The God Who Stays: Life Looks Different With Him by Your SideShembull

God Stays with Imperfect People

Sometimes in church, we talk about grace and love, but what we really expect is perfection. We talk about the fact that we all have fallen short and are sinful, but we dress up and pretend that we are blameless. Sometimes I wish church started a little bit more like a recovery meeting where we just admitted our faults right out of the gate: “Hi, I’m Matthew West, and I’m a sinner and have fallen short of the glory of God.” And the congregation would say, “Hey, Matthew.” Maybe we are looking in all the wrong places for approval. No one is perfect, yet sometimes it feels like we expect perfect appearances inside the church walls. As a result, I meet many people who believe God won’t stay with them because of their imperfections when the exact opposite is true. God always chose the imperfect people to do His best work. If you look through the Bible, you will notice that He seems to go for those second-stringers, the not-quites, the people who don’t seem to have it all together. He chooses them for His team. He uses them to do His most important stuff.

It is interesting to pay close attention to the Bible characters we think of as great heroes. Why? Because they were all completely flawed. They were the people who had the biggest mess-ups. They were the ones who lied, cheated, ran away, or worse. Let’s start with Abraham in the Old Testament, who was so cowardly he even lied about his wife, claiming she was his sister so the king wouldn’t kill him. There was Moses, the guy who led Israel out of slavery, who actually murdered an Egyptian soldier and then ran away to hide from the authorities. He also begged God not to send him to see Pharoah and tried to come up with excuse after excuse for why he wasn’t qualified for the job. Then, of course, the prophet Jonah ran away from God’s calling so fast that it took a giant fish to convince him to do anything right. And King David, who was the author of many of the psalms and the man the Bible calls “a man after [God’s] own heart (1 Sam. 13:14),” had an affair with a woman named Bathsheba—and didn’t just stop there. He murdered her husband, who also happened to be one of his top generals, to hide the fact that David had gotten her pregnant. The prophet Elijah, the very guy who watched God bring down fire from the sky in front of a bunch of angry Baal worshipers, hid in a cave when things weren’t going his way. And that is just a handful of people from the Old Testament.

Carefully read through the genealogy of Jesus in the book of Matthew, and you will find that the people included in Jesus’ family tree are some questionable characters: liars, adulterers, murderers, and even a prostitute. But what about the twelve men who were closest to Jesus? The guys called to be His disciples were all outcasts in one way or another. One might have even had a lazy eye! Many were fishermen who weren’t smart or wealthy enough to make the cut and stay in school past their fifteenth birthday. One of them was a tax collector who his own people detested. The disciples were the dropouts and the second-string players of their day.

My favorite of all of them is Peter. His name means “the rock.” Peter was one of the biggest talkers in the group of disciples. He swore he would stand by Jesus through thick and thin. But he was the very one who denied he even knew Jesus three different times. Despite this monumental mess-up, Peter was the disciple whom Jesus later chose to build His church: “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it” (Matt. 16:18). It’s pretty clear throughout the Bible that God not only hangs out with the imperfect people but He seems to choose them to do His most important work! If God can use these people, maybe we should be bolder and more confident that Jesus can use us as well.

God uses us in all our imperfections because of His grace. He seems to fortify the areas where we are weak just to show us His strength. I am constantly in awe of God’s grace toward me. I think that is why I write about it so much.

I sing about grace often because it is what I’ve always needed. It makes me think of those verses in Ephesians 2: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast” (vv. 8–9).

One of my favorite things about traveling the country with my job is how I get to see all the amazing stories of the work God is doing in the lives of ordinary people. It seems like God takes the very things that break us and uses them to heal others. He always works through our weaknesses to make us the best versions of ourselves.

We are never too broken or too imperfect for God to stay with us. And it is never too late for God to use us.

Respond

Have you received the gift of grace offered by Jesus? Explain the experience.

Describe a time when the Lord used an imperfection in you for His glory.

Prayer

Lord Jesus, thank You for Your sacrifice on a cross for me and Your desire for me to spend eternity with You. Amen.