Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Patrick Miller. And I'm Keith Simon. Right now we're

learning what it looks like to follow Jesus by working our way through the Gospel of Luke. Have you

ever taken advantage of a gift?

You know, used it for some purpose that the gift giver never really intended?

You know, maybe your mom and dad, they give you a car and you drive it like you're in a demolition

derby, which is of course the exact opposite of what they ever intended you to do with that vehicle.

Or maybe an art collector, he gives an up-and-coming artist some new brushes and some money to take on a new project and the painter the artist

uses all those gifts to paint something pornographic. Or maybe a new job offers to

pay for your move and you spend some of the money moving but you

actually spend a lot of the money buying yourself a very nice dinner along the way

or a scholarship fund it awards a full ride to a student and the student when they get to college barely gets anything above a sea.

In the modern world, we tend to idealize the idea of a gift as being something that should have no strings attached.

But like it or not, we all know intuitively at least that if someone misuses or destroys a gift

that we give them, when they do that, when they misuse it, when they destroy it, it not only harms the gift, it not only harms them, but it also harms us. It harms our relationship with them. The ancient world understood this perfectly well. They understood that gifts create

relationships and that a gift always requires in some sense reciprocation and that reciprocation was

using the gift as the gift giver intended. And it's not that that reciprocity the proper response. It never earned the

gift because that would make it not a gift at all, but they believed that that good

gifts produced the desired results that the gift givers intended.

So let me ask you a question.

How have you responded to God's gifts in your life? If he's given you the gift of life after all, I mean just in general if you

are living you have a gift from God. And not just that though, God has given you the gift of his

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