Discover Your Gifts

Celebrating How God Made You and Everyone You Know

Don Everts

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781514003732
• eBook ISBN: 9781514003749
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

You have gifts! And you are a gift to the world around you. Because every human is fearfully and wonderfully made, each one of us has something to offer to the world. But we have not always identified or developed our gifts well, nor deployed them effectively.Don Everts explores the gifts God has given every person and what new research reveals about the difference those gifts can make for us, our churches, and our communities. Churches have unfortunately focused mostly on spiritual gifts and vocations within the church. But we don't always recognize the wide range of abilities, skills, and aptitudes that all of us have, whether civic, artistic, or entrepreneurial. We each have God-given gifts and are called by God to use them in our vocations in the world. Discover how our gifts are a blessing to others and pave the way for reconnecting with our surrounding communities.

Everyone Is a Gift

THE POWER OF SEEING PEOPLE AS GOD SEES THEM

King David was writing psalms of prayer and praise three millennia before Lewis began writing his thoughtful Christian prose. And the poet William Langland was writing his influential masterpiece in the Middle Ages. But all three were profoundly struck when God allowed them to see people as he sees them.

David was offered a soul-altering vision of how God saw him as “fearfully and wonderfully made.” Langland’s protagonist wandered a medieval landscape looking for wonders, and his eyes were struck by humanity, a “fair field full of folk.” And Lewis’s awe-filled contemplation of humanity’s immortal nature led him to the overwhelming conclusion that none of us will ever meet an “ordinary” human.

All three authors give testament to the fact that God sees every human he creates as a gift—a precious wonder imbued at their creation with dignity and worth. All three are reckoning with “the sacredness and dignity of the human person.”1 And all three point to the inevitable and beautiful implications of seeing ourselves and the people around us as God sees us.

How can you and I tap into the power that comes from seeing people as God sees them? And what are the practical implications that we will notice in our everyday lives if we do?

MY SOUL KNOWS IT VERY WELL

In Psalm 139 we get a sort of play-by-play of a conversation between David and God (we call this prayer) and, in a way, between David and himself (we call this thinking). David is wrestling with how God sees him, how God pursues him, and how God made him. David’s words in the psalm reveal that he is not simply checking off a list of doctrines but is, instead, honestly reckoning with those truths. This includes the truth that God made David fearfully and wonderfully, knitting him together in his mother’s womb.

These verses read not only like insightful anthropology but also like soulful autobiography. David is letting the reality that God sees him as a gift sink into his heart and his very soul.

“Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well” (Psalm 139:14).

The proclamation that his soul knows “very well” that he’s a gift implies that there are different levels of knowing such a truth. Is it possible for our souls to know the truth of how “wonderful” God’s works are not very well or meagerly or incompletely? If my soul is any indication, the answer is yes.

Before Buzz moved in with us, if you had asked me whether God loved and valued every human he’d ever created, I probably would have said yes. I may have even been tempted to back up that knowledge with Scripture (“For God so loved the world”). I knew that God loved his creation. I knew that he had formed every human who had ever lived. I had even read and treasured David’s words in Psalm 139. But I’m not sure my soul knew that very well until Buzz moved in.

Living with Buzz caused this clear biblical anthropology to sink deeper into my heart. It confronted how meagerly and sporadically I believed this biblical view of humans, which David expressed so beautifully and which his heart “knew very well.” I knew God loved people. But there was something about living with Buzz that helped me experience this truth at a deeper level. Michael Downey describes a similar lesson learned by those who work with adults with developmental or intellectual disabilities: “All theories of personality development and all philosophical explanations of human nature fade into an embarrassed silence when confronted with the stunning truth about the person that is learned from experience.”2

My view of Buzz faded into embarrassed silence when confronted with God’s view of him. And I’ve never forgotten, or quite recovered from, that lesson.

Just as David marveled that his frame was not hidden from God when he was being woven together in the womb, so I have learned to marvel that Buzz was not hidden from God either. God saw him as a gift, imbued with dignity and worth. And this, it turns out, is an important part of the anthropology the Bible reveals: every single human ever created is a gift.

EVERYONE IS A GIFT

We see this right from the beginning, where the opening chapters of the Bible are unambiguous: all humans are created by God. Genesis is clear that God was and still is the source of all life on earth, including every single human who has ever been created. There is only one Creator, and therefore all humans are fellow creations of God. As Luther put it, “I believe God has made me and all creatures.” But humans, we’re told, are special creations because, unlike everything else, humans are created in the image of God:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;

male and female he created them.

(Genesis 1:26-27)

The repetition underscores the point: humans are not like other creatures. Human beings are special, marked out as different among all of creation. God created all life on earth, but only into humans does God breathe his own breath of life. As it’s put a few verses later, “Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Genesis 2:7).

God’s personal involvement in the creation of each human stops David in his tracks in Psalm 139. It changes David when he sees that God knit him together in his mother’s womb. It is incredible to consider the personal care God has taken in his creation of every human who has ever lived. Every single person we will ever run into during our life has been formed and knitted by the Creator, intricately woven with great care by our God, whether or not they acknowledge him. There are no ordinary people, as C. S. Lewis put it.3

In fact, it is exciting (and a bit sobering) to consider that Jesus himself had a hand in crafting each one of us. The apostle John clarified this significant point about the work of Jesus, the Word, when he wrote, “He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:2-3; see also Hebrews 1:1-2; Colossians 1:16).

It is sublime to reflect on these passages as they reveal “the uniqueness and sacredness of each person.”4 As our souls begin to understand that everyone is a gift, two beautiful implications flower within us: our low self-esteem is confronted, and our habit of showing partiality is undercut.

BEAUTIFUL IMPLICATION 1: CONFRONTING OUR LOW SELF-ESTEEM

The good news that God sees everyone as a gift naturally delights many of us. But for some of us, this news flies in the face of a heavy assumption we have been lugging along with us every day of our lives: namely, that we are no gift. We are no wonder.5

I know this heavy assumption intimately. I lived the first twenty years of my life with the hard and fast knowledge (or so it seemed to me at the time) that I was different from everyone around me. I could see the wonder in others; I could sense the dignity and worth imbued within them at their creation. But me? I felt different. I felt worthless. I felt unimportant.

I did not feel like a gift.

For anyone who struggles with low self-esteem, or even self-hatred, the news that everyone is a gift might seem laughable. Perhaps it’s true that everyone else is a gift. But not me.

This broken and cracked se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword: Savannah Kimberlin
• Introduction: Seeing Buzz Clearly
• 1 Everyone Is a Gift: The Power of Seeing People as God Sees Them
• 2 Everyone Has Gifts: The Power of Discovering the Gifts that God Has Entrusted to Us
• 3 Everyone Is Called: The Power of Naming Our God-Given Vocations
• 4 Everyone Can Grow: The Power of Helping Each Other Grow in Our Gifts
• 5 Every Church Can Equip: The Power of Unleashing People to Use Their Gifts
• Conclusion: Buzz’s Concert
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix 1: Research Partners
• Appendix 2: Research Methodology
• Appendix 3: Definitions
• Appendix 4: The EveryGift Inventory
• Notes
• Also Available
• Praise for Discover Your Gifts
• About the Author
• Other Titles by Don Everts
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright