The Lord may call us to serve in our weakness to do a work, not so much through us, as in us. It is not the Lord’s only purpose to save a people for himself. The Lord intends to glorify his people as they glorify him. The Lord may call us to do things that are entirely outside our comfort zone, things that are not within our natural giftings, so that he may grow us as his people and mould us more fully into the likeness of Christ.

Anybody reading the Bible can tell you that it is full of commands to serve. Few honest, Bible-reading Christians come to a conclusion other than that we are saved to serve. Paul makes the point explicitly in Ephesians 2:10: ‘For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.’

That’s all well and good. But how do we know which specific good works God has called us to serve in? We could do almost anything under the sun, so what should we gravitate towards doing?

The standard Evangelical answer to that question is to immediately reach for the language of ‘gifts’. The church is a body and we have all been uniquely gifted with ways and means of building it. The Bible is clear that the Lord has blessed the church with different people to do different things so that the body may be built up by working together properly. So, the argument goes, work out what your gifts are and then seek to use them in God’s service. Discover your God-given talent and crack on using it.

There’s a rightness to that sort of argument. Obviously, if your church needs a treasurer and you are some sort of maths genius or have a pretty solid track record as an accountant, it doesn’t seem all that sensible to keep your hands down when looking for volunteers. If you’ve got a brilliant background in building services or something, refusing to be the buildings deacon seems a little churlish. Of course we ought to use our God-given abilities and talents to serve his glory and build his church.

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