, I can't believe you haven't figured it out yet. What's wrong with you? That's not what he's gonna say. He's a generous God, and he is not trying to play hide and seek with you with your spiritual gift. He wants you to discover it, he wants you to develop it, he wants you to deploy it. So what if every day for the next week you just woke up and said, Hey God, I'm open today for you to show me the spiritual gift that you've given me and how you want me to use it? You might be surprised at what rises to the surface. Number two, what is producing fruit? Is there any area of your life right now where you feel like you are winning and you don't even know how or why? Is there any area that just seems to be blessed? Is there an area where there's unusual impact happening and people are like, man, how did you get those results? And you're like, I I I don't know. I don't even really know how to explain it to you. When you teach, do people grow? When you serve, do people experience hope and healing? When you encourage, are people blessed? Are they activated? When you evangelize, do people respond to Jesus? When you lead, are people rallied to take new ground? Like if anything beautiful and good is being produced in and through your life, you gotta pay attention to that thing. Jesus said that you will recognize a tree by its fruit. Fruit is often a clue that God has given you a spiritual superpower and it's accomplishing results for his kingdom. So you take some time to think about this. Like, what's an area of my life where it just feels like God just breathes on this thing? And I don't even fully understand how it works. It just feels like when that takes place, those results are produced. People are helped, and God gets glory. Number three is what gifts have other people noticed in me? When I was in college, I was studying for a youth ministry degree. I wanted to be a youth pastor, worked with middle school students, high school students, and there were people around me, some friends, some were leaders and mentors, uh, who spoke over me. Jordan, I think you have the gift of teaching. Now, this came as a big shock to me at the time because I was preaching at a local youth group on occasion and I was bombing. It was so bad. And I was really discouraged and really defeated because I desperately wanted to be good at teaching the Bible, and I was so bad. I preached a lot of really bad messages before I ever preached a halfway decent one. I remember one of the first messages I gave, youth group, in Grayson, Kentucky, and I think I talked for four minutes because I just ran out of things to say. Not prepared, way too prideful, and I got up there and I just panicked and realized I don't know what I'm doing. And I had the walk of shame off the stage afterwards and was just like, I don't know if this is for me. God giving you a spiritual gift is not Him making you a child prodigy. That's not what a spiritual gift is. It's not like automatically you are in the top 1% of performers in this specific thing. That's not a spiritual gift. A spiritual gift is that God's planted a spiritual seed into your life. And when it's stewarded well and when it's nurtured, that thing will blossom into a spiritual superpower. That's what a spiritual gift is. And luckily, I was blessed to have people close to me who saw raw potential in me and they began to call it out of me, to draw it out of me, and they helped me develop as a communicator. And for me, a lot of times, the greatest blessings, the greatest gifts in my life that have been revealed to me have always been because people close to me knew me better than I knew me. And they could see the work that God was doing in my life way before I could see it. Paul told Timothy in 1 Timothy, do not neglect the spiritual gift that I recognized in you. Timothy was Paul's protege, and he had Paul his mentor looking at him, going, Hey, I'm tapping on that thing right there, I'm poking on that thing. I see that potential in you, and I'm drawing it out of you. Don't neglect that gift. I think you should find a few trusted people in your life and then just ask them straight up. Hey, what do you think I'm good at? What do you notice in me? How do you see God working and moving in my life? Do you think I'm gifted in anything? And then don't listen for what you want to hear, just listen to what they say. Just listen to it. Like tell me for real. Because spiritual community is often one of the greatest assets that we have for unearthing our gifting. Lastly, number four, what step of obedience can I take right now? Oftentimes for me, I get stuck in introspection. And spiritual gifts can feel like this thing that's up in the clouds, and I don't fully get it. It's like this concept, and I'm waiting around for God to just like smack me upside the head with something. And oftentimes in my life, that is just not the way that it works. So I found over and over again that I discover gifts when I'm in motion. I don't believe that you will likely discover your spiritual gift as you sit on the sidelines. I think sometimes you gotta say, hey, I'm checking myself into the game. I want to get active. I need to start like getting busy and figure out what's going on here. Like just start doing something. I don't even know what I'm doing. I'm just gonna figure it out based on, oh, okay, I did that thing, and yeah, that's it's probably not that. This thing over here, oh, I feel like I'm on to something. I feel like I'm getting a little bit warmer as I begin to do some things. So I would say just start serving somewhere. Whatever the next serve day is or something, I don't know what it is. Just sign up for that thing and just serve. Lead something, pray for somebody, encourage somebody, give towards something, just start. Just start moving. What opportunities are in front of you right now? I'd encourage you to say yes to those things and then to pay close attention to what God does in you to see how he uses you. I believe that God has given every individual in this room a gift. It's a grace, it's a favor on your life for you to do something well, for you to excel at something. And it's not so that people will know who you are, it's to help other people and it's to bring glory to God. And I believe that the world needs the gift that God put in you. This community, it needs the gift that God put in you. Multiply church needs the gift that God put in you. It's not the same multiply without your gift. Multiply church needs to see your unique, God-given advantage come to life and be activated. So we need the teachers in this community teaching. We need the evangelists evangelizing, the servants serving, the givers giving, the prophets prophesying, the leaders leading. We need all of it. And my question would be like, what is it going to take for Multiply Church to go to the next level spiritually? On a more personal note, it would be, what's it gonna take for you to go to the next level spiritually? I believe it's the discovery, the development, and the deployment of your spiritual gift. So I want to pray for you and really just bless you as we move throughout the rest of this morning. So, God, I'm grateful that today we get to open your word. And God, we you've already been invited into this space, you've already been present into this space, and God, right now, we pause to take a moment to reflect on your goodness and to say thank you for giving us a gift. God, we want to know what that gift is. So over the next few moments, days, weeks, months, years, God, would you reveal to us in your kindness the great things that you've called us to? We want to serve people, we want to bring you glory, and we want to do things well. So, God, awaken a spiritual hunger and urgency for us to pursue the discovery of that gift. We love you and we thank you, and we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Sallie 32:56

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