Ep. 16 – The Holy Ghost from A to Z: Expands Your *Gifts* and Talents

Whether you need help recognizing, developing, or using your gifts and talents, the Holy Ghost will surely be a valuable companion to you.

The Holy Ghost from A to Z comes out in 3 weeks—pre-order it today!

Outline

• The Holy Ghost from A to Z: What the Spirit Can Do for You (by Liz Kazandzhy) will be published on June 14
• Quote from G – Expands Your *Gifts* and Talents
  • When you involve the Spirit in the process of developing your talents, He will accelerate your growth, expand your abilities, and increase your endurance. He can reveal to you how best to cultivate your talents, and He can lead you to opportunities for further development. As President Benson taught, “Men and women who turn their lives over to God will find out that He can make a lot more out of their lives than they can.”
  • When I had the help of the Spirit, I was able to write this book with “strength beyond my own,” but whenever I did something to offend the Spirit, I was “left to [my] own strength” and wasn’t nearly as effective
• Takeaway
  • Write a list of your gifts and talents, and then say a prayer asking the Spirit to reveal to you what you may have missed. Finally, choose one of those gifts and decide how you could use it to bless someone else’s life.
• Learn more about The Holy Ghost from A to Z

Transcript

I’m Liz Kazandzhy, and you’re listening to the cozy little podcast “Latter-day Saint Book Nook,” where we talk about books from a gospel perspective. Whether fiction or nonfiction, religious or not, great books are like wells of wisdom just waiting to be drawn from, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do. So if you love books, and you love the gospel of Jesus Christ, you’re in the right place. Come and learn from the best books to help you live your best life!

Hey everyone! Welcome to episode 16. Today will be a short episode based on my book, The Holy Ghost from A to Z, which comes out in exactly 3 weeks, so that’s super exciting. I have been working very hard lately to get the audiobook ready, so when it’s released, you can choose between the paperback, the ebook, or the audiobook.

Anyway, today’s episode is based on the G chapter, which is about the Spirit’s ability to expand your gifts and talents. We learn from Moroni 7 that spiritual gifts “are given by … the Spirit of God unto men, to profit them,” and the the Holy Ghost is an incredible guide that can help you discover, develop, and use your gifts and talents.

Quote from the G chapter

So, here is a quote from the chapter about this:

When you involve the Spirit in the process of developing your talents, He will accelerate your growth, expand your abilities, and increase your endurance. He can reveal to you how best to cultivate your talents, and He can lead you to opportunities for further development.

As President Benson taught, “Men and women who turn their lives over to God will find out that He can make a lot more out of their lives than they can.”

So I experienced this blessing as I was writing this book. I wrote it in a little over a month, which looking back, is actually pretty incredible. Almost all my writing was done in the late evening, after the kids were in bed, and God blessed me with both the desire and the energy to write day after day—even after days that should have left me completely exhausted and unable to write. But I felt that power beyond my own, guiding me to know what to write and helping me find just the right scriptures and quotes to weave into my writing.

Now, there was one night that was different. I had written most, if not all, of the book, and I wanted to work on the blurb—you know, the description that goes on the back of the book and in the summary section of Amazon. It’s a pretty important paragraph, but it’s also short, so I thought it’d be pretty easy to write out.

Well, it wasn’t. It took me forever, and I had the worst writer’s block ever. I couldn’t focus for the life of me, I couldn’t get the words to flow, I couldn’t figure out how best to organize the sentences, and it was just awful. It seriously took me like an hour and a half to write 200 words.

Well, when I was finally done, I went to bed and started saying my nightly prayer, and I thought, “Wow, that was hard. I wasn’t feeling the Spirit’s help at all, like I normally do.” And then the Holy Ghost opened my eyes to realize that earlier that evening, right before I sat down to write the blurb, I had done something to offend Him. I hadn’t realized it at the time—I only realized it later after looking back. And I thought of that phrase that’s used in the Book of Mormon when the Nephites were trying to fight the Lamanites, but because of their wickedness, they were “left in their own strength” (Helaman 4:13).

Well, turns out that’s exactly what happened to me. All of those nights where I was able to write a ton and just have the right words and phrases flow constantly—that wasn’t because of me, that was because of the Spirit! And when I lost the Spirit, I lost that gift, and it was kinda crazy to see how weak of a writer I actually am without His help!

So anyway, that was a very humbling experience. Thankfully, once I repented, the next writing session I had was so much better—I knew just what to write, how to write it, and how to organize my thoughts most effectively.

So the point is, as President Benson said, God can make a lot more out of your life than you can. Yes, there are plenty of people who have incredible talents yet don’t give the glory to God or involve Him in developing those talents. But if you do choose to involve Him—if you ask for His help in discovering, developing, and using your talents—He will truly bless you with strength beyond your own and direct you and your gifts in the best way possible.

This Week’s Takeaway

And so, for this week’s takeaway, I invite you to write a list of your gifts and talents, and then say a prayer asking the Spirit to reveal to you what you may have missed. Then continue to add to that list as those ideas come to mind. And finally, choose one of those gifts and decide on one way you could use that gift to bless someone else’s life.

Well, that’s all for today’s episode. If you haven’t pre-ordered the book yet, feel free to go and do that. You can visit ldsbooknook.com/holyghost or just Google “The Holy Ghost from A to Z” and you’ll find it on several websites. Thank you for listening, and I hope you have a great week!

Thanks for listening to Latter-day Saint Book Nook, hosted by Liz Kazandzhy! If you enjoyed this episode and you’d like to support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. You can also visit ldsbooknook.com to stay up to date with me and the podcast. Thanks again, and I’ll talk to you next time!