Got It? Use It!By the Reverend David Burgess
“God gave me the foundations: it’s up to me to build on them.”
This is a brief quote from a radio interview on the eve of the World Cup with Steven Pienaar, the South African international who plays his club football with Everton. And in an earlier interview he said this:
“I was very fortunate… to be able to polish the technique and the talent that God gave me and to learn how to use it in the way that God had wanted me to.”
I think that Pienaar captures exactly the point of living the Christian life. It’s about what you’re given and what you do with it.
You have to balance the two. Firstly, there can be problems if you concentrate too much on what you’re doing without referring back to God and the spiritual foundations he’s laid for you. A colleague once spoke to me about the problem of people within a church being evangelical about the wrong things, and I know exactly what she meant.
There’s nothing wrong with being keen on social events or enhancing the church building or church music, as long as these things are a means to an end and not an end in themselves. Otherwise you run the risk of enthusiasm turning into obsession and of your church becoming an activist organisation with little genuine spiritual basis.
Jesus himself describes that risk in the parable of the two houses, one built on rock and the other on sand.
On the other hand, we need to avoid being a church that (or an individual who) quietly does nothing very much, running from Sunday to Sunday with little or nothing to show for it in people’s lives or in the life of the community in between times. If you don’t seek what God has given you it could wither or die; or you might not even know what your gifts are in the first place.
Jesus tells another parable, the parable of the talents, to show how important it is to make good use of the gifts and abilities you’ve been given, and James, Jesus’s brother, puts it even more directly and bluntly in his epistle: “Faith without works is dead.”
Not all of us will get to play in the World Cup or lead a multinational company or make a contribution to science, medicine or the arts. But I do believe that God has a unique place for each of us in this world and has given us gifts and abilities to cement our place here. Those are the foundations; recognising and building on them is up to us.