Talents and the Gifts of Wisdom and Knowledge
- stephenstrent7
- May 10
- 9 min read
Saint Jerome Writing, by Caravaggio (1605-6); Wikipedia
Where Science Meets the Doctrine and Covenants, for the Come Follow Me lesson May 12-18; Doctrine and Covenants 46-48
According to the parable of the talents, as told in Matthew 25:14-28, a certain number of “talents” was given to three servants. The two wise servants doubled their talents whereas the foolish servant buried the one talent he had been given and didn’t develop another. The application of that parable in our time is that we are all given “talents”, whereas other talents, which we were not initially given, must be developed.
One talent I certainly was not blessed with is writing. I can’t spell, sometimes my spell-check doesn’t even know what I’m trying to spell. I was functionally illiterate until I was about 14, when my oldest sister, Shirley, convinced me to read The Iliad, the first real book (not just a picture book) I ever read. However, I still was unable to write an acceptable essay. None-the-less, I had a burning desire/need to communicate my thoughts and ideas. So, I plunged into writing. I even sat in on a writing course the first year I taught at ISU. But writing has always been a struggle for me. I have had dozens of books, papers, and grants rejected, mainly because of my inability to adequately convey my ideas in writing. Even with my struggles, however, I have managed to publish dozens of scientific papers and around fifty books—half of them textbooks.
What we call talent, in my opinion, is actually the gift of dogged persistence. There is a story of a man who listened to a woman play a beautiful piano piece. When she finished, he said, “I would give anything to be able to play the piano like that.” She answered, “No you wouldn’t. I have given many hours every day for many years learning to play like this.”
One of my talents is art. When I was young, I spent hours drawing and painting. I became pretty good at certain aspects of art, but I never became great, largely because, as I grew older, my time was drawn away from art toward other things, such as scientific research and teaching. When I first started teaching at ISU, I taught anatomy the same way I had learned it—by projecting lots of Kodachrome slides. Part of my start-up budget was for Kodachrome slide film, and I made hundreds of slides.
I have always paid very close attention to student feedback in my classes. The feedback I received from my anatomy students was that whereas the Kodachrome slides were great, my students had nothing to transfer to their notes. They were right. So, I abandoned all the slides I had made and started drawing on the chalkboard. I took advantage of my artistic talent to make elaborate drawings. Subsequent students liked the drawings but commented that what they had in their notes were copies of the finished chalk-board drawings without seeing the steps leading up to the final product. Again, they were right.
About that time, a new computer program became available called PowerPoint—and I began using it as soon as it came out in 1987. I have been using it ever since. Again, I used my artistic talent to draw the same kinds of figures I had drawn on the chalk-board, but now I could save intermediate steps of the drawings on sequential slides. I could also bring back into my lectures the “Kodachrome”-type images in my lectures. I could then give each student a complete copy of the PowerPoint presentation for each lecture. I have literally hundreds of PowerPoint lectures filed away.
Once I became very proficient at using PowerPoint, I also used that ability in one of my hobbies: designing model castles. I have designed dozens of 3D castles for school children and other people to cut out and construct. I have also created dozens of party supplies for exotic parties using my ability with PowerPoint.
Even though a large portion of a talent comes from hours of hard work to develop and refine it, we also recognize that people have different skill sets from a very early age. I persisted at art, not only because I was fascinated by it, but because even my early attempts turned out fairly good results. Where did that innate talent come from? I have often wondered if “inherent” talent was developed by millions of years of hard work in the premortal world. However, there apparently is some amount of genetics involved in certain talents—although the actual genetic-molecular mechanism has not yet been elucidated for most talents.
One example of a physiological basis for a talent is what we refer to as “perfect pitch”. In simple terms, our ears register the sound of a given pitch over a relatively broad range. Then nerve impulses from the brain inhibit auditory cells that are certain distances from the maximum response—allowing only signals from peak-performing auditory cells to reach the brain. The width of the inhibition may vary greatly from person to person. In some people, with “perfect pitch”, the acceptable range is very narrow. For other people, who “can’t carry a tune in a bucket”, the range is so wide that they can hardly distinguish one note from another. This system is apparently mainly hard-wired and it is as yet unclear if much struggle and work can change that. None-the-less, I love the movie My Fair Lady, and the implications for what can be accomplished with grit and hard work.
There is one famous case, however, of talent and inherent ability clashing: Eşref Armağan has a passion for painting but he was born blind. His father taught him the abstract concepts of color and perspective and Eşref, though he has never seen either color or perspective, has applied those abstractions to his acrylic paintings by his remarkable sense of touch, and he has become a world-renowned painter. Check out his wonderful paintings.
In many ways, I consider a gift of the spirit as being very much like a talent. If one has a given spiritual gift, he or she is not necessarily born with it. Like a talent, gifts of the spirit may take years to develop and perfect. We are admonished in Doctrine and Covenants 46:8, “Wherefore, beware lest ye are deceived; and that ye may not be deceived seek ye earnestly the best gifts, always remembering for what they are given…” So, just as with talents, we are admonished to expand our repertoire of spiritual gifts. How do we do that? By hard work, just as with a talent.
Every one of us is given at least one gift of the spirit—even though I think many people don’t perceive what their gift is. We are told in Doctrine and Covenants 46:11-12, “For all have not every gift given unto them; for there are many gifts, and to every man is given a gift by the Spirit of God. To some is given one, and to some is given another, that all may be profited thereby.”
Doctrine and Covenants 46:13-14 states, “To some it is given by the Holy Ghost to know that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that he was crucified for the sins of the world. To others it is given to believe on their words, that they also might have eternal life if they continue faithful.” It is my opinion that everyone who joins The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has received that second gift. However, I believe that far too many people, as soon as they have experienced that gift once, they burry it away, never again to experience that brief moment of supernal joy.
I consider wisdom and knowledge to be among the greatest of the spiritual gifts to seek after. I have been teaching in various Universities (BYU, Penn., UW, Roseman College of Dental Medicine, and ISU) every year since 1973. I officially retired in 2011, but I never stopped teaching. At age 76, I currently teach three courses each year to the dental students at ISU: Gross Anatomy, Histology, and Biochemistry. Although I have a lot of background in biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology; I had never taught biochemistry until spring semester 2024. I love it and I am having a great deal of fun teaching it. It seems that the older I am, the more insatiable is my thirst for knowledge. None-the-less, preparing to teach biochemistry and developing a whole new set of lectures was time-consuming and took a lot of hard work. Because of books I have written, especially The Infinite Creation, I have also delved into quantum physics and astrophysics. I often find myself going down a “rabbit hole” following some question about which I have to know how much scientists have discovered.
We are told in Doctrine and Covenants 46:17-18, “And again, verily I say unto you, to some is given, by the Spirit of God, the word of wisdom…To another is given the word of knowledge, that all may be taught to be wise and to have knowledge.”
Then we read those famous and history-making verses in James 1:5-6, “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.” One of my favorite verses is Proverbs 4:7, “Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.”
In the first General Conference, April 2018, after Russell M. Nelson became president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he stated, “Brothers and sisters, how can we become the men and women—the Christlike servants—the Lord needs us to be? How can we find answers to questions that perplex us? If Joseph Smith’s transcendent experience in the Sacred Grove teaches us anything, it is that the heavens are open and that God speaks to His children…Does God really want to speak to you? Yes! ‘As well might man stretch forth his puny arm to stop the Missouri river in its decreed course … as to hinder the Almighty from pouring down knowledge from heaven upon the heads of the Latter-day Saints.’”1
Then in 2020, President Nelson shared this statement with Jean B. Bingham, Relief Society General President: “They’re [the heavens] giving away all the secrets of the universe. They are. It takes an inquiring mind, one who’s really anxious to know what the truth is. And if you’ll ask God with a prayerful heart, with real intent, which means you intend to do whatever the consequences are, that He will manifest the truth of it unto you.”2
However, the now famous statement about revelation, made by President Nelson, is much older, dating from 1994, when he was an apostle. His fellow apostle, M. Russell Ballard stated, “There is a lesson to be learned from the study of the Doctrine and Covenants. Revelations are generally answers to questions. The Lord did not come and tap Joseph on the shoulder and say, ‘I have a revelation for you.’ But instead Joseph went to the Lord and asked to receive an answer. Time after time Joseph tells us how he would ask and how, in response, the revelation would come. Elder Russell Nelson recently expanded on this important principle. He said, ‘The Lord can only teach an inquiring mind.’ What an important lesson. The Lord doesn’t generally come to us—he waits for us to come to him and ask. Then he gives us the answer.”3
We are told in Doctrine and Covenants 42:61, “If thou shalt ask, thou shalt receive revelation upon revelation, knowledge upon knowledge, that thou mayest know the mysteries and peaceable things—that which bringeth joy, that which bringeth life eternal.”
However, wisdom is much like humility: when you are convinced you have it is when you can be certain that you haven’t. The Greek philosopher, Socrates, dismissed the claim by the “Men of Athens” that he was a wise man. He said that one Chaerephon once went to the Oracle of Delphi and asked her if there was anyone wiser than Socrates. The Oracle told Chaerephon that there was no one wiser. On learning of the oracular pronouncement, Socrates said he was astounded, because, on the one hand, it was against the nature of the Oracle to lie, but, on the other hand, he knew he was not wise. So, Socrates set out to find someone wiser than he, so he could take that person to the Oracle and prove to her that he was not the wisest. Socrates carefully questioned anyone who appeared to be a wise person. He questioned politicians, poets, and scholars, and, although he said that he occasionally found genius, Socrates said that he found no one who actually possessed wisdom. Each man he questioned was thought by the people around him to be wise, and each man thought himself wise. But try as he might, Socrates failed to find anyone who was truly wise. Therefore, he concluded that he must accept the judgement of the Oracle that he was wise, because he was aware that he was not wise.4
Trent Dee Stephens, PhD
References
1. Nelson, Russell M., Revelation for the Church, Revelation for Our Lives, April 2018 General Conference; churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2018/04/revelation-for-the-church-revelation-for-our-lives?lang=eng
3. M. Russell Ballard, What Came from Kirtland [Brigham Young University fireside, Nov. 6, 1994], 8, speeches.byu.edu
4. Socrates’ Defense: Apology, by Plato, translated by Benjamin Jowett; classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html
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