For
most people, their dominant gift jumps off the page at them. For others, it is
easily narrowed down to a few, but then a final determination is not so
obvious. Over the next few days, I will try to walk you through different things that might help you identify your gift. Some things that we will be looking at are parenting styles, birth orders, maturity, gender, your wounds, the use of the left-brain versus the right brain, as well as your culture and time frame. Sometimes determining a person’s redemptive gift is like looking at an
uncut gem. To the untrained eye, it looks like a rock, but if one takes the
time to remove the excess layers that have been placed on it over time, the
true jewel inside begins to emerge. In thinking about the characteristics of
the redemptive gifts, it is important to look at what is leagiftrned or acquired
behavior versus the essence of who and what God designed. The following factors
are some of the things that will influence how the redemptive gifts are
expressed in a person’s life.
Parenting
Every
child’s parents have their own redemptive gifts. Their gifts impact how they
view the world and how they raise their children. Therefore, the parent’s gift
will leave a very significant imprint on the children, regardless of what the
child’s own gifts are. Also, the potential character weaknesses of a parent’s
gifting can impact the child as well. If a child’s parents are servant and
exhorter, for example, the child might grow up in a home where the exhorter is
financially irresponsible and is living in denial. In an attempt for the
servant parent to help meet the child’s need, the irresponsible behavior by the
exhorter parent might be reinforced by the servant, thereby skewing the proper
redemptive gift qualities of the child. Thus, the child may grow up lacking the
knowledge needed to be financially responsible, although it is part of their
God-given design to want to be a good steward of resources, especially if their
redemptive gift is giver. On the positive side, let’s look at a child who has
the redemptive gift of prophet and is raised by an exhorter. Prophets tend to
have difficulty relating to people. Since the exhorter’s strength is the
ability to maintain relationship with others, the child will most likely be
much more oriented towards relationships than others with the gift of prophet. Because
they learned relational skills from their parent, the prophet has the imprint
of the parent’s exhorter gifting.
