Theme:   Elevate: Next Level Spiritual Growth - Leveraging Your Life

This eDevotional was written by a volunteer from Timberlake Church. 

READ: Romans 12

THINK: So many of us work hard to understand ourselves and the people around us… and rightly so. That’s an important part of life because nothing impacts us more than the people we interact with, live with and love… Pastor Ben shared a message last week that helped us to understand the amazing ways that God uniquely created us to be individuals. But the Book of Romans gives some pretty great insight when it comes to understanding ourselves:

“The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him” (Romans 12:3 MSG).

Long before words like empowerment became popular, business writer Peter Drucker was telling us that the secret of achieving results is to focus on your strengths and the strengths of those you work with, rather than focusing on weaknesses.

Just like Pastor Ben said, the truth is all of us are a bundle of both strengths and weaknesses. None of us is strong in every area. If you watch anyone with outstanding strengths, you’ll notice that they also exhibit outstanding weaknesses. It’s a fact of life… But in that I absolutely believe that God planned it this way. No one is good at everything, so we need each other.  We have to seek one another out and we have to cooperate with one another. The Bible says this:

“In this way we are like the various parts of a human body. Each part gets its meaning from the body as a whole, not the other way around. The body we’re talking about is Christ’s body of chosen people. Each of us finds our meaning and function as a part of his body. But as a chopped-off finger or cut-off toe we wouldn’t amount to much, would we? So since we find ourselves fashioned into all these excellently formed and marvelously functioning parts in Christ’s body, let’s just go ahead and be what we were made to be, without enviously or pridefully comparing ourselves with each other, or trying to be something we aren’t. If you preach, just preach God’s Message, nothing else” (Romans 12:4–6 MSG).

DO: Here are our marching orders: Find out what God made you to do well and do more of it. Don’t worry about what you don’t do well. In fact, maybe the key is to try to do as little as possible of what you don’t do well. Then find out what others do well and help them to be able to do more of it. That includes our significant other, our kids, our co-workers, the people on our ministry teams… When we each serve in our sweet spot the body of Christ is working just as the Creator desired.

PRAY: God show me in your great purpose and plan for just who you want me to be. Help me to celebrate my strengths and put them to use and stop fretting about the things I cannot do well. Show me how I can best serve you through the things I’m good at.  Amen.