Shaped for Significance
You don't have to travel too far around the world until you discover very quickly that God loves variety. He loves variety! He's made all shapes, sizes, colors, intensities, incredible variety in our world. God has made over 300,000 species of beetles. Would you call that creative overkill? Don't you think the world could have got along with just 50,000 species of beetles? Why did He create 300,000? He loves variety.
In one cubic foot of snow there are 18 million snowflakes and not one of them are alike. Nobody else is going to see it but God. He loves variety.
He likes variety in people too. Have you ever had to wait for an airplane and watch the parade of peculiar people walk by? God loves variety. And He made every single one of those individuals. He made you.
Psalm 139:13 “For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made…”
Job 10:8 “Your hands have made me and fashioned (shaped) me…”
From these verses we learn three foundational truths that are going to be the foundation of the series we're beginning today and be in for the next several weeks. Three important truths about you:
* I am unique !
You're unique. There's not anybody in the world like you. There never has been. There never will be. When God made you He broke the mold. God does not create carbon copies, He only creates originals. You're unique. If you were to search the whole world, you wouldn't find two people who had the same footprint or fingerprint or voiceprint. You are unique. Why did God make you different from every person who's ever lived? Why did He go to all that trouble? Because He wants you to know how special you are, how much you matter to Him. You are unique
*I am wonderfully complex !
The fact is, you are so complex many times we are a mystery to ourselves. Have you ever acted in a certain way that surprised you? Have you ever said something and later thought, "What was I thinking when I said that?" Have you ever felt a certain way and later thought, "Why do I feel this way? What's happening to me?" We are mysteries to ourselves. Have you ever been in a group and everybody reacted one way to a circumstance and you found yourself reacting in the exact opposite way to everyone else in the group? Inside you're thinking, "What's wrong with me?" There's nothing wrong with you, you're just unique.
*I was shaped for a purpose!
God created everything in the world for a purpose, the Bible says, including you. You're not here by accident. You're not just taking up space. God made you for a reason. You were designed by God and it was His idea. It's not a mistake. You were planned before birth. God did not simply sit down at a computer and randomly access a bunch of components and throw it all together and out came you. The bible says every clearly that you were purposefully, personally, orderly planned and designed by God. His loving hand made you exactly the way you are. You're not an accident. God had a plan in the genetic codes of your life. He didn't just throw it all together. You are you because God wanted you to be you. Your uniqueness is what God wants you to offer to the world.
In this series we're not going to talk about ministry, we're going to talk about how your shape affects every other area of your life -- your relationships, your career, your finances, your retirement, your enjoyment, your hobbies, your recreation -- how God uses your shape in every other area of life.
The Bible says you're a combination of five different factors.
I. THE FIVE PARTS OF MY GOD-GIVEN SHAPE
Spiritual gifts
1 Corinthians 7:7 “But each one has his own gift from God, one in this manner and another in that.”
There are at least twenty listed in the Bible. We're going to look at them in detail. Every believer has at least one and your gift is to be used to benefit others. Every time you do something and you do it well, you do it and you enjoy doing it, you are revealing your giftedness. God says every believer has a spiritual gift. We're going to look at how that impacts your work, your life, your job, your career, your family, all of that.
Heart
It's what drives you, what motivates you. All of us have different motivations, different drives, different interests. Would you agree there are some things you care about very deeply and there are other things you couldn't care less about? That's revealing your heart. This causes a lot of conflict in marriage. We have different hearts.
Revelation 17:17 “For God has put it into their hearts to fulfill His purpose.”
Philippians 2:13 “For it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.”
God puts desires in your heart. The way you discover what your heart is, your basic motivation in life, is ask yourself: What do I love to do? What do I really love to do? What is it I think about when my mind is able to think about anything? What do I really dream about? What does my mind automatically turn to?
You cannot not get away from a basic interest that God has implanted in your life. You are unique in that. He's given you gifts and He's given you a heart, inborn interests. He says those are for a chosen purpose. It's not by accident that you have certain interests and other people have other interests. God wants different kinds of motivations in life to accomplish different things.
Abilities
A lot of people think they don't have any abilities. Yes, you do. You just don't recognize them as abilities. Researchers have shown that the average person has between 500 and 700 different kinds of abilities. That's just an average person. If you can raise your hand that's an ability. You have many, many different kinds of abilities. God says that this is part of how He shapes us. Some of you are interested in computers. Some of you are scared to death of computers. Some of you have a natural ability with mechanical things. Many are good with numbers. Many are good with words. Many are good at speaking. We all have different abilities. Some people have the ability to work with people. Some people have abilities in music. Some people can think great ideas and abstract thoughts and put them all together. Some people have mechanical minds, engineering minds. God gives you those abilities. You may have an ability to entertain. Other people fall flat on their face when they try to entertain. You may have an ability to cook. You may have an ability to draw, to speak, to recruit, to research, to landscape, to build.... We all have different abilities. Those abilities are not by accident. God gave them to you for a purpose.
1 Corinthians 12:6 “And there are diversities of activities, but it is the same God who works all in all.”
Exodus 31:3 “And I have filled him with the Spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship.”
2 Corinthians 3:5 “Our sufficiency is from God.”
Personality
Personality refers to three things: the way you act, the way you feel, and the way you think. The root of your personality is the way you think, because the way you think determines the way you feel and the way you feel usually determines the way you act. Even the Bible says the root of your personality is your thought life.
Proverbs 4:23 “Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life.”
Everybody agrees that personality is very complex. We'll look at that in this series. Researchers have discovered there are at least 18,000 different personality traits. When you put those in combinations, the combinations are endless. In number of personality traits, you are very complex.
Years ago there used to be a debate over "Is personality something you're born with or is it something that's acquired through the environment?" If you ever took Developmental Psych in college it's the issue Nature or Nurture. Which is it? That used to be a big debate. There's no doubt about it anymore. Over the years, study after study shows that the moment a child is born they already have a set pattern of some personality characteristics long before any environment affects them from the outside world. Anybody who's a parent of two or more children knows that.
Your personality is a complex part. It's part of your shape ‑- your gifts, your heart, your ability, your personality. God wants to use your personality for a purpose. He gave it to you. It's a sign to you. It's not just something that came accidentally. He shaped you with it for a reason.
Experiences
Romans 8:28 “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.”
God is both organized and purposeful in planning the personal experiences he prepares for us. He uniquely allows things in your life. He doesn't cause them all but He sees them and He allows even the bad to bring good out of your life. He wants to work through your experiences.
In the last session of this series we're going to talk about four kinds of experiences that God uses in your life. We'll conclude the series talking about how to get the most out of the experiences you're having. God never wastes a hurt.
These are the five things we're going to be looking at the next several weeks. Spiritual gifts, Heart, Ability, Personality, Experiences. These five things make you, you. What can we say about your shape before we even get into the details?
Three things.
My SHAPE is
*Inter-related
You are a complex combination of gifts and heart and personality and abilities and experiences. They all work together. Each element influences the other. You are a combination of them.
*Fixed
It's stable. It endures. It's constant. It's fixed by God. Your shape does not change. As you go through different stages in life you have different expressions but your shape demonstrates itself very early in life and it continues with you for a lifetime. You're not basically any different from when you got started -- the basic bent, the basic shape that God's made you.
So what happens at conversion? What happens when I'm born again? When you come to know Christ and you're converted, God doesn't slow you down, He just changes your direction. If you look at the life of Paul, all of the characteristics you saw in his life -- his zeal, his enthusiasm, his very sharp mind -- he still had after he became a Christian. It's just that God used them in a new direction, He channeled them in a new way. He didn't change his personality but he changed how he used it and he used it for good rather than for selfish purposes.
*Irrepressible
You cannot not be you. It's all you can be. There's no escaping you being you. You can try to be like somebody else but your real self will spurt through. If you enjoy doing something over and over you'll repeat it. It becomes a pattern in your life. The fact is, if your job does not allow you to express your basic shape -- who you are -- it's irrepressible, so you'll find some way to express it if you can't do it at work. Maybe through a hobby or at church -- some way.
A secret of a strong organization for those of you who are CEO's is to put people in positions that they're shaped for. Then you don't have to motivate them. This is their niche, where they fit.
Why must I understand my S.H.A.P.E.?
Why should I bother to understand how God has shaped me? Why should we spend several weeks looking at this? Four benefits.
It impacts every area of my life!
First, a random list of issues that your shape explains. Once you understand your shape it explains how you respond to authority. It explains how you handle criticism, how you like to be led. The way God has made you and designed you explains how you deal with confrontation, how you handle power and freedom, how you make friends, why you lose interest in a task and when you do it, why you find it hard to get started in a new activity sometimes. Your shape explains how you deal with guilt, why you emphasize what you do, why you're popular or you're unpopular, why you get close to people or why you don't get close to people. It's all explained by your shape that God gave you. Your shape explains what makes you mad, what makes you sad, what makes you worried, what makes you happy, what makes you fearful. Because it's you! That's why this may be one of the most important series that I could do.
Four benefits of building your life around your shape, discovering what are your spiritual gifts, your heart, your abilities, your personality, your experiences -- looking at them and then building your life on the way God has shaped you.
It reduces stress. Comparison stresses us. It's dumb to compare yourself. You stop comparing yourself to others. You stop trying to do what you're not gifted to do. You build on your strengths. You recognize your limitations. You maximize what you're good at and don't worry about the rest. That's a stress reducer.
It increases success. What is success? It's not making a lot of money. I know a lot of people making a lot of money who aren't successful. Success is knowing God's will and being right in the center of it. Success is being what God meant you to be. It's figuring out who you are and then being it! Finding your niche and saying, "That's me!" That's success.
Life change. I like that term because we want to help develop, to position you, so you can make a significant difference with your life in this world. I think one of the things we ought to do is help teenagers discover their shape before they get out into the market place so we can help position them for success. Rather than like most of us, we had to go through four or five different trial and error decisions
Education should help people move that way. Your shape determines how you learn. Only about 25% learn by reading and studying, others learn by listening, discussing, by actually doing it, seeing it modeled. If you happen to learn the way the school system teaches you get "A's" but if you don't happen to learn that way you probably don't get very good grades. It has nothing to do with your intellect. It has everything to do with your shape. We learn different ways. Schools ought to teach different ways because people are shaped differently.
The implications of what I'm talking about here are mind-blowing! But it increases your success.
It deepens satisfaction. A satisfying life is when you are doing what you're shaped to do, what God made for you to do. Freedom comes from doing what you're gifted to do. You enjoy what God made you to be. All of a sudden you feel the love of God a whole lot more! Because you're in harmony with His plan.
It builds self esteem. Doing what you're shaped to do builds self esteem. There's an epidemic of low self esteem in our society today. Most people do not like themselves if the truth were known! They don't like themselves. One of the reasons, studies say over 50% of all the people in their jobs are in the wrong jobs. I believe that genuine, not pop psychological self esteem, but genuine self esteem is built on two biblical truths. Not on raising yourself up by your boot straps or positive thinking or "I'm OK, you're not so hot!" but genuine self esteem is built on two things:
1) The truth that you matter to God. Jesus Christ proved it. He died on the cross. He didn't die for junk. He died for you. Jesus Christ proved how much you matter to God by giving His life on the cross for you.
2) You were shaped by God for a purpose. You matter to God and you were shaped by God for a purpose.
