I hope we all know that God uses broken people.
HE puts us back together and then uses us. Uses us for HIS honor and glory, not for ours. Our stories of reconciliations, redemptions, and renewals are not solely based on our merits or actions, but orchestrated and knit together according to HIS perfect and good will for us, if we love HIM, and are called according to HIS purpose.
So, I pray we all know that if we are in Christ, we are a new creation.
Now, what of the non-believer? Well, this is where I think the church biffs it.
As people we get distracted by a lot of things, right? Sometimes as believers we can also forget about just how broken we used to be before Christ. We can forget our own sins, where we faltered, how we messed up, who we hurt, and as a result of our very human forgetfulness we may get hung up on other people’s faults, sins, mess ups and how they’ve hurt us. I just lovingly ask my brothers and sisters in Christ: do you remember where Jesus found you?
We hear very cliché things like, “love the person, not the sin” and I pray that we haven’t heard that so much that we discount the truth in it, because it is true. People are not only the sum of their errors.
God will always be able to do exceedingly, abundantly more than we can ever imagine, let’s not (for a second) believe that HE cannot save someone. HE alone judges the heart. Our job… church… is simply to be a farmer. Plant seeds wherever we go.
And… when someone brings up to you who you were in the past, accept it. Understand that just as we get hung up on what others are doing, others may still be hung up on what you’ve done, or who you’ve been, and that needs to be understood. Oh… to live in a way that people would forget who I used to be. That’s the prayer of my heart.
To live in a manner where someone who knew me pre-Christ sees a difference in how I live, how I treat others, how I journey through tribulations and trials.
God uses broken people. He’s in the business of redeeming and saving and sometimes, it doesn’t look like we think it should. I hope we never turn into a bunch of Jonah’s, resenting God’s willingness to forgive people that we’ve determined are unforgivable. People that we believe we know so well that we cannot fathom a change in them. Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean Christ can’t do it.
There is a time and place to shake the sand off of our sandals. But… the danger is in never willing to get sand in our sandals to begin with; because, we have determined that the journey isn’t worth it.
God uses broken people. To resent that (even a little) doesn’t align with the character of God. Don’t be who you were before HIM, but don’t forget who you were either.