Standing Firm in Gratitude – Showered with Gifts

My daughter was ‘showered’ with amazing gifts, as girlfriends and family gathered to celebrate her upcoming wedding. Sleek serving platters, sturdy mixing bowls, porcelain baking dishes, dainty glasses and tall pitchers emerged from fancy boxes with bows. After unwrapping her gifts, my daughter was equipped for hosting the very friends and family that showered their love on her, for many years to come. Beaming out from under a makeshift hat of wrapping paper and curly ribbon, she shone with gratitude.

Gifts Christ Gives to Us

Christ has given amazing gifts to his bride, the church. We’re the recipients of living gifts that will equip us to love and serve one another for years to come. 

Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ. Ephesians 4:11-12 (NLT)

Equipped For the Long-Term

Ally did not receive baked bread, iced cakes, or ready-made punch for her shower, as lovely as those delicious consumables would have been. She and her fiancé would have feasted for a day, or maybe a week on those things. Instead, she received the tools that would equip them to prepare food and drinks for themselves, their family and friends, day after day, week after week, and year after year. The tools to create their feasts were the greater gifts.

In the same way, Christ gave us gifts that equip us for life together, over the long term. The inSPIRE journey is intended to be a lifelong exploration of wholeness. With the gifts Christ ‘showered’ on us, we can walk with Christ, day after day, week after week, and year after year. We can grow and mature in the Lord, in communal unity, faith and wholeness.

Living Gifts

The gifts we have been given are living – apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. They are not our saviours. Only Christ is our Saviour. But they are gifts. We benefit from their talents and work, in ways that make us increasingly less dependent on them and more responsive to the Spirit of God, as we mature in faith.

Are We Grateful?

Do we thank God for his gifts, his people? Do we express our gratitude?

Ally and I followed up on the fun of her event with the joy of writing thank you notes. I addressed envelopes as Ally wrote words of gratitude in cards and happily mailed them out to recipients.

Now, in the light of her gratitude, I read these verses in Ephesians about Christ’s good gifts to his church and I am convicted of my muted response to such generosity. I have been influenced by amazing people in the body of Christ, speaking the truth in love. They have equipped me to grow in service and mature in faith.

As I write, I see the faces of pastors, teachers, professors, prophets, and mentors who’ve shaped me—one of them is my Old Testament professor, Dr. Dennis Tucker. With quiet wisdom and deep humility, he helped me hear the voices of the minor prophets, voices I’d mostly kept at a distance. Through his teaching and his life, he showed me God’s heart for the oppressed and voiceless. Because of him—and others like him—I’m changed and better equipped as a minister of the gospel. I’m grateful.

What Will We Do?

Who will you thank God for today?

Who can you and I thank directly, for being willing to be those gifts?

How will you express your gratitude?

Surely every purposeful expression of gratitude will lift hearts and diminish the tiresome words of conflict and complaint in the world around us.