Being gifted is not a guarantee

After studying spiritual gifts, I’ve learned something about myself that I don’t like.

My main gift is teaching. This is characterized by a strong motivation to collect and dispense information. For example, we teachers look up a word in the dictionary and wind up reading the whole page. If someone wonders about anything, they don’t have to ask for help; we go digging for the answer anyway. I am easily curious and have a good memory for detail.

This teaching gift has a downside. For one thing, I’m interested in everything (hence the propensity to research) but am so easily distracted that I find it difficult to focus on the project at hand. But that is not the worst of it; teachers have a terrible tendency to think that once we know something (knowing and thinking are important to us), that head knowledge is all we need.

I’m fully aware that having the answers for everything (or thinking I do) will not win popularity contests. Know-it-all’s are a big pain in the neck (and in other parts of the anatomy) for the rest of the world. However, that is not the only downside of the matter. When I think this way, I can study the Bible, know what God wants from me, and because I now know it, not actually do what it says. My intellect says this is a totally silly assumption, but the reality is that I often replace obedience with knowledge.

But there’s another complication; obedience is not based entirely on knowledge. It needs more than that. I’m reading Psalms 119 this morning, a section that declares love for God’s commands but laments an inability to always obey them. Verse 32 says, “I will run the course of Your commandments, for you shall enlarge my heart.”

My devotional books says that knowing and accepting God’s teachings are not enough to make me spiritual; I must do what they say. Then it adds, “We may be perfectly right, but unless we possess His life and live by that, we lack the supreme essential.”

My challenge is two-fold. One, I must continually recognize that knowledge means nothing unless it affects the way I live, and second, the way I live does not depend on what I know but Who I know. Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.”

In other words, apart from the life of Christ in my heart, I cannot obey even when I know what to do. Unless His life is controlling and motivating me, more Bible knowledge only makes me an informed sinner—and still a pain in the neck.