Roles, Gifts, Fruit…

I have been reading a book by C. Peter Wagner called Your Spiritual Gifts Can Help Your Church Grow. It is an interesting book. The chapter I am on now is about 4 things Spiritual Gifts are not. They are not Natural Talents, Fruit of the Spirit, Christian Roles, and Conterfeit Gifts. So my talent to play the bass, or my pastor’s talent to play the guitar, or write new songs for litergical use are not gifts of the Spirit. At least according to Dr. Wagner. I believe these are gifts of the Spirit. Dr. Wagner also says that only Christians receive gifts from the Spirit. We as members of the body of Christ have been given a gift to use in the ministry of the church, but only members of the body have been given a gift. If you do not believe, then you could have a natural talent for something, but it is not a gift from God. And our gifts are only temporal, only the fruit of the spirit is eternal, as 1 Corinthians 13 tells us, all things will pass away but these three Faith, Hope, and Love will remain. Well Dr. Wagner also says that the fruit, being that it is singular is love and the other words listed are mearly attributes of love. So faith, or faithfullness as it is listed in Galatians 5:22-23, is a part of the Fruit of the Spirit. Yet according to 1 Corinthians 12 it is also a gift. So how can it be temporal and eternal? I guess one could ask the same thing for us, for we are temporal, yet we are eternal as the body of Christ. One other thing he comments on is how an atheist can have a natural talent, that God can transform into a Spiritual gift if the start to believe. Doesn’t this mean that everyone has been given a gift of the Spirit, and it just has not been discerned as that yet. And is not everything we have truly a gift of the Spirit. Luther said we all have a vocation, a call to do, a part of the plan of God that no one else can fulfill. We are all called upon to further the kingdom by doing our part. That means we all have a gift, all of us, and we need to use our gift to the furtherment of the kingdom, not for personal gain. Just remember we all have gift(s) of the Spirit, and we all have roles to play in this game of life, and if you are just a little fruity it will help sometimes.