Warning: What You're Good at Might Kill You

Since I know that all my loyal (and not-so-loyal) readers are hanging on every word I write (today is blog post #803, you're probably running out of room to hang them on your wall). Ergo, you probably picked up on the innate tensions in our culture that I talked about last week.

On Monday, the conversation with the guy from India where I celebrated our cultural value of innovation. On Friday, our obsession with means (the primary driver of our previously-celebrated cultural value of innovation) divorced from a sincere consideration of ends, and how that causes serious problems in our culture.

So which is it? Is the focus on innovation a strength or a weakness, a blessing or a curse? The answer, of course, is yes.

Our cultural value of innovation and "bigger and better" is both our strength and our weakness. It is both what has propelled our nation ahead in unprecedented ways in politics and economics and invention and it may ultimately prove to one day be our undoing.

This is simply one outworking of a larger principle: inherent in our strengths and gifts are the seeds of our own destruction.

To put it biblically, what you and I do best, what we most love and where we are most gifted is the place where we must most deeply and radically and passionately and deliberately repent.

Our gifts are the places that most need the redemption of God, the cleansing work of his Spirit, and the good discipline of submission on our part.

Not in the least because the places where we are most gifted are the places where we are most prone to operate in our own strength, apart from the Father who gave us the good gifts in the first place in order to do the works he has prepared in advance for us to do.

Operate solely in your weaknesses and you are exhausted and frustrated and (I would propose) not in step with what God has called and equipped you to do.

Operate in your gifts and you will be tempted from time to time to do your own thing, your own way, apart from the one who gives the gifts and enlivens them to be a blessing for you and the people around you.

The work, of course, is to walk in step with the Spirit, to believe in the Son he has sent and to entrust him with both our strengths and our weaknesses and to ask him to gather all of it up for our good and his glory.

But the temptations inherent to the operating in our gifts pose particular obstacles to our submission. Which is why it's all the more important to be wide-awake the very real opportunity we have to entrust God with our gifts and allow him to do "immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine."