Is God’s Life Calling Nature or Nurture? by ‘brother bill’
The instrument does not arrive already singing. It is wood, glue, varnish, and string until a human being decides, year after year, to add something to what was given. That is the quiet scandal of excellence: heaven supplies the raw material gifts; a life must still be invested in skills.
We speak too easily of “gifts.” The word lets us off the hook. It suggests the thing simply landed, fully formed, while the rest of us were looking the other way. Scripture will not allow that fiction. God does give. He also commands the recipient to work the gift as if eternity hangs on the daily choice.
Ephesians 2:10 “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.”
The good works were prepared. The walking is ours. We make the plans God guides our steps.
A young man can want three things—to preach, to heal, to lead a nation—and watch every door close. He can then take the path that pays, bury the first calling under competence and cash, and tell himself the gifts were reassigned. They were not reassigned. They were buried. The Master still owns them. The servant simply stopped investing in them.
Then a sentence from a doctor arrives: wheelchair. The sentence that was meant to end a life instead unearths the old deposit. The man discovers that serving people’s actual needs—accounting for properties, watching over a ranch, tending what is broken—can be done “as to the Lord and not to men.” The calling was never the title. The calling was the investment.
“And whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance; for you serve the Lord Christ.”
So, where is our trust?
That is the invested life. Not the life that waits for the original dream to reappear on its original terms, but the life that takes whatever is in the hand today and works it for the One who still owns both the gift and the servant.
Paul wrote to a younger man who was tempted to let the fire go out: “Therefore I remind you to stir up the gift of God which is in you through the laying on of my hands. For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”
Stirring is work. Fear is the excuse that keeps the talent in the ground. Power, love, and a sound mind are what God supplies so the stirring can continue after the first enthusiasm dies, after the discouragement, after the diagnosis.
“As each one has received a gift, minister it to one another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.”
Stewardship is the opposite of both pride and despair. Pride says, “I earned this.” Despair says, “It was taken from me.” Stewardship says: “It was entrusted to me by God. I will put it to work among the people in front of me, with the strength He still supplies.”
The culture around us prefers the language of cosmic lottery or systemic disadvantage. Both leave us spectators. The kingdom uses different arithmetic: “For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.” The man who hid the one talent did not lose it because God is stingy. He lost it because he refused to risk investing in it and add anything to what he had been given.
So the question is not whether you received enough. The question is what you are adding.
You add the early hour when no one is watching.
You add the refusal to let a job leave your hand until it is right.
You add the decision, after the dream died and the body threatened to fail, to serve the next person as though the Lord Himself were the client.
You add the daily choice to work out what God is still working in you,sacrificing by taking up your cross daily.
“Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.”
He supplies the will and the doing. We supply the working-out. That is the partnership. That is why a instrument can sound like a human soul, why a guitar can hold Brahms as if the wood itself were listening, and why a life that once walked away can still hear the Master say, at the end of ordinary faithfulness, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
The work is hard. It is also available. The only miracle required is the next stubborn choice to add something to what God already placed in your hands.
That’s my life’s story what’s yours? Blessings on your life’s purpose and the adventure it brings.
brother bill/dad
