Insight #5: Personal Abilities and Strengths

How I am Shaped

In this series of exercises, we are going to look at how you are shaped. There are many facets we could include, but we are going to focus on four:

• Abilities
• Personality
• Experiences
• Spiritual Gifts (For Christians)

Insight #5: Personal Abilities and Strengths

Why Understanding Your Strengths Is Important

1. People are most effective when they know and use their strengths.
2. Many, if not most, people do not know their strengths.
3. Because of misunderstanding Scripture, some Christians have one or the other theological misunderstandings on strengths.

We have an interesting paradox in the Christian community because we have two streams that impact this skill.

 “Total Weakness versus Total Strength”

The “holiness” stream emphasized the depravity of man to the degree that many people came to see any acknowledgement of personal strength as pride, i.e. sin. Some people in this stream seem to advocate a philosophy of “Total Weakness”.

• They emphasize that we can do nothing in ourselves.
• Their favorite verse is “Don’t think more highly of yourself…”
• They seem to do everything they can to build a negative self-image

The other stream seems to advocate a philosophy of “Total Strength”

• Their favorite verse is “I can do all things…!” sometimes to the extreme of forgetting “…through Christ.”
• They emphasize “We are children of the King” and “We can do anything”.
• They seem to do everything they can to build a positive self-image.

If we deny we have ability, we are denying God, for it is God who gives us strength and abilities.

If we take credit for our strength and abilities, we also deny God, for it is God who gives us these abilities.

4. God has given every Christian some areas of strength.
5. Almost all strengths taken to extremes can produce negative results.[1]

In this session we will focus on abilities and strengths. We will use four exercises and then a summary sheet

• Exercise #1 – Abilities Profile
• Exercise #2 – 26 Specialized Abilities
• Exercise #3 – Personal Abilities and Strengths
• Exercise #4 – Reflective Questions
• Summary sheet

Bonus Worksheet for seeing the abilities and strengths in others.

Here is the link to the worksheets for this exercise: Insight #5 Abilities

 

[1] Marcum, Dave, Steve Smith, and Mahan Khalsa. businessThink: Rules for Getting It Right–Now, and No Matter What! New York: Wiley, 2002. Page 37