Misfit Heroes

Have you ever felt like you’re not good enough to be used by God? Like you’ve made too many mistakes in your past, or even in your present? You look around and think that others who are doing great works for the Lord must be perfect. Then you look at yourself and know you are far from that, so you pull out your mental label maker and stick the word “unusable” on yourself.

If you feel this way, or have felt this way at some point in your life, I have really good news for you…

As it turns out, the imperfect, messed up ones are God’s favorite people to use! Imagine that!

This beautiful truth about our Jesus fascinates me. One of the things I love most about reading the Bible is seeing the stories of countless individuals that were SO far from perfect, but God chose them, changed them, and used them anyway! There’s some pretty wild stuff in the Bible, you know. Like, if it was made into a movie in full, explicit detail, it would probably have to be rated R. **gasp!** Please don’t take that in an offensive or disrespectful way! The Bible is the Holy Word of God, but those were some crazy times, y’all; and many of the violent or “inappropriate” deeds included in its pages were committed by pivotal Biblical figures!

I know that for the most part, we are all aware of the flawed individuals God used in the scriptures, but sometimes I think we need to stop and think hard about this. We need to be reminded of exactly who and what these people were and how God redeemed their stories. Because it doesn’t make much sense, does it, for the one and only pure and holy God to work through such people. But that is precisely what He does and has always done!

Here’s some examples to get your mind going:

• Abraham lost his patience with waiting on God to fulfill His promise to give him a son, so he took matters into his own hands and slept with his wife’s handmaiden (at his wife’s insistence!). Not to mention, he lied TWICE about who his wife Sarah was and almost let her get taken as the wife of another man. Despite all this, Abraham had one of the closest relationships with God of anyone in the Bible, AND became the father of God’s chosen people.

• Jacob eventually had his name changed to Israel and became the namesake of God’s people, the Israelites. But before all that, he was a notorious liar and cheat. His birth name literally means “supplanter”.

• Judah, the father of the tribe from which Jesus would come, had twins by his daughter-in-law, Tamar, who was disguised as a harlot to trick him into giving her the aforementioned children.

• Moses, the most revered leader in Jewish history, was a murderer! He killed an Egyptian man and ran for his life, spending forty years in exile in the desert before God spoke to him from the burning bush.

• Rahab, the great-grandmother of King David was a harlot from Jericho!

• Samson broke every vow he had made to God, ran from God’s call on his life, and eventually fell prey to the seductive Delilah before his story was at last redeemed in the final heroic moments of his life.

• King David is called the man after God’s own heart, he wrote much of the Book of Psalms, and Jesus himself descended from his bloodline. Yet he had a child with Bathsheba, a married woman, then had her husband murdered in order to keep her for himself.

• Peter, the founding apostle of the church who preached salvation on the Day of Pentecost, was a hot-headed fisherman who denied that he even knew Jesus because he feared meeting the same fate as his Master.

• My personal favorite, Paul—the man originally called Saul, who hated and murdered Christians in the name of God. Jesus met him in a life-altering moment on the road to Damascus, revealed to him who He was, and gave him a new name and a new start. Talk about a transformation! Can you imagine how he, and the Christians he persecuted, felt after his conversion? The man became the very thing he had persecuted, and went on to write the majority of the New Testament!

I could go on, but I’ll stop there. You get the idea.

As I said earlier, this concept completely fascinates me. It is one of the greatest things about Jesus, this fact that He uses the imperfect. Every single one of His disciples that He hand-selected were ordinary and flawed, as I showed with Peter in the above list of examples. All of them except Matthew the tax collector were uneducated. No one expected them to be able to do anything extraordinary with their lives, but we are the evidence of how Jesus used them. We would not be here as believers without that small band of misfits that turned their world upside down.

Is that not amazing? When we look at the lives of these people in the Bible, we should be encouraged! We may not be perfect, but neither was Moses, or David, or Peter, or Paul… If God can use all of them, just think of what He can do through us! His power is limitless and His strength is made perfect in our weakness. We don’t have to worry about not being good enough, because HE is the definition of goodness. That same Jesus who called those simple, ordinary men to be His disciples, loves and chooses us too, exactly as we are. He calls to us in our brokenness, and, if we let Him, picks us up and makes us His vessel. He uses the imperfections in our lives as the foundation for a beautiful portrait of His grace, and we become an example of His power.

So that label you’ve placed on yourself? Peel it off and throw it in the trash! The Bible says all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but it also says that anyone who desires to be saved—and used—by Him can be if they seek it. Allow Him to move in and transform the mistakes and imperfections, and come join the ever growing crew of misfit heroes that He has chosen!