What does First B Jackson teach about using your gifts?
Drawn from the messages where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At First B Jackson, the teaching on using your gifts starts with a flat statement from 1 Peter 4:10: each one of you has received a special gift. Not some, not the spiritually advanced. Each one. Pastor Raymond built on that by noting that Peter does not produce an overwhelming taxonomy of gifts. He collapses everything into two categories, speaking and serving, and says that whoever speaks should do so as if speaking the very words of God, and whoever serves should do so by the strength God supplies. The purpose of both is the same: that God gets the glory through Jesus Christ.
Brad Yates pressed the same idea through Jesus' parable of the talents in Matthew 25. A talent represented something like twenty years of a laborer's wages, and every servant in the story was handed a genuinely significant sum. The common English word 'talent' actually comes from this parable. Brad's point was that no one has been handed something trivial, and the commendation the faithful servants received was identical no matter how much they returned. The master's word was 'well done, good and faithful servant,' not praise for cleverness or theological precision. The measure was faithfulness. Brad also held up the servant he called Deuce, the one who received two talents and presumably knew another servant had received two and a half times as much, yet the parable records no grumbling. He simply got to work.
The harder edge of this teaching is what happens when a gift goes unused. Brad pointed to the third servant, who was not condemned for doing something sinful but for doing nothing at all, and he connected that inaction to Romans 14:23, that whatever is not from faith is sin. Fear, he said, is a powerful motivator but an unstable one, and it can freeze a person just as surely as it can drive them wrong. Pastor Raymond made the same point through a story about 70 pounds of green bananas given to him by a congregation in Costa Rica that had very little to give. He hung them in his backyard and forgot them, and weeks later found them rotted on the floor. A real gift from real people, wasted by neglect. The teaching at First B Jackson takes that image seriously: what God places in your hands is meant to be put to work, not stored away until the moment feels safer or more convenient.
Taught from 1 Peter 4:10 · Matthew 25:14-30 · 1 Peter 4:7-11 · Romans 14:23 · 1 Peter 4:11
The passage taught · 1 John 4:16-19
16 We know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and he who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him.
17 In this love has been made perfect among us, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment, because as he is, even so are we in this world.
18 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear has punishment. He who fears is not made perfect in love.
19 We love him, because he first loved us.
World English Bible
The messages that teach on it
- September 3, 2023 Blessed to Be a Blessing Brad Yates preaches on the parable of the talents, showing why faithful stewardship of God's gifts matters as believers wait for Christ's return.
- September 3, 2023 Blessed to Be a Blessing Brad Yates opens Matthew 25's parable of the talents to ask what faithful stewardship looks like for followers of Jesus who are waiting for their master's return.
- October 14, 2018 Green Bananas and the Gifts God Gives A Wyoming pastor connects rotting green bananas to 1 Peter 4 in a sermon on spiritual gifts, urging believers to use what God has given before it goes to waste.
- October 14, 2018 Use the Green Bananas A missionary's 70 pounds of rotting bananas becomes a vivid picture of what happens when we ignore the spiritual gifts God has given us to serve one another.
Mentioned along the way
- October 15, 2023 Do Business With This Until I Come Back Luke 19 parable of the minas, set against the brutal history of the Herodian dynasty, calls us to faithfully use what God has given us until Christ returns.
- October 15, 2023 Do Business With This Until I Come Back A Wyoming pastor walks through the brutal history behind Jesus's parable of the minas, asking what believers do with the grace they've been given.