All In: Faith UnfurledMostra

Have you ever been told that your past was too much for God to be able to use you? Do you ever feel like you are worthless because of bad choices made before you trusted Christ? Does your past haunt you? Let me introduce you to a woman who would be able to commiserate with you, and yet she is listed in Hebrews chapter eleven among the heroes of faith.

When we first meet Rahab in Joshua chapter two, she is committing what amounts to treason against her home city of Jericho by hiding the two Hebrew spies. Why would she do this? Rahab had come to faith in the God of Israel. She told the spies that the whole land had heard what God had done for Israel at the crossing of the Red Sea, and all the inhabitants of the land were trembling with fear.

Rahab received the Hebrew spies in peace and hid them from the soldiers sent by the king of Jericho. Because she demonstrated her faith in the God of Israel, God spared Rahab, her family, and anyone in her house when the rest of the city collapsed.

God did not stop using Rahab there. She would marry into the children of Israel and have a son named Boaz. Boaz would marry a girl named Ruth, and their grandson would be the father of the one and only King David. Rahab, the harlot girl from the Canaanite city of Jericho, would be the thirty-fifth great grandmother of the Messiah, Jesus Christ.

Rahab did not let her past prevent her from living an unfurled, all-in faith. She recognized the power of God, and that same power transformed her life. She went from a woman of ill repute to an elevated woman in the lineage of Jesus.

Believer, are you allowing your past to drag you down and hold you back from an all-in faith? Let God change your future. Forget the things which are behind and reach forward to the things which are before (Philippians 3:13). God can still use you. He is the God of second, third, and fourth chances.