Transcription
We have a very specific idea about the kind of person God uses. We think they must have been ready, prepared, somehow more qualified than the rest of us. We look at the heroes of scripture and we see the finished version, the deliverer, the king, the apostle who changed the world. But we almost never stop to ask, what did they look like before all of that? What were they doing the morning God showed up? Because the answer almost every single time is not what we would expect.
There is a phrase you have probably heard, "God doesn't call the equipped, he equips the called." It is true, but it doesn't go far enough. Because what scripture shows us again and again, across centuries, across every kind of human failure you can imagine, is something even more radical. God doesn't choose the qualified, he qualifies the chosen. And today we are going to watch him do it 10 times.
The first man on our list never deserved to be on any list at all. His name was Jacob, and his name meant exactly what he was, a grabber, a deceiver, a man who came into the world clutching his twin brother's heel and never really stopped clutching. He tricked his dying father. He stole his brother's birthright. He manipulated, schemed, and maneuvered his way through life as if blessing were something you could take rather than something you received. And then one night, alone at a river crossing called Jabbok, something found him in the dark. Scripture says a man wrestled with him until dawn. Jacob didn't run, he held on. Even when his hip was wrenched out of its socket, even when every muscle in his body was screaming at him to let go, he held on. "I will not let you go unless you bless me." And God, the God he had spent his entire life trying to outsmart, looked at this broken, limping, stubborn man and gave him a new name. Not Jacob, Israel. The man who wrestles with God. God didn't choose Jacob because he was good. He chose Jacob because he would not let go. And that, stubbornness surrendered, was exactly the raw material God was looking for.
Moses had every advantage Jacob never had. Raised in Pharaoh's palace, educated in the most powerful empire on Earth, strong, capable, burning with a sense of justice for his people. And then he threw it all away in a moment of rage. He killed a man, buried him in the sand, and when it came to light, he ran. He ran as far from Egypt as a man could go. He found a patch of desert on the backside of nowhere and became a shepherd. Not a prince, not a deliverer, a shepherd for 40 years. 40 years is a long time to sit with what you did. A long time to watch the life you could have had disappear in the rearview mirror. A long time to convince yourself that whatever purpose you once imagined for yourself, that door is closed now. Moses was 80 years old when God showed up in a burning bush. 80. And God didn't say, "I found someone better while you were gone." God said, "I have heard the cry of my people, and I am sending you." The man who ran from his calling spent 40 years being prepared for it. He just couldn't see that from the desert.
When the angel of the Lord found Gideon, he was hiding. Not strategizing, not training, hiding, threshing wheat inside a wine press so the Midianites wouldn't see him and take his food. And the angel looked at this frightened crouching man and said, "The Lord is with you, mighty warrior." Gideon's response is one of the most honest moments in all of scripture. "Mighty warrior? If the Lord is with us, why has all this happened? Where are all his wonders? The Lord has abandoned us." He wasn't being faithless. He was being human. He was looking at the evidence in front of him. Enemy occupation, stolen harvests, years of suffering and saying what most of us would say. This doesn't look like someone is with us. And God didn't argue with him. God didn't rebuke him. God simply said, "Go with the strength you have. Not the strength you wish you had. Not the strength you'll have one day. The strength you have right now, today, which feels like nothing." "Go." And Gideon went. With 300 men against an army like locusts, with torches and empty jars instead of weapons, and they won. Not because Gideon was a warrior, because God needed the victory to be so impossible that no one could claim the credit.
The day Samuel came to Jesse's house to anoint the next king of Israel, Jesse brought out seven sons. Seven. He lined them up. Tall, strong, impressive. The kind of men you look at and think, "Yes, one of these, obviously." Samuel looked at the oldest, Eliab, and was certain. "Surely this is the Lord's anointed." And God said, "No. I don't see what you see. You look at the outward appearance. I look at the heart." So Samuel went down the line. Son after son. Seven times, no. And then he asked Jesse, "Are these all your sons?" And Jesse paused. "Well, there is the youngest, but he's out in the fields with the sheep. I didn't think He didn't think to call him. His own father didn't think to call him. They sent for the boy. David came in from the field, sunburned, probably smelling like sheep, and God said, "That one. Rise and anoint him." The one nobody thought to invite was the one God had already chosen. Your invisibility is not evidence that God has overlooked you. Sometimes it just means he isn't done preparing you yet.
Before Jeremiah said a single word to anyone, God told him something that should have been the most encouraging thing he ever heard. "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I set you apart. I appointed you as a prophet to the nations." And Jeremiah's response, "I don't know how to speak. I am only a child." God chose him before he existed, and Jeremiah's first instinct was to explain why God had made a mistake. And honestly, who can blame him? Because being chosen by God in scripture is rarely a comfortable thing. Jeremiah would spend his entire ministry delivering messages nobody wanted to hear. He would be thrown into a cistern. He would watch his city burn. He would weep so much that the book of Lamentations reads like an open wound. He once told God, "You deceived me. I am a laughingstock. Everyone mocks me. I will not mention your name anymore." But then, in the very next breath, he said, "But if I say, I will not mention him, his word is in my heart like a fire. A fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in. Indeed, I cannot." That is not the voice of a man with natural confidence. That is the voice of a man who kept going not because it was easy, but because he could not stop. Because the calling was stronger than the fear. God doesn't need your confidence. He needs your willingness.
Every list like this one tends to include the same names. The patriarchs, the kings, the prophets. Rahab doesn't fit that list at all. She was a prostitute in Jericho, a Canaanite woman in a city God had marked for destruction. By every measure, ethnicity, occupation, history, location, she had no place in this story. Except she did something that most of Israel had failed to do. She believed. Two Israelite spies came to her city and she hid them. Not because she owed them anything, but because she had heard what God had done at the Red Sea. And she knew, "Your God is God in heaven above and on earth below." She tied a scarlet thread in her window, and when the walls of Jericho fell, her house stood. And that woman, that outsider, that unlikely believer with a scarlet thread in her window, is listed by name in the genealogy of Jesus Christ. God doesn't just qualify the broken. He qualifies the unexpected. The ones nobody saw coming. The ones the religious establishment would never have chosen.
Esther had no power, no plan, no political standing. She was an orphan raised by her older cousin. A Jewish girl living in exile in a foreign empire. Hidden, displaced. Her true identity concealed on the advice of the man who raised her. And then, through a series of circumstances she never chose, she found herself in the palace of the most powerful king in the world. When the moment came when her people were scheduled for extermination and only she had any possible access to the king, her first response was fear. Anyone who approaches the king without being summoned will be put to death. You know this. Everyone knows this. I haven't been called in 30 days. And Mordecai sent back one of the most important sentences in the Old Testament. Do not think that because you are in the king's house, you alone of all the Jews will escape. And who knows, perhaps you have come to your royal position for such a time as this. For such a time as this. She had not arrived at the palace by accident. Every loss, every displacement, everything that had been taken from her had positioned her for one moment that would save an entire people. She went to the king unsummoned. She risked her life and she said, "If I perish, I perish." That is what qualified courage looks like. Not the absence of fear, the decision to move forward anyway because the stakes are bigger than your survival.
Of all the people on this list, Joseph may be the hardest to understand. Because Joseph didn't fail. He didn't run. He didn't deceive or hide or argue with God. He just suffered for years for no apparent reason. He had a dream from God. And then his brothers stripped him of his robe and threw him in a pit while they sat down to eat. He heard them debating what to do with him. Then he was pulled out of the pit and sold to slave traders heading to Egypt. From the pit to Potiphar's house, where he served faithfully, built trust, did everything right. And then Potiphar's wife lied about him, and he was thrown in prison. From the pit to the prison. And in the prison, he interpreted a dream for a man who promised to remember him. And forgot him. For two more years. At no point in this story does God appear and explain what he is doing. At no point does Joseph receive a vision saying, "Hold on. This is all leading somewhere." He just kept being faithful in the dark. And then Pharaoh had a dream. And the man who forgot Joseph suddenly remembered. And Joseph was brought from the prison to stand before the throne of Egypt. And from that throne, the throne he reached through a pit and a prison, he saved the world from famine. Including the brothers who sold him. "You intended to harm me. But God intended it for good." Not in spite of the suffering, through it.
Peter knew exactly what he did. That is what makes his story different from almost everyone else on this list. Moses didn't fully understand the weight of what he'd done. Gideon was afraid, but hadn't failed yet. Joseph suffered, but hadn't sinned. Peter didn't whisper it. He didn't imply it. Three separate times, to a servant girl, to bystanders, to someone standing by the fire, he said it out loud. "I don't know him. I am not one of his disciples. I don't know what you're talking about." And then the rooster crowed. And across the courtyard, Jesus turned and looked at him. No words. Just a look. And Peter remembered what Jesus had said. "Before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times." And he went out and wept bitterly. He had been the most vocal, the most confident, the one who said, "Even if everyone else falls away, I never will." And he was the one who fell. After the resurrection, Jesus found Peter by a fire on the beach, and he asked him not once, not twice, but three times, "Peter, do you love me?" Once for every denial. Not to punish him, to restore him, to replace each act of betrayal with a deliberate act of recommissioning. "Feed my sheep." The man who denied Jesus three times became the man who stood up on the day of Pentecost and preached to thousands. The man who wept in the courtyard became the rock the church was built on. God didn't disqualify Peter because of his worst moment. He built something on top of it.
And then there is Paul. Every other person on this list was disqualified by weakness, by fear, by failure, by circumstances beyond their control. Paul is different. Paul was educated, brilliant, zealous, disciplined, and he used every one of those gifts to hunt down followers of Jesus and have them imprisoned. He stood watching and approving while a man named Stephen was stoned to death for his faith. He wasn't passive. He wasn't ignorant. He was, by his own later admission, the chief of sinners. And then on a road to Damascus, a light knocked him to the ground, and a voice said, "Saul, why are you persecuting me?" Not, "You are beyond redemption." Not, "Look what you have done." "Why are you persecuting me?" Present tense. As if Jesus was personally feeling every blow Paul had ordered against his people. And this man, this persecutor, this accessory to murder, became the writer of nearly half the New Testament. The man who planted churches across the known world. The man who would eventually die for the very faith he had tried to destroy. Paul understood grace in a way most people never do. Because he knew exactly how undeserved it was. His letters have the urgency of someone who cannot believe he was chosen. Cannot believe the mercy extended to him. Cannot stop telling people about it. That is what happens when God qualifies the truly unqualified. The message becomes unstoppable.
10 people. 10 completely different kinds of disqualification. Too deceptive, too guilty, too afraid, too invisible, too young, too foreign, too powerless, too broken, too much of a failure, too far gone. And God chose every single one of them. Not despite what they carried. Not by overlooking it, but through it. Using the very thing that seemed to disqualify them as the thing that shaped them for exactly what he needed them to do.
So, if you're watching this and you are in a season that feels like a pit, take note of Joseph. God was in that pit with him and the pit was not the end of the story. If you are in a wilderness, remember Moses. 40 years felt like waste. But the man who came out of that desert was not the same man who ran into it. And the patience and humility he learned tending sheep was exactly what he would need to lead 2 million people through one of their own. If you have failed, remember Peter. Jesus didn't just forgive him. He rebuilt on top of the failure. And if you carry something in your past that you believe puts you beyond reach, remember Paul. The man who thought he was destroying the church was being prepared to build it. God doesn't choose the qualified. He qualifies the chosen. And he is not finished with you yet.