Get the appYour God Is Too Glorious: A 7-Day Devotional by Chad BirdSample
God's Qualifications
Things don’t turn out the way we imagined they would. Dream jobs can be a nightmare at times. Even Love Boat marriages can go the way of the Titanic. No one in Hollywood or Nashville knows our name. We never bask in our fifteen minutes of fame. Instead, we settle into a decidedly predictable life that is sometimes happy, often hard, and occasionally quite brutal.
In other words, our lives are exactly the kind of lives that God gets excited about. The more unimpressive our jobs are, the more lackluster our bio, the more we feel like we’re just a name on a list or a face in the crowd, the more we are the perfect venues for God’s ongoing work in this world. If God is anything, he is a God who has a thing for the normal. He is a God who turns our every expectation inside out.
The Scriptures are packed with illustrations of this tendency. To begin with, God goes out of his way to handpick the wrong people for his most important missions. The Bible is like the HR Handbook from Hell. Here’s everything you should not do when looking for the perfect candidate for a position.
Need a woman to become the mother of a promised son? Instead of choosing a robust twenty-five-year-old, the Lord taps a post-menopausal, wrinkled, ninety-year-old named Sarah for the job.
Need someone to lead the emancipation of slaves from the most powerful nation on earth, as well as to serve as the spokesperson for these oppressed people? Rather than choosing the ancient equivalent of a Navy SEAL or a quick-tongued Secretary of State, God handpicks a stuttering eighty-year-old shepherd named Moses who’s been on the lam for forty years after beating a man to death.
Book after book, from Genesis to Revelation, the Lord sends men and women on errands they are ill-qualified to fulfill. And nothing has changed in today’s world. He continues to buck our manmade religious systems by inserting men and women into them who don’t meet our qualifications. But they meet God’s. He’s delighted to use them in his kingdom to show all of us that it’s not by brainpower or brawn but by the Spirit of love that the Father gets things done.
When have you seen God do great things through someone who seemed entirely unqualified?
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About this Plan
Do you ever feel you’re the only one in the room without the impressive degree, the high-profile workday, the great calling? Yet God uses ordinary people to do extraordinary work. He may very well be hiding in your mundane commute, the late-night feeding, even that hundredth load of laundry you just did. May this week-long devotional remind you that God is in the most inglorious places—and uses the people there to change the world.
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We would like to thank Chad Bird and Baker Publishing for providing this plan. For more information, please visit: http://www.chadbird.com/yourgod
