This is based on reading 1 Peter 4:10-11
The Function of Fellowship: Gifted to Serve
“As each has received a gift.” Not some. Not those with theological training. Not the ones who have been walking with Jesus the longest, or the ones who seem the most naturally talented, or the ones in any kind of formal role. Each. Peter does not qualify it. He does not build in exceptions. He states it as the baseline reality of life in the fellowship of the Spirit: every person who has received the Spirit of God has received a gift for the community of faith. There is no one in the body of Christ who is simply a passenger.
That might seem an obvious thing to say; however, it’s easy to create, without ever intending to, a two-tier model — the gifted and the rest, the ministers and the congregation, the ones who do the spiritual heavy lifting and the ones who turn up and receive it. Peter will not have it. The structure of the body — the way Paul builds on this same conviction in 1 Corinthians 12, and the way Peter states it here — is that the gifting is universal. The Spirit has distributed something of Himself to each member, and the fellowship is incomplete when any member does not share what they have been given.
Good Stewards of Varied Grace
The image Peter reaches for is precise: we are to serve as “good stewards of God’s varied grace.” Not owners. Stewards. There is a world of difference.
A steward does not manage something for their own benefit or at their own convenience. They manage something that belongs to someone else, on that person’s behalf, and are answerable for how they’ve managed it. The gift is not to hoard, to deploy only when I feel like it, to set aside when I am tired or discouraged or unconvinced it is making a difference. It belongs to God. I am holding it in trust. And the person it was intended to serve — my brother, my sister, the one I sit with in fellowship, the stranger I encounter on mission — is waiting for it, even if neither of us knows that yet.
Peter calls the grace expressed in these gifts poikilos — varied, manifold, multi-coloured. The grace of God is not a single note; it is an entire symphony, and each member of the fellowship carries one instrument. The fellowship sounds like what it was meant to sound like, only when everyone plays. A body in which some members are active, and others are passive, is not a healthy body. It is a body where gifts are being withheld — and that is a stewardship failure. Many of us genuinely underestimate the weight of what we carry and the cost to the body when we don’t bring it.
Speaking as Those Who Handle Holy Things
Peter then names two broad streams of gifting. If anyone speaks, let him speak as one who speaks the oracles of God. This is a striking and somewhat arresting charge. Not: speak thoughtfully. Not: make sure your content is broadly biblical. Speak as one who speaks the oracles of God. That is a call to something radical — what leaves my mouth in the fellowship must be anchored in what God has said. It must carry the weight and seriousness of the fact that I am not offering my own insights dressed in religious language. I am handling the living word of the living God.
This puts me in my place. There can be a drift — in fellowship conversation, in teaching, in prophecy, in encouragement — toward sharing what we think, what we feel, what seems to us to be the case, and offer it under a spiritual heading without subjecting it to the discipline of “Is this actually what God is saying?” The speaking gift, rightly understood, is not a platform for self-expression. It is a form of submission. You are not expressing yourself; you are delivering someone else’s word. And that someone else is God. The speaking gifts function well only when the one speaking has been listening first.
Serving in Borrowed Strength
The serving gifts carry an equally important corrective. Peter links their exercise not to human capacity or natural talent but to “the strength that God supplies.” That relocation of serving from the domain of our effort to the domain of divine enabling changes everything about how we think about it.
There are people in every fellowship whose contribution looks unglamorous from the outside. The consistent practical help. The care given quietly, without any expectation of recognition. The person who shows up when asked, who doesn’t wait to be thanked, who simply does what needs doing and does it again next time. Peter is saying: that is not merely admirable human kindness. When it is done in the strength God supplies, it is Spirit-borne ministry. The grace of God is being channelled through those hands. It is as sacred as anything spoken from a platform, and it will be as fully rewarded when the accounting is made.
To Him Be the Glory
And that brings us to where Peter is going all along. “In order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.” This is the telos of everything. Not communal flourishing as an end in itself. Not the satisfaction of using your gifts. Not even the edification of the fellowship, important as that is. The goal is the glory of God, through Jesus Christ.
Peter is not simply saying: make sure God gets the credit. He is locating the glorification of God within the mediatorial work of the Son. When I exercise a gift in the fellowship — by faith, in dependence on the Spirit, in love for my brothers and sisters — that service passes through the hands of Christ and is presented to the Father in a form that pleases Him. That is what makes the exercise of gifts sacred rather than merely useful. That is what prevents the fellowship from being a well-organised community operating on human steam for broadly beneficial purposes. Everything finds its destination in Him.
To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. That is where Peter lands — and that is where everything lands. The gifts are not ultimately about us. Not about our development, our contribution, our sense of purpose, as real and as good as those things may be. They are about the glory of Jesus Christ, now and into eternity. And when that is truly the motivation — not guilt, not duty, not the need to be needed — something is freed up in the giving. It becomes an act of worship. It becomes an overflow of love. It becomes what fellowship in the Spirit was always meant to be.
Such is the value of the gift and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Kingsman.
For His Name’s Sake
C. L. J. Dryden
Shalom
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