When Life ChangesSample

 When It’s Not About You 

The Bible gives us a number of stories where God calls people to face challenge and change. Their responses—sometimes heroic, sometimes humorous—reflect our own. Like us they panicked. Like us they offered excuses.

Jeremiah was too young. 

Gideon too afraid. 

Moses too shy. 

And yet God used them. We call them heroes.

When God calls me to something new, here’s how my internal dialogue usually goes (I don’t audibly hear God’s voice—just humor my writer’s imagination here):

God: “Hey, Elizabeth, I have new things for you to do. They’re exciting, but they’re scary.” (Flashes a big grin and a thumbs-up.)

Me: “But Lord. . . I’m not ready. I’m not righteous enough. Not brave enough.”

I sit waiting with my humble face on. Waiting for Him to encourage me. He smiles and I lean forward, eager for reassurance and maybe a compliment or two. He puts a hand on mine and says, “I will be with you.”

(Long pause.) Me: “That’s it? Your entire speech? But do You mean—do You mean I don’t matter?”

God (chuckling): “Of course you matter. But this isn’t about you. It’s about Me. It’s about Me fulfilling My purposes through you.”

I must still look discouraged because He says, “Don’t you see? This takes the pressure off. You can stop worrying so much about yourself—your qualifications, your weaknesses, your regrets. You, you, you.”

And as He speaks, something releases inside me. A pressure, a tension I didn’t even know I’d been carrying. I roll His words around in my mind: It’s not about me. It’s about Him. 

When we study the people God called in Scripture, we see that He responded to different people with different excuses in the exact same way. He simply said, “I am with you.” God’s answer was God.

And this tells us something profound, a fear-taming, game-changing, life-giving truth: God’s call wasn’t about the people He called—God’s call was about Him. It was and is and always will be about Him.

And guess what? God was—and is and always will be—fully qualified.

God is wise enough. Righteous enough. Brave enough.

When God calls you, it’s not about you—it’s about Him. When God is with you, you are qualified for your call. When God calls us to go, He is with us, and He is all we need.