Is Your Skill Robbing You Of Your Best Life?

For the last two weeks I have been writing to you about identity. About living from inside the heart rather than standing guard at its door. About coming home to the way we were made to live, and trusting that the blessing has always been on us and not on the successful arrangement of our circumstances.

This week I want to follow that thread into something practical. Something that touches the very shape of the lives we are building.

The big difference between a skill and a gift.

There is a line in scripture that has stayed with me for years. It says that it is the gift of a man, not his skills, that brings him before kings.

Sit with that for a moment.

Not his hard work. Not his competence. Not his ability to get the job done. 

His gift.

I believe the picture of the king here is a metaphor. It is pointing at prosperity, at visibility, at the kind of success that opens doors we could never have opened on our own. 

Consider that scripture is telling us something quietly radical about how this moment flows and arrives into our lives.

It is not our skills that take us there.

It is our gift.

Now here is the difficulty. Most of us spend our entire lives leaning on our skills and quietly neglecting our gift.

Our skills are the things we have learned to do well. They are useful. They pay the bills. They get us hired, promoted, and relied upon. There is nothing wrong with a skill. Yet a skill, on its own, has a ceiling. It completes a task. It earns a wage. It closes the loop and waits for the next task to arrive.

A gift is something else entirely.

A gift is the thing that was placed in you before you arrived. It is the thing that flows out of you when you are most yourself. It does not merely complete a task. It multiplies. It blesses. It feeds people in ways that a skill never can.

This is the heart of what I want to share with you today. I find this distinction hidden in plain sight in the parable of the talents.

Most of us know the story. A master gives his servants talents before leaving on a journey. One receives five, another two, another one. The first two invest (put to work) what they were given and multiply it. The third does something different.

Now, in most of our English translations, we are told that the third servant buried his talent in the ground.

However in the Aramaic, the language closest to how this story was first carried, something more interesting is said. It tells us that the man did not bury his talent. 

He put it in his wallet.

This small difference in my opnion changes everything.

Consider what it means to bury something. When we bury a thing, we remember it from time to time. We think of it occasionally, then less often, and eventually we forget it almost entirely. It is out of sight, and slowly it slips out of mind.

A wallet is different. A wallet is something we carry every single day. It is something we reach for constantly. It is in our hands, in our pocket, in our awareness, woven into the ordinary motions of daily living.

So this man did not forget his talent. He saw it every day. He knew exactly where it was. He simply chose, day after day, not to use it.

Yet, there is something else hidden here. The fact that this man had a wallet, or purse, at all tells us that he had money. He was not destitute. From the outside, his life may have looked perfectly fine. He had means. He had enough. He had the appearance of a man who was doing well.

Yet look closer.

He had a wallet full of money and nothing else. He had borne no fruit. He had nothing to share, nothing to give, nothing that blessed the people around him. 

He clearly had one or several skills that he valued more than the gift he had been entrusted with. Those skills enriched him circumstantially. 

They filled his wallet but left him empty internally.

His life looked good from the outside and bore no fruit on the inside.

Just like the fig tree that looked magnificent from a distance but had nothing to offer when Yeshua and his disciples came to it hungry. All the leaves were there. 

All the appearance of life was there. Yet, when the moment came to feed someone, there was no fruit to be found, and sadly we know what happened to that tree.

Our money can change circumstances. 

Our gift can change someones life.

I think we would do well to consider that one of the underlying messages in this picture is this. When we build lives that look good but bear no fruit, over time we begin to destroy the very fabric of the life we were given. The leaves cannot sustain themselves forever on appearance alone. 

Something withers underneath and quietly begins to die, because where there is no flow there can be no life. Our lives are like water. They thrive only in the flowing, and we flow most truly when we offer our gifts to others.

God is far more interested in our inner condition and in what we are able to offer from that place than He is in than how well, how good, or how successful we may appear from the outside.

Now here is the part we often rush past. When the master returned, he did not take kindly to this at all. The man had used his skills to maintain a comfortable life, but he had refused to invest the one talent, the one gift, he had been given.

The master's response was not gentle.

I think we miss why.

It is because gifts are meant to multiply. That is their nature. That is the entire reason they were placed in us. When we invest a gift, it grows. It compounds. It reaches further than we could have imagined. It begins to bless people we will never meet.

Skills do not do this. Skills restrict. They complete the job and stop there. They earn the wage and close the loop. The purpose of a skill, more often than not, is simply to get paid. And there is nothing wrong with getting paid. Yet, a gift was meant for more than that. A gift was meant for getting paid and then paying it forward. A gift was meant to overflow.

It is the multiplication of gifts, over time, that eventually leads kings and queens to become aware of us.

Skills get us through the day. Gifts get us before the throne.

Skills makes us a living. Gifts give us a life.

This is exactly what we see in Joseph.

I wrote to you about Joseph two weeks ago. About the fourteen years he spent in the pit, in slavery, in the prison, forgotten. I want to return to him now, because his story shows us precisely how this works.

Joseph had skills. We see them everywhere. He managed Potiphar's household with excellence. He ran the prison so well that the warden handed him everything. By any measure, Joseph was a deeply skilled administrator. Those skills served him. They kept him useful. They kept him afloat in impossible circumstances.

Yet, it was not his administrative skill that brought him before Pharaoh.

It was his gift.

The gift of interpreting dreams. The thing that had been in him since he was a boy. The thing that had once gotten him into trouble, that his brothers had hated him for, that the world had tried to bury. That was the gift. 

So when Joseph finally stood before Pharaoh, it was not his competence as a manager that changed everything.

It was the gift, exercised in the right moment, that multiplied into the deliverance of an entire nation.

His skills kept him alive through the years of waiting.

His gift took him before the king.

Now consider this. The gift, when it finally flowed, did not merely complete a task. It multiplied beyond anything Joseph could have engineered. It saved Egypt. It saved the surrounding nations. It saved the very brothers who had thrown him into the pit. It saved the existence of the Jewish people. One gift, faithfully carried and finally released, became a blessing on a scale no skill could ever produce.

This is the difference.

So I want to leave you with a question this week, asked gently, the way I would ask it of myself.

Are you living from your skills, or from your gift?

It is an honest question, because the skilled life can look so good from the outside. It can fill the wallet. It can earn the respect. It can keep us busy and useful and comfortable for years. And all the while the gift sits unused, carried in our pocket, seen every day, never invested.

Let me be clear about something here, because I do not want to be misunderstood.

There is nothing wrong with using your skills to pay your bills. It is perfectly normal and perfectly good to earn a living from the things you have learned to do well. We live in a world that runs on this, and there is no shame in it whatsoever.

Yet, a gift blesses our lives in a way that getting paid never will.

Getting paid meets a need. A gift feeds the soul. 

Getting paid keeps the lights on. A gift lights something within us and others that no wage could ever touch. 

The two are not the same, and we were never meant to settle for one while neglecting the other.

So the caution is simply this. 

Do not allow the success of your skill to quietly prevent you from using your gift. This is the trap so many of us fall into. The skill works. It pays. It provides. Yet, it is because it works so well, that we never feel the urgency to invest the gift. 

The comfort of the skill becomes the very thing that buries the gift in the wallet.

It is our gifts, blessed by God and faithfully invested, that usher us into places our skills and the money they earn never could.

I can attest to this in my own life. There have been moments, and places, that my gift ushered me into that no paying skill or bank balance could ever have created for me.

Rooms I had no business being in. Changing the Tennis history in two nations and an area of the World.

Conversations that changed the course of things and not only for me. The blessing of being carried into those places by my gift overflowed to the people I found there. 

Including you, the one reading this today.

I would not be writing these words to you if I had only ever used my skills. It was the Giver or my gift blessing it that brought me here, and that is the very thing I am inviting you to see in your own life.

If we want a life that is truly large, a life that multiplies and overflows and blesses far beyond ourselves, then we have to do the braver thing. 

We have to invest the gift. Not just the skill. The gift.

Otherwise our lives will be nothing more than a good customer to our own bank.

Remember,

The talent was never meant for the wallet. It was meant for the world.

P.S. See you next Sunday!