God Uses Unlikely People

Many a misguided promise has been made to God during times of crisis. The “If you’ll just let me live . . .” prayer has set more than a few people on a pathway that God never required. Until a person comes to know the heart of God, the default setting is to believe that what He wants most from us is service and sacrifice. Nothing could be further from our Father’s way of grace, but that misguided notion has created needless frustration for many a religious zealot who knew no better.

Twenty two year old Martin Luther’s pledge to become a monk during a lightening storm in 1505 certainly set him on a new course in life. True to his word, later that year he entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt and took his monastic vows the next year. He had just received a Master of Arts degree and had been preparing for law school, but now everything had changed so he backed away from his previous plans. After all, he had made a promise to God and, given what had been at stake, that promise couldn’t be forgotten.

Luther was a diligent student and was determined to please God, whatever it took. He spent long hours in prayer, fasted often, gazed on religious relics in hopes of nurturing his spirituality and was obsessed with confessing his sins. In fact, one time his confessor told him to go away and come back when he had something worth confessing.

Ironically though, as time passed he grew more and more frustrated with his own spiritual development. In spite of all his sincere efforts to become more holy, he found himself feeling more and more unholy and absolutely could not shake off the tormenting awareness of his own sinfulness. He tried and tried hard to be the person he thought God wanted him to be. He would later remark, "If anyone could have gained heaven as a monk, then I would indeed have been among them." He said, "I lost touch with Christ the Savior and Comforter, and made of him the jailor and hangman of my poor soul."

This phase in Luther’s life is important to recognize because it is an unavoidable part of the personal development of a grace revolutionary. Revolutionaries are passionate people by nature. That’s true even if what we are revolutionary about is our faith. Have you tried with all your heart to be the person you’ve believed God wants you to be but, like Luther, found yourself feeling more and frustrated instead of more and more free? If so, that’s good. You’re on the way to discovering the meaning of personal brokenness, a necessary step on the way toward the place of being mightily used by God.

As much as we might like to bypass brokenness, it just can’t be done if God is to really use our lives. Personal brokenness is the doorway to public usefulness in God’s kingdom. Jesus said it is only when the kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies that it will bring forth much fruit. In God’s economy of things, life comes out of death, strength comes out of weakness, and daylight breaks out of the darkness. That’s how it works.

The phase in life is one of restlessness. Don’t think that it’s a bad thing if you’ve felt restless because this time is actually a transitional stage. It’s a time when God is preparing you for a greater level of spiritual growth. The starting point isn’t restlessness about the church or other people, but about yourself and your own spiritual journey. Like Luther, many of us have experienced and thought the answer was to pour more effort into our spiritual walk. Ironically, God uses this time to bring us to the place where we realize the answer has nothing to do with our giving it more effort at all. Instead, it’s about discovering what it means to abandon all hope in ourselves and to rely entirely on His effort.

If you have always felt perfectly satisfied with your own spiritual journey; if you’ve never seen in yourself an inconsistency in your walk that nagged you and caused you to feel like you just couldn’t live up to what God expected; if you’ve never tried to boost your religious activity in an attempt to grow spiritually, what you’ll read here probably won’t connect to you. Those who think they have it all figured out and are in perfect step at all times aren’t candidates for grace. That’s not a criticism. That’s just the way it is.

If, on the other hand, you have seen in your own experience a gradual decline of enthusiasm in your Christian life; if you have dedicated and rededicated yourself to God with promises that you were going to do better in living the Christian life; if you have felt that your spiritual walk was a rollercoaster, an endless cycle of up and down ability to feel like you’re successfully living the Christian life and you felt that you had to find a way to consistently live the life you know you’re called to live, you may well be a grace revolutionary in the making. Some struggle a long time after committing themselves to God before they connect to the fact that it takes the same grace that brought them in to lead them on. Until they reach that place, they just keep giving it all they have.

Twelve years passed between the time Martin Luther entered the monastery and when he took the public stand in Wittenberg that would become the defining moment of his legacy. During that time, he tried with all his might to live a life that pleased God and gave him a sense of personal fulfillment, but as time passed he became increasingly unhappy. No matter what he tried, nothing worked. He became more and more miserable as he grappled with the whole concept of the righteousness of God and how a person can have it. He especially hated the passage that talked about living with the righteousness of God in our lives, because no matter how hard he had tried he could not achieve that goal. It became an obsession with him that caused him to feel rage at times, both toward himself and toward God. He found it almost maddening that despite all his efforts to walk a righteous pathway, the only thing he could find was a restless pathway and nothing he did could change that.

Don’t think for a minute that you don’t qualify to be a grace revolutionary because you aren't spiritually strong enough. As strange as it may sound, that is exactly what does qualify you. It is only when we are aware of our own weakness that we will truly trust in Gods strength because it is only then that we fully realize we have no other choice.

So if you’ve felt frustrated about your own life, take heart. God is using that dissatisfaction to move you into the place where He can transform you by His grace. Before we can be used by God to change the world around us He must change us. We have to become fully persuaded of the true nature of grace and personally experience the transformation it brings. We can’t take people to where we haven’t been. We must accept our personal weakness before we will ever learn to cast ourselves in complete abandon upon the empowering grace of God.

I was a believer for twenty-nine years before I began to understand this principle of brokenness. I thought what God wanted was for me to be more dedicated and to try harder. Like Luther and, I suspect like you, I often revved up my own religious rpm’s in an effort to move further down the road toward the sense that I was living the way God wanted me to live but, in spite of all my efforts, frustrations mounted and discouragement came on me often. I lived in what I have called the motivation -- condemnation -- rededication cycle.

People are leaving the traditional church world in droves for this very reason. They’ve been told that their greatest need is to be more committed to God when what they needed to hear is that God is fully committed to them. It is only when we realize this truth that we find the motivation and ability to fully commit ourselves into His hands.

Let me put it another way so that if you haven’t connected with this idea of brokenness yet, it may become clear with this explanation. If you’re waiting to get your act together before you will step up to act as an ambassador of Christ, spreading His grace in this world, you’ll wait forever.

Don’t think for a moment that God uses people who have worked out their spirituality to the place where they’re in a different league than you. The truth is they are more like you than you may want to know, but you need to know it because, by knowing that there are no Super Saints, you may be more likely to believe that God can use you to advance the cause of His grace in this world and, even more difficult than that these days, in His church.

One guy said to me, “If you only knew the things I’ve done, you’d know why God couldn’t use me.” “Really?” I asked. “Are the things you’ve done worse than murder? Adultery? Stealing? Lying? Drunkenness?” Read the list of those mentioned in Hebrews 11, the “faith-chapter” that lists those set forth for us as examples of faith from biblical history. Look at their lives individually. They did everyone of those things and more.

As you consider their sins, remember that the sinful things they did were, for the most part, after they had been called by God and began to follow Him. So don’t try to fall back on the yeah-but-my-sins-were-done-after-I-trusted-Christ excuse. So was theirs.

Check out that list in Hebrews 11. Then go back and look at the things the Old Testament tells us about what they did. After doing that, you may be inclined to ask, “Is this the best God can do if He wants to give us a list of people who had great faith and were mightily used by Him?” Yes, it is. So don’t think God can’t use you.

Don’t believe for one minute that anybody who sets himself up above you today, as if he has some spiritual advantage you don’t have, is telling you the truth either. This whole idea of there being super-saints in the church today who are somehow different from the rest of us is an enemy tactic meant to discourage us from thinking God can use us. When we see them we may feel like we don’t measure up, but just remember looks can be deceiving. In spite of the way some religious leaders present themselves to us, the truth is that people are just people. We all have the same kind of struggles, doubts, temptations and weaknesses. If you doubt that, then ask yourself again why God listed the kind of people He did in Hebrews 11. Maybe there’s a higher quality of saints in the world today? Maybe back then He listed them because there weren’t so many good examples as there are today? Yeah, right. You know that’s not true. People have always been the same and God has never looked for perfect people to use. He only looks for people who will completely trust Him – nothing else. You might not be able to clean up your act the way you’ve wanted to in the past but He isn’t asking you to do that. He’s just asking you to trust Him. You can do that much, can’t you?

There are no second-class citizens in God’s kingdom and you don’t have to think for one moment that you lack anything that would keep you from rising up at this very moment to be used by God. In Jesus Christ, you have been made complete because you have all of Him and in Him resides the fullness of Almighty God Himself.