TayTay and Gifts of the Spirit
1/03/24
You’ve got your Taylor Swift haters out there who are just, “Gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate”, and your Swifties who are just, “Gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake”, to whatever beat Taylor throws down. I’m neither a ‘shaker’ or a ‘hater’ of Taylor Swift, I’m more of a curious bystander to the Swift phenomenon. However, I give credit where it’s due, and she is absolutely a gifted musician, singer, and entertainer. Her shrewd social media team and PR management I’m sure has helped build the Swift hype (the mania?) but still, there’s no denying the TayTay fever which has swept through Australia is due to her giftedness.
But from where does Taylor get such amazing gifts?
You may be surprised to know that she gets her gifts from the Spirit of God, the same way that you receive your gifts from God’s Spirit. In fact, your very life is the gift of God. This is true of all creatures in God’s creation. Life does not come from us, we do not generate life, or make ourselves. God makes and bestows life.
The General Operation of the Spirit.
You may be accustomed to only thinking about gifts of the Spirit in terms of holy gifts given to Christians by the Spirit, but in fact all people receive the Spirit’s gift of life regardless of their faith in Jesus or not. In theology, this is what is known as the general (ordinary) operation of the Spirit. By this general operation, the Spirit animates all living things. Psalm 104:27-30 provides a good example of this general operation of the Spirit:
“All creatures look to you to give them their food at the proper time …when you take away their breath (spirit), they die and return to the dust. When you send your spirit (breath), they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.”
The Spirit creates, preserves, and cherishes life. There is no creature on this earth who doesn’t owe their very life to the general operation of God’s Spirit. And so, Taylor Swift is ‘gifted’. She is gifted with life as all people are, and the Spirit has particularly gifted her life with exceptional musical and performative abilities. I don’t want to take away anything from her hard work, hours of practice, creativity, and voice training, but I do want us to see how those things have not been generated by Taylor from nothing. We all share in life gifted to us by the Spirit of God, even though our lives are not all gifted uniformly in ability, appearance, and experience, and even though we may cultivate or misuse the life we have received.
Understanding this general operation of the Spirit raises for us a much-overlooked aspect of the doctrine of sin. All life comes from God the Father by his Spirit, and in him all people live and move and have their being. And yet, rather than acknowledging that life is a gift from him, we sinfully assume life is our own possession to direct and to use as we see fit. We use the gift of his breath in our lungs to power our vision for life, rather than his vision of life. This is what Paul is getting at in his gospel proclamation to the Athenians in Acts 17. It is God himself who, “…gives everyone life and breath and everything else, …he made all the nations”, and he marks our time and place in history so that we might seek the one who gives us life and, “… perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us” (Acts 17:25-26). The problem is that we are ignorant of him and his gift of life, and we don’t use his gifts to, “Reach out for him”.
Can you see how sin in this sense isn’t connected to bad things you do, but to what we fail to do with the life he has given us? It’s not about whether you’re a good person or a bad person, it’s about acknowledging that your life is not your own, it’s about following the life-script from the author of life and not writing our own story. For a while, God has overlooked such ignorance but now, the revelation of eternal life in Jesus by his resurrection from the dead, means that God, “… commands all people everywhere to repent”, of this sin and turn to Jesus (Acts 17:30). This revelation is the special operation of the Spirit.
“All people are gifted life by the Spirit, but their life is made holy by the Spirit when they give their life in service of the Lord and his people.”
The Special Operation of the Spirit.
The special operation of the Spirit is to make people holy, and in this regard, he is called the Spirit of Holiness. He is called the Holy Spirit because he sanctifies, that is, he makes holy the lives of people who repent and confess that Jesus is Lord (1 Corinthians 12:3). All people are gifted life by the Spirit, but their life is made holy by the Spirit when they give their life in service of the Lord and his people. So, if Taylor Swift was to confess Jesus as her Lord and use her great talents in the service of Christ and his church, then her gift of life would be made holy by the Spirit. She would be sanctified and made a saint (a holy one) with all God’s people. What a thought! I’m tempted by Taylor’s fame and brilliance to think this would be the most amazing blessing for God’s people, imagine the new church songs she could write and record! I do hope Taylor finds life eternal in Jesus, but her holiness would be no more miraculous and extraordinary than it is for any of us to made holy by the Spirit.
How remarkable it is that anyone from the greatest to the least is able to give their life to Jesus as Lord. How astonishing it is that the Spirit brings the high and the lowly, the slave and the free, the Jew and the Gentile into the body of Christ. How astounding it is that the Spirit makes each part of the body indispensable, apportioning grace to each member so that the body may be built up in love as each part does its work. How wonderful it is that the Holy Spirit has made you a gift to the body of Christ for our common good in Christ Jesus. Praise God for the work of his Spirit.
