Spiritual Gifts 6 Teaching

[HKHaugan]

You keep hearing the expression, ‘Get your mind around…’ It is not so much getting your mind around what God is saying in His Word but rather letting Him get His mind around you. Do we spend more time trying to make sense out of something from our limited perspective or can we let an idea of His embrace us? Can we start by assuming He might really have something to say that is valid, logical and true, then to test it? Is the way we are presently thinking about life, people and how we spend our time, really working for us? We do this with other things like we are willing to take as authority some third hand comment on how a certain pill helps us to think better. Why not try letting God’s thoughts do the same?

First of all, God’s thoughts are living ideas. The aim of the gift of teaching is to present God’s spiritually alive ideas about what it means to be human. To those willing to hear, willing to compare ideas and willing to evaluate, teaching is the gift given to help put the blocks in the foundation of an individual’s faith or maybe even to stimulate someone to challenge their own personal ideas that have grown out of non-belief.

Second, the Holy Spirit gives the gift. The spiritual gift of teaching is not something that comes out of a person’s talent, intellect or ‘common sense.’ It is a spiritual gift of insight from the Holy Spirit who makes the words of Scripture come alive through talent, intellect and, instead of ‘common sense,’ spiritual sense. When someone with the gift of teaching teaches the response may be, ‘Oh, now I get it’ or ‘I never thought of it that way before’ or ‘That’s something I needed to hear’ or ‘That changed how I thought’ and hopefully, ‘I need to hear more, the Lord really spoke to me right where I am.’ That’s when we let the Lord ‘get His mind around us.’

Third, this gift brings spiritual ideas. When Paul said in Romans 12:2 that we need to be transformed by the renewal of our minds he was asking us to open our minds, to be humble enough to consider there are spiritual ideas that can change lives for the better. Spiritual ideas from God are alive. Human ideas apart from God are only concepts and not alive. God’s ideas change hearts. Hearts are softened to love others, attitudes are changed and behavior modified. There are ideas in the way God thinks about people that really do make sense and can benefit the relationships we have far beyond what we have built apart from Him.

What the Lord is doing is really undoing. He is lovingly and patiently undoing, unraveling the ego-protecting ideas (also called strongholds) we have built in our self-centeredness to survive a really unbalanced world. Our relationships and attitudes have been twisted out of shape, the shape God intended for us as persons created in His image. The image of God in us is contorted. That is the result of sin, the self-destructive spiritual force that separates us from God and one another.

The beauty of the gift of teaching is that the teacher is totally dependent on Scripture and how the Holy Spirit gives Him the humility, the momentary insight, the awareness of his own sin and its forgiveness, the need to set self aside and receive the words to express the insights and the faith to deliver them. But more beautiful still is that these same dynamics are those that motivate all the other gifts as well. Teaching plays a part in letting God get His mind around ours. The confirmation of this gift is when people respond by saying openly or within, ‘I get it.’ So everyone, “Let this mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus…(Philippians 2:5).”