A Gift Can Be Neglected and Nobody Ever Told Me

I grew up believing that if God gave a person something, it stayed given.

Not in a sentence anybody said out loud. It was in the air. A gift was a permanent installation, like a wall socket. You either had it or you did not, and if you had it, then whenever the moment came, you would open your mouth or pick the thing up and it would be there, because God put it there and God does not take things back.

Then I read a letter Paul wrote to a young man he loved, and there is an instruction in it that I had to read three times.

Neglect not the gift that is in thee.

Neglect. That is a maintenance word. You cannot neglect something that takes care of itself. Nobody says do not neglect your bones. The word only makes sense about a thing that will deteriorate if it is left alone, and Paul uses it about something God gave, that was named over Timothy publicly, with hands laid on him.

So a gift can be neglected. Which means a gift requires something from the person who has it.

Nobody told me that, and it cost me about two years.

The instruction is maintenance, not acquisition

Read the verse and then the one after it, because they belong together.

Neglect not the gift that is in thee, which was given thee by prophecy, with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery. Meditate upon these things; give thyself wholly to them; that thy profiting may appear to all. (1 Timothy 4:14-15, King James Version)

Give thyself wholly to them, that thy profiting may appear to all.

Profiting. That word means progress, advancement, the visible difference between where a man was and where he is. And Paul assumes it should be visible. He expects that if Timothy gives himself to this, people around him will be able to see him getting better.

That is a strange thing to say about a gift, if a gift is a finished installation. You do not get better at having a wall socket.

You are meant to improve at the thing God gave you, and He has never once handed anybody a finished ability. That is not me demoting a gift. 1 Timothy 4:15 uses the language of visible progress on purpose, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a person able to work at something without feeling like the working insults the Giver.

Given and grown are not opposites

I want to hold both halves, because people fall off one side or the other.

One side says it was given, so I do not touch it, and any effort would be striving in the flesh. The other side says I built it, and God gets a nod at the ceremony.

Paul does neither. He says the gift is in thee, given, named, real, and he says give thyself wholly to it. Both. He does not experience any tension there at all, and I think that is because he understood something about how God works that we keep losing.

God gives capacity. People spend capacity. That is the pattern from Deuteronomy 8:18 all the way through, and it never once becomes the other thing.

You have a real gift, and working at it has never once made it less of one. 1 Timothy 4:14 calls it given and 4:15 calls for whole hearted effort in the same breath, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a person from splitting those two apart.

What neglect actually looks like

Here is what I have found, and it is much less dramatic than the word sounds.

Neglect is almost never a decision to stop. It is a slow substitution. The thing gets pushed by one legitimate item after another, and every single one of those items is real, and no individual week looks like abandonment.

And the second stage is worse than the first. After a stretch of not touching it, a person gets rusty, and then touching it means being confronted with the rust, and the rust is embarrassing, so the not touching starts protecting itself.

That is when a gap becomes a wall. Not from neglect, but from what the neglect made it feel like to come back.

I know exactly where that wall is in my own life. There was a stretch where I did not write for a while and coming back was humiliating, and the humiliation, not the busyness, is what made the stretch long.

You are able to come back to it rusty, and the rust has never once been a disqualification. 1 Timothy 4:14 tells a man not to neglect a gift, which assumes he could and might, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets somebody past the embarrassment of a bad first hour back.

He was young and he was told to keep going

There is one more thing in that chapter and it is a word for somebody specific.

Right before this, Paul tells him to let nobody despise his youth. And right after, he says take heed to thyself and to the doctrine, continue in them.

Continue. That is the word for keeping on doing a thing that is already underway, which means Timothy's problem was not starting. It was the long middle, where nobody is impressed anymore and nothing feels new, and the temptation is not to quit dramatically but to drift.

That is where most gifts go. Not in a crisis. In the middle.

You are in the middle of something, and the middle has never once been evidence that it stopped mattering. 1 Timothy 4:16 says continue in them, and the Spirit of God is the one who supplies persistence in exactly the stretch where nothing feels like it is moving.