Thinking Sensibly of Ourselves

When walking the narrow road of the Christian life, many of us fall into one of two traps when it comes to our gifts: viewing ourselves too highly or too lowly. Some of us have permanently taken up residence in one of these ditches and refuse to move. There is water flooding in, garbage pooling around us, and frogs laying eggs in our hair, but we refuse to move from our ditch. 

Maybe you battle with pride. You don't only know you're gifted in this way, but you kind of flaunt it. You're always telling people about your gift and you're constantly fighting to get your gift front and center at your church. Perhaps you even get a bit frustrated when people don't recognize your gift. Your gift has become an opportunity to draw all eyes on you rather than God.

Or maybe you're in the other ditch. You see all the other believers around you flourishing in their gifts, serving with beauty and speaking in truth, but whenever you look down at your ordinary hands you see nothing to offer. Perhaps your mom or friends nag you to use this talent of yours that they all see in you, but you shake your head and assure them that there are many other people who are far more gifted with this talent than you, so they should be serving instead. You see yourself simply as a failure who could never get any gifting right, let alone use it to glorify God.

How do we crawl out of these ditches and start looking at ourselves the way Scripture calls us to?

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