Faithful Stewards

1 Peter 4:10 (NIV)Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms.When we hear the word "gift," most of us think of talent — the ability to play an instrument, to paint a picture, to speak before a crowd. These are real gifts, and we should not dismiss them. But Peter has something broader in mind, and if we read him too narrowly, we may miss something important about ourselves.The Greek word the writer of this epistle uses is charismata — gifts of grace. And grace, as Peter describes it here, comes in many forms. The word he uses for "various" is poikilēs, which means many-colored, like a richly woven fabric. The gifts through which grace flows are just as varied. Some of them don't show up on a résumé. The gift of sitting quietly with someone who is grieving. The gift of asking exactly the right question at exactly the right moment. The gift of noticing what everyone else has walked past. These are real gifts, and they carry real Kingdom weight.The problem is that we often can't see them in ourselves. What comes naturally to us, we tend to dismiss. We assume that if something is easy for us, it must be easy for everyone. And so a capacity that God has quietly placed in us — shaped by everything we have lived and learned and suffered — gets waved off as nothing special. Sometimes we call this modesty. But there is a kind of false modesty that is really just a failure of honest inventory.The epistle writers calls us faithful stewards of these gifts. In the ancient world, a steward was not a passive caretaker. A steward was a manager, someone entrusted with resources and expected to put them to work. Jesus makes exactly this point in the parable of the talents. The servant who buried his talent in the ground wasn't being humble. He was being faithless. Fear and false modesty produce the same result — the gift goes unused, ungrown, and the people it was meant for never receive it.Faithful stewardship means first recognizing what we have been given — honestly, without inflation but also without denial. It means developing those gifts, which takes effort and intention. And it means spending them freely, in service to others, trusting that God's grace does not run out when we give it away. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. The more freely the gift is shared, the more abundantly it grows.What gift has God placed in you that you have been reluctant to name? What capacity have you dismissed as unremarkable that someone around you has quietly needed? These are not small questions. How we answer them is part of what it means to be a faithful steward of God's many-colored grace.PrayerOur Father, open our eyes to the gifts you have placed within us. Give us the honesty to name them, the discipline to develop them, and the generosity to share them freely with those around us. May we be faithful stewards of your grace in all its many forms. Amen.This devotion was written and read by Jim Stovall.Grace for All is a daily devotional podcast produced by the members of the congregation of First United Methodist Church in Maryville, Tennessee. With these devotionals, we want to remind listeners on a daily basis of the love and grace that God extends to all human beings, no matter their location, status, or condition in life.If you would like to respond to these devotionals in any way, we would enjoy hearing from you. Our email address is: [email protected] United Methodist Church is a lively, spirit-filled congregation whose goal is to spread the message of love and grace into our community and throughout the world. We are located on the web at https://1stchurch.org/.