J. N. N. Ng’ang’a – Meditations for 23-29 January 2012: You Will Only Serve Well If You Operate In Your Area Of Gifting
Day 1
Exodus 9:16
But I have raised you up for this very purpose,
that I might show you my power and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth
Some people have not yet discovered what God created them for, their life’s purpose . They also need to find out the gifts they have and should be utilizing to fulfill that purpose. So it is not just a young person, even older people can discover their purpose even if late in life. You meet them and they are frustrated that after forty years of working they still don’t know who they are. That is why we use the word discover your purpose
You may be are busy studying courses that are not in their area of gifting, nor are they in their area of calling nor of purpose. This discussion is supposed to help you to understand that you should not take for granted that what you are doing is what you were created to do. You have to invest time to Discover. \
So it means that you have to invest time and effort in order to find out who you are and what you were created for. In other words what is your gifting? So even if you are a first year in a university , the younger you are, the more important this topic is. Because if you discover what God created you for at the age of sixty, like my age mates, and you may be dying at eighty , now you can see it will be useful only for short time.So the younger you are, the more critical the topic.
But at whatever age, it is good to know your purpose because if you don’t know your purpose, your gifting, there are three things I suggest you are likely to experience . The first one is that you are trying to be who you are not. And that’s not easy. When you try to be who you are not, chances are, you are not doing your job at all nor are you doing the other person’s job well .
God created each one of us to fulfill a particular purpose and gifted us to just meet that purpose. So when you just trying to be somebody else, you can’t be as good in that area, nor are you going to be happy. So the first thing is, you are wasting your time.
Number two, when you have not discovered your purpose, you tend not to be good in what you do. You are doing something you are not good at, putting a lot of effort but the results are not very good. You know, when you are where you are supposed to be, or gifted for, it is very easy for you. In our school days ,because of over-emphasis on science, you ended up trying to get as many people as possible to do science. In A level by that time, the pass rate was somewhere around thirty to forty percent. Because as people knew A level schools were starting, everybody is trying to go into them and then people who were not created to do Science, are trying to do Science.They argued that Physics is difficult, so hard. It is not the Physics that is difficult, it is the candidate who is in the wrong course. I went through a school in Kenya called Alliance, and it was offering both Art and Science. I want to tell you in our A level years, no time did the Art class ever beat the class that was doing double Maths, Physics and Chemistry. So when I met my friends from other schools who said, You know I was doing double maths and it is so difficult we all failed, I would reply , the school I come from, the best pass mark was in double Maths, physics and chemistry. Why? When you give students all the options and each person takes what they are gifted for, they tend to do it very well.
That’s why you have to discover your gifting or your purpose, because the two are related. So that’s why I am saying the second reason why you need to discover your purpose is that you tend to do well when you do what God created you for. And if you do well in that area, the world will be a better place.
For example, if you become a doctor but you are not really intended to be a doctor, only because you are good in biology, but remember medicine is not biology, medicine is not just anatomy, medicine is being empathetic ,feeling the pain of a patient, you will be frustrated in the career. And you know that empathy is not tested in an exam. So when you go to a medical school they will never test that. They will test whether you understand anatomy. And you will get a hundred percent. But when you take a patient and he is feeling pain, you feel like ordering him to stop feeling pain! Basically, you feel annoyed by sickness instead of becoming empathetic. Have you met medical people like that? Where they feel like unajifanya(pretending) to be sick. At that time the patient feels like he is dying but instead of the doctor sympathizing they think unajifanya. …you are just pretending to be sick. Because he is in a career where God never created him to be. And although he can pass medical exams, the way God has created him, he wont enjoy being a doctor. The requirement of a doctor is not just science, there is that part that I have just talked about. And you have to have both science and empathy in order to be a good doctor.
Even if you are born again it will still be critical that you actually discover where your gifting is, where you are called, because you will tend to be very good in that area.
We have seen that the dangers of not knowing your purpose is first , you may be doing somebody else’s work. Second one is, you will not be good in your work because you tend to be good in your area of purpose. The final one: if you are not in your area of purpose, you tend to be a frustrated person. In other words, you find that every time he comes from work he is so tired not because he has worked, even when he opened the office in the morning, he was already tired. He wondered , I am here again! Oh God! What did I do to deserve this.When you are doing something that you are not gifted in, you tend to be pushing your way, it becomes like a burden. And that’s why the issue of your life’s purpose is critical, it is one of the most important issues in a mission discussion .
Day 2
Acts 13:36
“For when David had served God’s purpose in his own generation,
he fell asleep; he was buried with his fathers and his body decayed
God wants you to serve but He doesn’t want you to serve Him in an area he has not gifted you in. You can be busy serving the Lord but you are not getting any good results because you are not where God has gifted you in. We need to emphasize that right from the beginning.
The second thing we need to note is , nobody does not have gifts. Everybody has gifts. You cannot be reading this and not be gifted. God is your creator and He is not in the business of creating junk. God knows you are important, you are precious, you are useful to His kingdom. He has given you his own gifts. Many however spend all their life without discovering this gifts that God has deposited into each one of us .
Does a gift need developing ? Our background has taught us a limited field of gifts. On the one hand it seems like those who are gifted have’ arrived’ and do not need any further training. A lot of people assume that if you have a gift you don’t require training. That’s not true. The fact that you are gifted makes you desire training even more. You are so interested in doing well, you look for education in the area of gifting.
On the other hand those who assume that they do not have gifts feel inferior and unable to rise to their responsibility. Because they don’t feel gifted they feel shy to do anything useful. In their own mind, they someone else is so gifted….. Why did you pick on me? Can’t you see I am hopeless, useless?
Once you discover you have a gift and the gift is different from Ng’ang’as, you are never intimidated by Ng’ang’a. Obviously Ng’ang’a may be gifted in speaking, but you are also gifted in doing something else like listening and retaining information. There are people who listen in a meeting, some of them may not write any notes, three years to come they can remind you exactly what you said. That’s a gift, isn’t it?
You need to understand that once you know that the fact you don’t have this gift does not mean that you have no other gift, you neither get proud of your achievements nor intimidated by how good others are. You know you don’t have my gift but you have your own gift. Talking about intimidation, I went through ite as started getting opportunities to speak to groups. The first time I was invited to preach in a high school was 1970. So I have preached for the last over forty years. I had not even left high school by the time I was invited to speak. But when I forget that speaking is just a gift from God ,even to date I at times still gets intimidated and I have to pray for courage . Another time I was invited by a club of rich people. I was invited as an after dinner speaker. I went with my wife, Rebecca. One wife asked, ‘this year, where did you do your shopping?’ She then added, ‘I went to Paris. And by the way that city is improving day and day’. The other one answered ,’ Me, this time I was in London’. I realized I had never taken my wife anywhere similar nor could we afford it. I have taken her somewhere. Even if it is Gikomba, it is somewhere. You seat there feeling intimidated and yet you are still expected to speak and you may wonder, where do you begin. Ealier as we parked, the kind of cars could tell us who was inside the party. You become intimidated until you realize… as for money, they truly have the gift of money. But the only reason they wanted me to talk is because they don’t have what they believed I had. And so as I go to the podium I am not intimated. God has given me the message, isn’t it? I am talking about making money.
For a long time I had only one degree. And I am supposed to go to a place where there are only professors. They have asked me to give them a talk. Exactly how do you deal with them when they are academic giants? Then I realize, they would never have called me if they knew what they want me to tell them. So as I speak I tell God, give me your message that can benefit them.
This issue of discovering you gift is also related to knowing that your gift might not be my gift and the fact that I don’t have your gift does not make me inferior. You have no reason to be proud or brag. Every gift matters. You need my gift , it is important to you. The day you discover that you have this gift and I have this other gift, what does it do to you? All over sudden all your pride goes. You have nothing to be proud about because you realize although you have this gift, you don’t have the other gift. So this person has a gift you don’t have. You know there are people with pride because of what they do. I am doing lawyer. And you feel like walking with shoulders a littler higher. Then they ask you.. what do you do.. I am a sociologist. Oh sorry. You need to understand that, that is foolishness of the highest order. Because you need a lawyer but if all of us are lawyers, there will be trouble, isn’t it? The sociologists are the ones who understand human dynamics so that the lawyer can have less work. So that if God has given you a gift in helping people to relate better, that’s a wonderful gift. So when a lawyer seeds a sociologist who is good at organizing people, getting them to have social skills, getting them to relate better and they are happy, the lawyer keeps wondering, oh God, I wish that’s the gift you gave me! He realizes he also needs it, isn’t it? A lawyer is just about to be divorced by his wife. And he wonders, how can I how can I deal with this lady better? You come to the sociologist. Now, you need to understand that a lawyer may be happy to help other people divorce but he is not happy to be divorced himself. He is not looking for another lawyer, he is looking for a sociologist. It is important to then realize, you yourself need a sociologist. It will make you have respect for other people. And so pride no longer comes. Or you are a doctor of medicine, that is good, but that means you are going to need other people, isn’t it? Recently I was talking to a doctor, who told me that he wants to go to a service in time at eight o’clock because he has patients every day of the week including Sundays. Then the wife told me, tell him it is not a good thing. The wife wants me to help them because she says sometimes we go to church, both of them born again, and then he says, let me check a patient. She might be in the car until five in the evening, after the Sunday service. She does not seem to understand why the issue cannot be resolved. He needs a counselor .So then you understand it doesn’t matter what your gift is, you need somebody else’s gift. The other person’s gift is not unnecessary. Otherwise God would not have created that gift. Pride disappears when you discover that your gift doesn’t make you better than the other person’s gifts.
Of course some gifts are more exhibition-like. In other words people will see them. Some other gifts, nobody will ever hear of them. But the truth of the matter is, God knows you, isn’t it? And the kingdom of God is benefitting from that hidden gift.
Day 3
Exodus 31:3
and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability and knowledge in all kinds of crafts
What is meant by gifts. How can one discover his gift. If you discover them, how can you develop them and use them as a Christian in God’s kingdom?
A gift is not something you work to get. In other words, if I gave a book , you cannot go around being proud that you have book and other do not. you never bought it. A gift means a benefactor, just looked at you, gave it to you. But that’s the first thing that you understand about gifts. That gifts are things that come from somebody else, it is not something that you have necessary earned yourself. That’s why if there is anything you should not be proud about, it is a gift, isn’t it? Some of us wanted to be doctors but every time they did biology they used to fail. That’s how they discovered that God did not call them to medicine. When they ended up wanting to do law, they excelled in law, isn’t it? But in medicine they would not have succeeded. What does that tell you? It is not that you are better than them, it is only that, that’s not their area of gifting. It is a gift. So you need to understand that every gift you have is actually God-given.
There are spiritual gifts and there are also what we call natural gifts. But whether they are natural gifts or spiritual gifts, all of them come from God. Check the book of 1 Corinthians 14 and see the ones that are written there. There are many others that are not written in that chapter and we see them. Actually when you go to the Old Testament in the book of Exodus there is somebody involved in construction , and we are told that he had a gift. God put in a spirit in him of craftsmanship. Nobody else was allowed to make temple items because God had put a spirit, not a spirit to speak in tongues, a spirit to make temple items. So when we talk about gifts, we are not just limited to the ones you see in Corinthians. In Exodus, the bible is telling us, that if you need an architect, remember it is the Spirit of God who put in them a spirit of architecture. So it is a gift. It is God giving it to you. Whether it is a natural gift or a spiritual gift, it is God’s gift. The thing to note is that if it is not your doing , you don’t own it, you are only a steward. Please remember your gift is God’s gift donated to you and you are only a steward of that gift.
Day 4
Matthew 25
14 “Again, it will be like a man going on a journey,
who called his servants and entrusted his property to them.
What is a steward? I think that’s an important word to deal with. If you are a steward you are not an owner. That’s one of the definitions of a steward. A steward is a person who is not an owner. This is, a steward is a conducting, supervising or managing something owned by somebody else. If you are a steward you are either conducting, supervising or managing something owned by somebody else. It is the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to your care. That’s what we call stewardships. So all of us, are just stewards. Whatever you have you are steward. The best way of looking at who a steward is, is an example of a bank manager. You know a bank manager is somebody I sympathize with . When you hear somebody is a bank manager of one of top five, most likely, his bank looks after billions. He can write a banker’s cheque to you and sign and you can get a hundred million to yourself. If in serious financial need, when you go to visit him your legs start having fellowship..shaking . But do you know that guy at exactly the same time he is having a quarrel with his wife because the wife has been saying the child needs a bicycle, and he cannot afford it. He checks his account and realizes the only money remaining is three thousand and a bicycle is ten thousand. Remember he has just signed a cheque for millions to someone else. But he cannot withdraw even five thousand for himself. This is because all those billions are not his money. He is only a steward of the money. The only money that is his is may be a hundred thousand shillings he gets as salary per month. That’s what he must budget for. The rest he cannot give to himself. Similarly all the gifts both natural and spiritual that God has given us are for us to fulfill his call on our life…to fulfill the purpose for our lives. We are therefore stewards for these gifts and we shall be held accountable if we do not use them to fulfill His purpose for our lives. You use the gifts , the training, to serve Gods people, not to enrich yourself.
My first job when I left university in the mid nineteen seventies was at a development bank. And I sat there seeing rich people, signing their loans, releasing their loans, but I realized I cannot give myself a loan. The rules did not allow. So I can be helping people to be rich but I myself I am not rich.
So it is important to understand a steward is like a bank manager. He is looking after a lot of money but for that he is accountable to the board. Now, the board in your case is God. So every gift you have you are accountable for it and even if not in this life, in the final day you will have to give an answer as to how you managed your gift. If the gift of medicine, you are a doctor, everybody who has died because of you carelessness you will have to answer in heaven. You became a doctor in order to help God’s people not to suffer from sickness. So whether you are arguing , my salary is too low, it is important to understand that God is holding you responsible for everybody he brings your way who is not feeling well. You are a student, at university in Rwanda, and God allowed you to go there as a gift. There are many people in Rwanda who wanted to go there but they didn’t. If you go there and you are so careless that you are thrown out of campus, remember your parents might not ask you but God will hold you accountable.
That’s what gifts is all about. You discover it is not yours to do whatever you want. If my gifts I have given you, I can give you conditions on how to use the gifts, isn’t it? And that’s what God has done. He holds accountable for all the gifts he has given us.
It then becomes very important given what we have said so far, to be then sure who you are expected to be.
Day 5
ROM 12
3 For by the grace given me I say to every one of you:
Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought,
but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you
What has God created you for?What gifts has he given you?
In order to be what God wants you to be, you must know who you are. You know who you are by doing a SWOT analysis. Those of you who have Business training will know the word SWOT quite well, isn’t it? God expects you, you are a good steward of what God has given you, to discover what you have as gifts. Like a bank manager must know how many billions the bank has at nay time , isn’t it? How much has been given so far, how much is yet to be given?You do that by having a swot analysis.
What’s a swot analysis? It stands for Strengths , Weaknesses ,Opportunities and Threats. And it is important to do this exercise not just once in a lifetime, but very often. It is not the kind of exercise you do in a noisy place, it means you go for a retreat and ask the Lord to show you who you are. May be it is in prayer and fasting where you go asking God, show me who I am. What are my strengths? Because you see you could have been brought up by parents who told you, you are hopeless, useless, you will amount to nothing. And you started believing them. But you see your parents do not own you. You belong to God. They were just a delivery system. You need to understand your parents don’t know you really, you know you will surprise them as you mature. That’s why for example your nose is like you father, your ears are like your mother and your back is like your grandmother’s. You need to understand you are not like any one of them. Sometimes you check yourself and your ears are not like your mothers, does not look like you father’s, because there were recessive genes in three generations which were in your great grandfather and have now reappeared in your ears. You are not like anybody, you are original. And that’s one of the things that we in Africa don’t like believing….that your children, are not necessarily like you. They are unique, created by God, may be they are gifted to accomplish something I will never have to accomplish. But in African tradition, you are supposed to be like your mother. That is not biblical. To the bible, every one of us is an original. And like somebody says said , don’t die a copy. You are original and God wants you to discover, not what your mother says about you, but who you are really. If they say you are useless, don’t believe them. I used to do a job where Ethiopia was one of the countries I was covering, I would stay in Hilton Hotel in Addis Ababa. One evening I came in from the Shell office into the Hilton. I found some books being sold. I found a small book that interested me. It was a book of school report forms of great men. Somebody did a research, on grest world leaders foe example , Wilson Churchill. They went back to the school where he came from and obtained his reports. What did the teachers say about them? They talk about J.F. Kennedy, etc. The book is full of those reports. You know you read and laugh. The teachers got it wrong almost in every case. Somebody like Churchill, who was the prime minister of Britain during the Second World War, his teachers seem in agreement, that the boy would amount to nothing. There is nothing he can ever accomplish.
Yet he is now reputed as the one of the most powerful prime minister the world has ever known. The teachers were not lying. They believed what they had seen. But you see the teachers may only see as far as they can see. But each one of the people included in the book, went on to become one of the greatest men or women the world has ever known.
But what I am trying to get you to understand is, in the swot analysis, do not limit yourself to what your mother said, to what your father or teacher said. Your strengths could be what your mother said but they could also be something your mother has never discovered because she is human. Nobody knows you fully.
We are complex by nature There is a part of you only you know about yourself. Even your parents don’t know it . Every one of us has a part nobody but you knows. You need to understand that the truth of the matter is, there is a part of you only you knows. Secondly, let me surprise you, there is a part of you others know but you don’t. This sounds so embarrassing. You know something about me that I don’t know. For example you never see yourself at the middle of your back. Am I right? So you can have a piece of cake stuck there as you walk, and everybody can see you have a piece of cake , and you look at yourself in the mirror but you can’t see it. It is still at the back. Others know about it, but you don’t. That’s why it is important to also share information about self with others. When you have friends, honest friends, you will know more about yourself .You will know what you know about yourself plus you will know what they know and you don’t know.
Number three, there is a part of you where you and them both know. Remember we started by saying there is a part only you know, a part only them know, now there is a part where both of you know. For example, you may be short-tempered. You know you are short-tempered, I also know you are short-tempered. So that area, all of us know. That is the part in friendship that is supposed to be expanded continuously. Where you volunteer information about yourself , you increase that area .When your friends volunteer information about you, they increase it.
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Of course there are many friends who may know things about you but they dare not tell you because they fear losing you as a friend. If I tell him that, we might never be friends again, they argue. Do you hear friends like that who can talk about you in your absence but they can never face you. Those are useless friends. It is very important to understand that if they are useful friends, it will be important they tell you what they know about you, that you don’t know about yourself.
The fourth area is a part you don’t know and your friends also don’t know, only God knows. So when they say, I know him, that’s a lie. You only know one fourth, and what else has been volunteered by the person. There is an area only God knows. And that’s why I said, in the Swot analysis, getting to discover your gifts, you need to be a in a retreat where you are seeking God’s mind on your strengths.
Remember at this point you close your mind to all weaknesses. You are only asking God, show me who I am and the strengths you have given me. You will be surprised at how long the list is likely to be. Every one of us, including the one who the mother has condemned as useless, will discover there are many, many strengths.
Day 6
Rom 8
28 And we know that in all things God works for the good
of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose
Once you have done that strengths exercise , open a new page to list your weaknesses. And be frank with yourself. Let every weakness come out. Not so that you become hopeless but because once you know your weakness you know how to manage it. But if you don’t know your weakness, you can’t manage it. So it is important to know your weakness so that you actually manage it. The best way to get to be a great performer is to understand your weaknesses so that two things happen: you manage it well, but you also avoid to do things that require your weakness to be used . So it is important to know them.
Strengths and weaknesses are only relevant as they relate to assisting or hindering being what God wants you to be.
The other two are called Threats and Opportunities to your future. In my future ,what are things surrounding me in my environment that are going to be a threat? You list all the threats. For example, you are very, very talkative. That can be a threat, it can also be a weakness. A threat is anything that will stop you being who God wants you to be. And you need to see all those threats because once you know your threats, if there is a threat and God wants you to succeed, He will give ways that can help you to deal with the threat.
Then the last one is, Opportunities. Opportunities are again related to your future. What is it in your environment that you can see, will especially place you in position to relies your call. For example if your father was an ambassador and you stayed in Vancouver for three years, and in Hong Kong three years, you really have spent your life everywhere in the world ganing friends in many countries. You know that exposure has given you opportunity others do not have.
I have had challenges when visiting French speaking countries. You need to understand because my background never allowed me to know French, there are certain limitations I then have. But you may have grown up playimg with French children. So you need to look at, what opportunities that are yours because of the journey God has taken you through. Some of them are opportunities that people don’t identify as opportunities. For example, you were born very poor. Then as if that was not enough your father died when you were thirteen. And as if that’s not bad enough, when you were in first year your mother also died. Surely, by the time you graduate you have had problems more than the share of an average person. Do you know what that means? It means that you have opportunity into the future that requires people with resilience like you whom nothing can shake . God has given you something called resilience. The ability to go down and not go flat, for you still rise up again.
But if God gave you the kind life where you have never suffered, you have never had a problem, it could be a threat. Please look at the background God has given you , and start realizing that many of the things that have happened to you are either threats or opportunities for your future. That’s the SWOT analysis that you need to do if you truly want to discover who you are and what are your gifts.
Also understand that you are unique. So as you are trying to discover your uniqueness. You are not comparing yourself with another because you are unique and you have a particular purpose. That’s what you are discovering. God does not run out of ideas, so He did not make you like somebody else. You are a model of his. You may even be born identical twins but it is only the bodies that are identical. The spirits are not. However identical you are, the spirit with in you is not identical. It is important to know who you really are because that’s what makes you unique so that you may achieve what God wants you achieve .
Day 7
2 Timothy 3:10
[ Paul’s Charge to Timothy ] You, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose,
faith, patience, love, endurance
Once you discover who you are ,then accept yourself as you are. The problem with a lot of people is, they have never accepted themselves. Every time they see themselves in a mirror, they see as if they have wrong hair. But the fact that you have an airstrip on your head(bald) doesn’t make you a looser. After all it seems you do not need to go the barber often. It really does not matter. Once you know who you are, accept who you are. Sometimes you listen to some of the musicians that are being called great, you wonder , surely, is he speaking or singing? And yet he expects us to buy his cassette. Yet they are popular. So it seems like every voice is a singing voice. People are buying their cassettes in droves. It really does not matter what you are. Accept yourself the way you are.
If you don’t accept yourself ,it will interfere with success in your life.For example if you are walking and people laugh, you think they are laughing at you. Somebody says, what a tall guy you are? You feel it is bad. You don’t like your height, you think I also don’t like your height. So you never see what I see and I might be appreciating your height. Yet you think I am condemning you for your height. To discover and become who God’s wants you to be, it is important that you accept who you are. The bible says that you shall love others as much as you love yourself. In other words the measure of love for others depends on how much you love yourself. If you don’t love yourself, then you have no capacity to love others. You love others as much as you love yourself. That means before you can love others first of all love yourself. I keep saying that if you are the kind of a person that is about to commit suicide, I shall fear you because if you do not love your own life, then you are unlikely to love mine. You can very easily murder me.
When you find somebody hurting himself, he may also be one of the people likely to hurt others. If you find one who is always complaining, that kind of a person cannot achieve much. As they are complaining, they never appreciate anyone or anything. If you are married to somebody like that, you have a problem. You go to London you bring them a dress, they say it is too red. You don’t bring them a dress, you must have a concubine. You take them out for lunch, it is because ‘you don’t like my food at home’. You don’t take them for lunch, it is because you do not value them. People who accept themselves are secure and are joy to live with. Your marriage will never go well if you don’t marry somebody who is proud of themselves. Their nose may be crooked but, if they themselves are complaining about it, don’t marry them because in your own house they will bring you trouble. So , even if it is a beautiful girl but she doesn’t like herself, check if you should marry her. If you marry her, there might be trouble in your own home. Go for the ugliest who likes herself because when she comes home, because her ugliness does not disturb either you or her, she likes herself and you like her, there will be peace at home.