Something Real

Imagine this scene, if you will. You're in the region of Galilee around the turning of time itself. The people are whispering, then talking openly about this prophet, about this strange man who is traveling the region doing the unthinkable - healing the sick and the blind, casting out demons, teaching with authority, and eating with sinners. It's the last of these that is most controversial, it seems. The most unbelievable. 

After awhile, the whispers get to you and you have to go see for yourself. You start sneaking into the back of the crowds, start inching your way closer to the center of the action. There, you discover the Man everyone's talking about, and He's real. He's really real. Excitedly, you scurry out of the crowds and back to your friends and family, who are waiting to hear your report. 

You've got to come see this guy, you tell them, and they're on the edge of their seats.

He loves you so much.

Uh...what?

It's not the story of Jesus that we see anywhere in the Scriptures, and yet, it's the story we keep trying to pull off. It's no wonder that people are feeling a little sold short on this Jesus of ours. It's no wonder that He seems to be missing something essential when we talk about Him this way.

I'm not saying that Jesus doesn't love you. He does. He loves you so much. But this is not what drew the crowds. This is not what convinced people to come out and see Him. Go back even to the imaginary story at the beginning of this post - it's not what prompted you to go out and see Him. You didn't hear whispers that Jesus loves you, even though He does; you heard whispers of His power, His authority, His unconventional wisdom, His unconventional life. It's these things that drew you to Him. Only later would you discover, perhaps, that He loves you. 

We use God's love for His people as a selling point, but to be honest, it's not a great one. There are a thousand other people even in most of our communities that we could get to love a person. With the right marketing, with the right outreach, with the right hype, I could fill a room to capacity with people who will say that they love you, or who might even really love you. People who love you, in this world that's just looking for someone to love, are a dime a dozen. You don't get up off the couch to go see another one of them. The truth is that you probably don't even know much of anything about most of the people who say they love you. 

And let's say that your life really hits the rocks. Let's say you're hungry, tired, broken, beat down, crippled, sick, or possessed by something that's bigger and darker than you. It's nice have to people who love you, but nice really isn't enough. Let's say you're faced with your own limitations, your own weakness, your own insecurities, your own mortality. Are you really, at this moment, hoping there's someone out there who loves you?

Of course not. You're hoping there's someone who can heal you. 

That's where Jesus comes in. See, the selling point of Jesus, what we need to be telling people about Him, is not that He loves us, although He does and that's great. What people need to hear about Jesus are the same whispers that traveled through Galilee. There's this guy...

There's this guy who teaches with such authority that you can't help but buy into His message. There's this guy that speaks with such authority that the winds and the waves and the demons obey Him. There's this guy who gives sight to the blind, opens the ears of the deaf, strengthens the limbs of the lame. This this guy who breaks bread with sinners. And He's got a piece in His hands for you. 

There's this guy who surrounds Himself with nobodies and calls them somebodies anyway. There's this guy who dares speak back to the experts, who confounds them with their own questions. There's this guy who hears the crowds calling His name but He still knows yours. There's this guy who hears you calling from the side of the road, and He's calling right back to you. By name. There's this guy....

That's what gets people to Jesus. That's what brings them out of their comfort zones and into the commotion. That's what gets them onto the streets, begging, aching, crying out to God. It's not that He loves them; that's not enough. 

It's that He's real. 

It's that all the whispers they've heard about Him are true. It's that He really is that guy. He really is the One who is casting out demons, curing the sick, healing the lame, and eating with sinners. He really is the One who knows your name, who calls you out as a nobody and makes you somebody. He really is the One who, when your life really hits the rocks, lets you sail again.

He really is the One who can heal you.

That's what people are looking for. That's what people need. Yes, Jesus loves you, but so do a thousand other people who may or may not actually be real. This guy...this guy is the real deal. He's real. He is who He says He is. That's what we need to be telling people. That's where we need to be calling them.

Not into the arms of a loving God, but onto the streets of Galilee. Where they can discover that there's this guy...

Jesus Loves Me

Jesus loves me. This, I know.

It's one of our major selling points as Christians - God loves you. Jesus loves you. If you're one of the millions of people looking for love right now in this world, look no further. Because God is love, and He loves you so, so very much.

The Bible, it's the story of God's love. It's the stories of God's love. It's the proof irrefutable that God loves you, even if you're a sinner. Even if you're a saint. Even if you're a broken-down, worn-out, lying, cheating, adultering, prostituting, failing mess of a man or woman. Even if you're a blind, deaf, lame, mute, crippled, bleeding, disreputable individual. Even if you think you've got it all together. Even if you know you don't. The Bible is God's testimony of His love for you. 

And all that is true. It's true. 

And it's dangerous.

It's dangerous for a lot of reasons. It's dangerous because it tends toward a perversion of worship. If, in this religious ideation we have, God is the one who does all the loving, then isn't it He who worships us? A lot of Christians today think this way. A lot of Christians today think they can do no wrong in God's eyes, that no matter what scheme they come up with or what evil they take part in, God is always going to love them just the same. He's never going to be angry with them. He's never going to be disappointed. He's never going to hold them accountable for anything because they, as the work of His hands, are the object of His worship and not the other way around. They have become God's god. He adores them and sings praise over them.

Because He loves us so.

It's dangerous because it makes God not a formational or foundational presence in our lives, but just another circumstantial one. He's just someone else who loves us. Someone else who can't get enough of the awesome that we are. Our lives are full of people that we keep around for no other reason than that they feed our ego. They love everything we do. They tell us how good, how smart, how beautiful, how capable, how amazing we are. And God becomes to us just another one of these voices. He tells us all these same things about ourselves, but if His primary role in our lives is as just someone else who loves us, His voice is not fundamentally different to our hearts than is Bill's or Susie's voice next door. In fact, we may even reach a point, and fairly quickly, where we don't even need God for this because Bill's and Susie's voices are more real to us than His whisper. I can hear Bill when he says I'm amazing; I can hear Susie praise my awesomeness. To hear God, I have to, you know, pray and stuff. And create space in my life for Him to answer. And figure out if that's His voice I'm hearing or just the wind. ...It's far easier to be loved by Bill and Susie than it is to be loved by God. And if I can get from the world what I can get from God, why do I need God?

There are plenty of people in this world that love me.

It's dangerous because it encourages a shallow relationship with God. If the thing that is most true about God is that He loves you, then really, that's all you ever need to know about Him. You keep coming back to Him with one question, and one question only: Do you love me? If the answer is yes, then God is still God and you are still you and all is right with the world. But in this simple question, Do you love me?, lies the neglect of the bigger question: How much do you love me? The Cross of Jesus loses its power if the question is love or no love, deal or no deal. The Cross becomes a token of affection just the same as a bouquet of flowers, a fast food gift card, a beautiful ring, or the latest gadget. Oh, that's nice. Jesus gave me a Cross. How neat.

Not only does the Cross lose its power, but God loses His face. It used to be that men longed to see the face of God. Abraham longed for it. Moses longed for it. David longed for it. Elijah longed for it. Men ached to see the face of their God, to know the contours of the lines around His eyes, to see the depth of the universe reflected in them. Today, not so much. Today, who cares? The face of God? Nah. We'll settle for the heart of Him. As long as that heart is, you know, totally centered on loving us. That's the single most important thing about God's heart - whether or not, this morning, it loves us. That's all we care about. Do you love me today, God? Okay, great. 

If someone's willing to love us, broken and battered as we are, most of us don't bother to spend much time asking questions. We don't ask whether that person is good for us or bad for us. We don't ask what they contribute to our lives. Their contribution is fairly obvious, isn't it? They love us. For that alone, they are worth keeping around. And if the day comes when we tire of their love or we just don't feel it any more, we cut them loose. We move on. Because we are so love-starved in our world, because our egos are so fragile, we just don't care about much of anything else. We just want to be loved.

And Jesus loves us. This, we know.

But if, for whatever reason, there comes a day that He doesn't, we move on. If today it doesn't feel like He loves me, then today, I have no need of God. I have other people to love me. And if, for whatever reason, those other people stop loving me, I'll come back to God because He has to love me. Or something. And that's all we ever want from Him, isn't it? Just to be loved? 

The Investment

None of this has been meant to discourage you from using your talents in this world; that was not the intent at all. Rather, I simply wanted to emphasize the nature of a true talent. A talent always requires an investment.

But by all means, make that investment!

The Bible is very clear on this. That's what the whole parable of the talents is about. It's about the sinfulness of not investing in God's creation the things that you've been entrusted with. The only guy who got in trouble was the one who put his talents in the ground, buried them, and recovered them later with nothing to show for it except the exact measure he'd been given. He hadn't done anything at all. That was the offense.

And the tragedy.

But this doesn't mean that all talents should be invested in the same way, or in the same place. There are some talents that are going to produce 10-fold because we put them in high-stakes markets. We put them in places where there's a huge risk that they could fail, and when we do this, this is the place where we reap great rewards. It's the person who has to work at it, who has to put in the time and the effort to make a talent fruitful, but who then rises to the top and becomes a voice for something greater of God.

There are some talents that are going to produce 5-fold because we put them in medium-stakes markets. We put them in places where there's a mild risk that they could fail, and when we do this, this is the place where we reap steady rewards. It's the person who works at it, who puts in the time and the effort, but maybe doesn't rise all the way to the top. Or maybe has a talent that's kind of obscure, that's not necessarily obvious to others who might be looking on, or maybe isn't such high-value in our world. Still, there are good rewards, and the effort is worth it.

The real lesson, though, comes from the last man, the man who buried his talents in the dirt. Clearly, we are not meant to bury our talents, but see what the master says to him. You could have at least put the money in the bank, and then you would have gotten at least the interest that the bank is paying right now. 

Think about this for a second. When you put your money in a market, the market has access to that money. It gets to play with it. It gets to tangle with its worth. It gets to decide what you get back out of it. When you put your money in a bank, there's no such interplay. No one else gets to touch your money; it's just for you. 

Sometimes, that's the investment we make. Sometimes, that's the best investment we can make. Your talent doesn't have to go into the market to be valuable. You can put it in the bank and make it a resource for yourself. And still be doing honor to the talent that God has given you.

A few years ago, my worship minister (and others) kept asking why I wouldn't join the praise band, why I wouldn't offer my talents as a musician to the ministry of worship. The answer, for me, is that this is one talent that I've put in the bank. What I mean is this: I pour myself out in ministry. I give all of the gift that God has given me to give. I do what God has called me to do. And then, when I come home empty at the end of a day, music is one of the ways that God fills me up again. It's a talent that isn't in the market; it's just in my bank. It's for my own personal use. If I take that talent and start playing a high-stakes game with it, if I put that investment elsewhere, then it may not be in my account when I need to make a withdraw. If I have to make the investment to make my music "good" or to make it "worthy" of being a part of the ministry of music, then it is one more way that I'm pouring myself out. It's one more thing I'm giving away. And you just can't give away everything you've got. You weren't supposed to.

Some things were meant just for you. Some things, you just have to keep in the bank. 

But keep them in the bank. Because that's where you can use them. That's where you can make those withdraws. That's where you keep the interest growing, where you keep something steady coming into your talent.

So figure out what the market is for your talent. There is one. For some, it's going to be a high-stakes game, a very public investment with a measurable risk for success or failure. For some, it's going to be a quiet investment, a personal account for private use. For others, it's somewhere in the middle. But it's never in the dirt. It's never a hole in the ground. It's never in a place where you had to dig it up, dust it off, and clean it up before you can use it. On this, the Bible is quite clear. 

Something Beautiful

Here's what we need to be mindful of when it comes to gifts and talents: they're not the same thing. Even when we're talking about one specific idea, that very idea may be a gift for one person and a talent for another.

Think, for example, about your worship team at church. Whatever you call them. A praise band, a worship team, a music ministry, whatever. When we think about music, we often use the words 'gift' and 'talent' interchangeably. "Oh, you're so talented!" or "What a gift you have!" Yes, and yes, but usually together. 

There are persons on that worship team for whom music is a gift. It comes naturally to them and just seems to pour out of them. You can give them a piece of music, and their soul just drinks it in until it comes dripping out of them. They practice, but only because they love the music. When they practice, they are receiving the gift so that they can give it away. Every run-through draws the music deeper into their heart where it just becomes a part of them, and then they reach out with open hands and give it away.

There are other persons on that worship team, however, for whom music is a talent. It doesn't come naturally to them; it comes easier to them than to someone not talented in such a way, but their participation in worship is an investment. They take the music home and run through it again and again not so that it sinks into them, but so that they get it right. They write it out. They agonize over it. They try to train their fingers to play, their voices to capture just the right mood of praise. When they practice, they think about the coming time when they will not simply give this gift of music, but they will invest in it. They will give it without knowing the return rates, without understanding whether or how much it will grow. 

One of the reasons we must be so mindful of this difference is because it has the tendency to create some powerful insecurities.

The person who is talented in an area in which others are gifted often struggles to understand why it's so hard for them. Why they have to put in so much more work than the others. Maybe she thinks that if she continues to put in the hard work, it will one day flow as naturally out of her as it does from the others, that her talent will one day become her gift. Sadly, it doesn't usually work this way, and this can be very discouraging. Someone who is talented will always have to put in the work. They will always have to make the investment. That's what you do with talents.

On the other side of this coin, the person who is gifted in an area in which others are talented often wonders if it isn't perhaps too easy for them. If they might be missing out on something by not having to put so much work in. If they aren't taking it as seriously as someone else. If it's somehow just a "joke" to them. Maybe he thinks that if he would practice more, the song would go even deeper still, even though he realizes that the song itself comes already from the very depths of who he is. Maybe he thinks that if he really took it seriously, he'd learn something new in the process. Maybe he feels like his gift will never grow if he doesn't invest in it. But you don't invest in gifts; you receive them. So he's not missing anything really at all.

But what happens is that we end up with insecurities on both sides, and then everyone comes to worship unsure. Uncertain of what they have to offer. The talented person wonders whether the investment is enough, whether the work they've put into it has reaped sufficient returns to be valuable, whether all that work has been "worth it" in terms of offering something meaningful. The gifted person wonders if the gift is enough, if enough has been received to give enough in return. 

This is exactly why we have to know the difference between gifts and talents. Because it is in understanding what each person brings that we are able to comfort and strengthen one another. 

You can't tell a talented person that it's okay, that they're really good at this, that this is their thing and it will be beautiful because they know how hard it is for them. They know what it takes to get to this point. They've counted the hours and done the math. You can't fool them because they know their own secrets. So you have to acknowledge their investment. You have to offer them returns. You have to come back to them with numbers. That's the language of a talent.

Nor can you tell a gifted person that it's okay, they've done the work, they've put in the time, and it will be beautiful because they know how easy it's been for them. They know what comes naturally to them. They know that even if they wanted to work at doing it better, they probably don't even know how. They literally don't know what to do except let this holy thing flow through them with open hands. You can't fool them because they know how inexplicable a gift is. So you have to take their open hands and hold them. You have to embrace the gift and take. That's the language of a gift.

When we take the time to recognize the difference between gifts and talents, we encourage each other. We love each other well. And something beautiful happens.

Something like worship. 

Gifted and Talented

There's a fundamental difference between gifts and talents, one that I think goes unnoticed in our language-nonspecific culture where one word means essentially the same as the other. We read the parable of the talents and talk about how we ought to handle the stuff God entrusts to us. 

But not all the stuff God entrusts to us is the same. The question we have to ask ourselves is whether what we have is a gift or a talent.

The parable of the talents is very clear about the nature of talents: they are an investment that we are supposed to invest in, as well. Talents are things that require us to work at them, to pour ourselves into them, to pour them into the world. They are essentially like seeds - on their own, they don't amount to much, but properly cared for, they manifest into something beautiful.

A gift on the other hand is quite different. Nobody invests in a gift. Nobody invests a gift in return. A gift is simply given...and received. That's all you can do with it. That's all you're supposed to do with it. It is a flower in full bloom, ready to be displayed center-table.

The trouble comes when we confuse the two. 

We all have both gifts and talents. We all have things we're good at, but that we have to work at a little bit, and things that just pour out of us beyond our control. People generally ask us to give more of our talents, and then we're pressed because we know a talent is not so easy just to give; it must be invested and invested in. Rarely, someone may ask us to give more of our gifts (or perhaps more frequently, depending on what your gift is; mine is kind of obscure), and we realize how demanding this request is, too.

We can't just give our talent because it requires something from us. It requires us to work at it. It requires us to put in the time to make it beautiful. Writing, for me, is a talent. It's something I have to invest it. It's something I have to work at. I do so because at this stage in my life, I believe that investment is worth it. But I feel the pressure when someone asks me to write something specific. (Even, by the way, when God asks me to write something specific.) I stare at the blank paper sometimes for hours, not knowing how to make this investment, not sure about the return rates on whatever piddly bit I have to give here. Sometimes, I get a great return, tenfold of what I put into it. Sometimes, I get just what the bank will give me for having an account at all. Sometimes, I dig a hole and get nothing. Just nothing at all. 

Our gifts, on the other hand, confront us with a trouble all their own. Our gifts do not depend on how much we are able to invest in them, on how much we can pour into them in order to pour out of them. They aren't linked to interest rates or returns. But they are fully dependent on our having received them first. 

I cannot give what I have not received.

So in order to operate out of my gifts, in order to give them to the world, I have to first receive them. Over and over and over again. The more I give away, the more I am in need of receipt. With hands open to the world, I must keep my hands open to God, as well. Some days, this is easier said than done.

Some days, I'm asked to operate out of my gifts. It's a humbling experience every time, when someone knows what it is that God has given me to give the world. When someone recognizes that in me. When someone knows, in a certain situation, that I'm the one to call because I'm the one who has something to give here. And something to give freely, because no good gift comes with strings attached. 

But these requests bring me face-to-face with my own...prayerfulness? My own connectedness? They make me aware of how intentional I've been about receiving, of how faithful I've been in receiving. Some days, I don't feel like I have a lot to give. On these days, I am aware of my closed hands - hands that have not received because they have not asked. Because they have not been begging. Because they have not been needy. Some days, I feel like I have too much to give, like this world was asking for a token gift and here I come, bearing the full weight of who I am in God. Still, I am aware that I have only what I have, that I give only what I've been given, and nothing more and nothing less. 

But that's what's cool about gifts. They're free. They're simply given. You don't have to till the soil, dig a hole, fill in around them, water them, fertilize them, tend them the way that you do a seed, a talent. You just have to fluff out the petals a little bit and reach out with open hands. In fact, you couldn't do anything to a gift if you wanted to. You couldn't make another single flower grow. You only have to give what you have received. It's out of your hands.

Because it's into your hands.

That's the fundamental difference between a gift and a talent. One is freely given; the other is an investment to be made. And there's a lot that can go wrong when we confuse the two. 

There's another hidden danger here. More on that tomorrow.