Use of gifts and talents
Testing and approving the will of God again involves a negative and a positive, as Paul points out when he continues:
For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you. 4 Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, 5 so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.
In keeping with the “grace,” or gift, of the public ministry given to Paul, he now shares a useful piece of advice with his readers. Negatively, he says, “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought.” Then turning that into a positive, he says, “Think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you.”
The second half of that positive response poses some difficulty. Scripture nowhere speaks of saving faith as being given in different measures to different people. Saving faith saves. One person is not more saved than the next by virtue of having received more faith.
A factor contributing to the difficulty of this verse lies in the translation quoted above. The NIV and other translations that use a rendering such as “the measure of faith” convey the idea that faith is being measured. The original language, however, allows the words “of faith” to be understood as a possessive: faith’s measure or the measure that faith uses. With the latter understanding, Paul’s twofold advice would then read as follows: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure, or standard, that your God-given faith uses.
What standard, or measure, does faith use to assign proper worth and value to the individual Christian’s role? Paul suggests that a Christian’s role in the church is analogous to the role individual parts or members play in the human body. “Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.” “Each member belongs to all the others.” That is the harmonious relationship that exists among Christians when each one uses an individual God-given gift or talent for the common good.