Using Your Talent Well
In the 1981 movie, Chariots of Fire, Eric Liddle, Scottish runner and missionary, was often confronted by his sister, who had already gone to the missionary fields of China. She was troubled by Eric’s interest in running and urged him frequently to give it up to serve God.
In one scene in which she has questioned his motives yet again, he says, “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.”
Eric went to the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, but the opposition he faced didn’t end with his sister. When he refused to run his specialty race because his qualifying heat was run on Sunday, his own team and coach, his government and many others attempted to change his mind. But he stood firm and when that race was run, he was preaching in a Paris church.
Instead, he was placed in a 400 meter race, which was not his specialty and which he was not expected to win.
But Eric did win that race.
Then, he went to China as a missionary, where he died of a massive brain tumor in a Chinese concentration camp in 1945; six months before the allies liberated China.
Most people have a very narrow view of what serving God looks like. What Eric did in China fits that template. What he did in the Paris Olympics does not.
Standing in a pulpit does. Painting or writing do not.
But God bestowed each human being with some special talent and a purpose to be accomplished with that talent. If the talent is ignored because it doesn’t seem to fit the popular idea of “service to God”, then can anything else that person does truly be considered service to God?
Can a person who is gifted with singing truly serve God if the service doesn’t also include singing?
No matter how many are fed, clothed or healed in the name of Christ, if that isn’t the work I’m supposed to be doing, am I really serving God by doing it?
That’s not to say those things are going to count against me. But burying the talent I’ve been given, even for something I think is more honorable or more worthy or more acceptable than using the talent I have, is condemned in the Bible. Remember the unworthy servant, who buried the talent he was given in the ground? Remember what his master said to him?
You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? 27Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest. Matthew 25.16
What is the special talent you have been gifted with?
Is it being used in God’s service?
Or are you bowing to what the world thinks is “real service” and doing something for which you were never intended by the Giver of All Gifts?
For more about Eric Liddle, you might want to visit Ben Witherington’s blog post from August 23, 2008, which is titled A Christian for the Ages.