May 21, 2015
What is Lacking
I interviewed a successful
business woman whose approach to higher education is to take specific classes
that pertain to areas where she is lacking. Early in our Christian walk most of
do something similar and work on our weaknesses — prayer, forgiveness, turning
the other cheek. However, it seems that once we have a pretty good grasp on
Christianity we spend more time identifying and strengthening our gifts, rather
than working on areas of spiritual weakness. James says, “Perseverance
must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking
anything. If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who
gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him” (James 1:4-5 NIV).
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----I am so relieved you said, “…most of us!” I’ve hardly given any formal thought to what are my spiritual gifts. But then, as a recovered manic-depressive (bipolarite, I suppose would be the contemporary term,) being mentally out-of-bounds is yet within my once over-stretched envelop. It’s rather general knowledge, now, that people who subject their life searching and dealings to the tighter constraints of the truth tend to become depressed more often than those who are willing to settle for whatever mental representations adequately support daily function and duty. And the more one tends to be a perfectionist, the more he risks mental, emotional, and social maladjustment.
-----It certainly isn’t that there is anything wrong with knowing the truth well. There is everything wonderful and glorious and right about it. Especially when you realize Jesus Christ is the end of that trail leading to the full and unadulterated truth. The problem comes in mixing the truth into this wicked brew history has made of our society. Charting proper courses of thoughts and actions through it is restricted sometimes severely by the truth.
-----Moreover, there is the fact that none of us are very well versed in accurate, specific truth. Truth in general is pretty easy. It needs to be because the Lord wants all kinds of people to come into His eternal life, not just geniuses. So knowing the general truth about things that will get them there must not be a process of scholarship, but rather, a process of desire. I am tempted to say that the truth (Jesus Christ, ultimately) will find everyone who truly desires it. It will find them even more than they will find it. Once general truth is found, though, the journey into its specifics becomes more a thing of study and practice.
-----Folks who keep good guard over their hearts accept a practical satisfaction regarding the search for specific truth. Of course, one part of practical is the sense of temporary, because practical keeps an eye open for advancement even though not making it a requisite. The perfectionist is not practical. The perfectionist is afraid to perform unless he has complete grasp of the entire script. Only when a perfectionist is able to constrain his need to fully grasp the script to the scene he’s now performing can he advance through the play well. The point of practicality becomes very important when the play is the search for truth. Folks who do not constrain their need for truth to the practicality of their ability to find and deal with its specifics wind up in mental and emotional turmoil.
-----Prayer, forgiveness, turning the other cheek, forbearance, perseverance, patience, honor for one another, goodness, kindness, and such are admixtures of both mental and emotional constructs. Each of them involve knowing certain specific truths and abound yet more with the more truth learned. But each flows forth on certain emotions, and those emotions develop only from doing rather than from searching, examining, learning, and just knowing. The perfectionist who must know the whole script before performing will never perform, then, because emotions are part of performance.
-----Then, what makes a gift? Gifts are those areas in which one performs well. Now, it’s not quite that simple. Some gifts require certain physical circumstances. For instance, the gift of giving is not much a gift without owning either something to give or possessing the skills to earn it. Aside from such bits of complexity, accepting practical stages of growth in our spiritual weaknesses will better develop gifts than will advancing on our weaknesses with unconstrained perfectionism. There must be interplay between learning and performing.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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