Preparation for Gifts (part IV)

By Odon Bulamba (summary only)

Most servants of God have gifts but they don’t work. Why is that? It is because they lack faith. For instance, if someone has the gift of healing and someone is sick, first you must be in good contact with your God, you must ask God, “am I ready to do that or not?” If God allows you, do it and if he doesn’t allow you, don’t do it. Also, don’t be influenced by anyone, if you are influenced by this world, the Spirit cannot work in you because the Spirit needs to rule everything in your life. God told us that those who want to follow Me must bear their cross, it’s not about other people’s crosses it’s about yourself, you must know yourself, you must know who you really are and admit your spiritual weaknesses. Ask yourself, “Do I have faith so that my gift can work? When I pray am I influenced by someone else?”

Many Christians when they gather together to pray, they want to show others how good they are in praying. If you have the gift of prayer it will not work if you want to show men that you can pray. Sometimes Christians when they pray in front of others they are very careful with the words they choose and try to show everyone they are grammatically perfect. This is zero for God. You will find that some people preach and they will say this is written this and that and this man says that but after the preaching you will find emptiness. When we want to show people that we have something special and we are able to pray or preach, the Spirit of God will leave us.

Jesus gave us a good example to follow, after His baptism He went to the desert for 40 days and Satan came to Him. Satan knew that he was the Son of God but Satan said to Him if, if you are the Son of God change those stones so you can eat bread because you are hungry. Can you see how Satan wants us to be proud? There was nobody else other than Satan and Jesus there but Jesus answered and said no. Satan did not give up, he knows that God created the earth and everything on the earth belongs to God, but Satan said to Jesus, “I will give you all this if you accept to do whatever I ask you”. Satan knew that this didn’t belong to him but he still wanted to give it to someone else. For us Christians, when we have the gift of the Spirit we can be sure that we will be invited by servants of God, by churches, by families and by groups of people, they will respect us and give us the first place in everything. But when we pray and speak in front of them we must ask God’s opinion first, if you don’t ask God’s opinion the gift you have in you won’t work.

The first thing in preparing to use your gifts, is that you must know the gifts that are in you. “Do I have the gift of hearing or not? Do I have the gift of vision or not?” When you know that you have spiritual eyes or ears you will know that God will answer you and talk to you through that.

One time in Kenya a young man took a blind person to the cinema. Try to imagine the situation, the blind knew he was in the cinema so he still saw something but he had to ask the others what was happening. Although the screen was in front of him, he still couldn’t see. But because someone was beside him and could tell him what was going on he could still follow what was happening. It is the same thing between us and God. When you don’t have the gift of prophesy it will be difficult for God to tell you what is going to happen in 5 days or 1 month and maybe that will be difficult to know the future because prophesy doesn’t work for the present, prophesy is there to help the church for tomorrow, to warn Christians what is ahead of them. If God knows that you don’t have spiritual eyes He will try to see if you have spiritual ears and if you don’t have them God will see that because you have other gifts that He will.
The gifts of God also depend on how we ask God and they also depend on how we behave before God. For example, I am lazy and God finds that this person is really lazy, if I give this person the gift of prayer it will never work because when you have the gift of prayer you must pray all the time, you are ready to fast everyday and you will be ready to stay up all night praying (“watch”) 2 or 3 times a week. Most people sleep for 8 hrs every night but the one who has the gift of praying will never sleep for 8 hrs, it is always in the night that God wakes you up and says wake up and pray, so you pray and then you fall asleep and 2mins later He will wake you up again and say pray, but if you are lazy you will say to God, “oh it’s too hard change my gift.”

In another example, other Christians have anger in them and they are bad tempered, they don’t know how to wait and handle situations and when situations come up this person is the first one to lose control. They are always the first to say, “do you want to do that because I can just put my Bible aside and react like anyone else”. How can God give a gift to this person and what kind of gift can He give? So how we react and who we are will also depend on the way God gives us gifts, that is why Paul said first seek the gifts that are necessary. God also said ask what you want and I will give that to you and if you ask me for a fish I will never give you a snake, but you must know yourself first, you must know your weaknesses and ask God to help you reach perfection, “God change and transform me so that I will be ready to receive the gifts”.

SUMMARY
- Before to use our gifts we have to first know what they are
- If you want to receive gifts from God, first prove to Him that you are ready to work
- Don't be lazy
- Reach for perfection (resist temptation)

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