The Qualification of the Non-Qualified

What I love about God is that He picks weird, awkward, empty, broken vessels like you and me to flex his crazy glorious Kingdom. No one else does this.

When others write you off, He writes you in.

Not because we are awesome, but He is.

It’s an amazing thing to witness God-powered purpose light up someone’s eyes as they’re brought from death to life. There’s nothing else like seeing the hollow shelled-out eyes of a self-loathing loser suddenly get a new license for glory. It takes no talent, no money, no status, no qualifications — but only the explosive interrupting grace of God, infusing veins with renewal.

One testimony is just as great as another — he kicked heroin and quit racing cops and stopped stealing purses and went to seminary, or she grew up in church her whole life and finally caught grace. Both are moving. Both are resurrection. Both tell His story.

You might think you’re under-qualified somehow because there’s nothing really worthy about you: but the hard truth is that this has always been true. You and I were unqualified before we walked through the door. If others really knew the dirt and insecurity and anger swirling through our hearts, much less the hurt we have caused others, none of us would be picked for anything. You probably wouldn’t pick someone like you either. No matter what our talents or abilities, we each have a rock-bottom reality of wretchedness.

But it’s in your worst condition that God unconditionally loved you before you took a single step in the room. His grace qualified you before you did a single thing, and His grace covers all the ways you have failed before. More than that: His grace empowers us for what’s next, so that though we might fall again, he picks us up from the floor of self-doubt and strengthens us even for one more stumbling step forward. He qualifies you based on the merit of Himself. He is really that good.

God loves you simply for the fact that He breathed you into existence, and there is nothing else we need to contribute to His love except ourselves. Though we’ve brought our fallenness into the mix: God also took care of that with His Son, and this without any contribution except our sin, because grace is a gift that does not depend on our compensation.

When you can cling to this unstopping security — all is possible. Your talent will not be the ceiling nor the measure of your success. Your past will not be a time-stamp of the world’s critical eye. Our “value” will be both a lowly zero and of infinite worth — because before God we are broken rebels, but before God we’ve been given His all. We are just as much His kids as you are someone’s child, and you don’t need to prove a thing for it. The proof is in His cross.

May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.

— Colossians 1:11-12

— J.S.