WORDS FROM W.W. March 30, 2016
God has a way of surprising us.
Easter Sunday is an example of that…Christ-followers huddled together behind a locked door in fear, and then there is a knock from a woman saying that Jesus was alive! That was a surprise!
This morning I was reading the story of Rahab in the Old Testament book of Joshua. She was a woman with a reputation…and not a good one! She was a prostitute, and, obviously, known for that. The two Israelite spies went right to her house. The welcome mat was always out for Rahab’s business.
And God uses her to protect the two men! And not just that, she is in the genealogy of Jesus. Check out Matthew 1:5 if you don’t believe me! Someone with a bad reputation, someone who was on the other end of the spectrum from “the honored”, gets brought into the God-story.
Saul had a reputation for persecuting Christians, and then he got blinded by an encounter with Jesus and had the first letter of his name changed. The meaning of his name went from “asked for” or “prayed for” to “humble.” And who would have thought that the chief persecutor of Christ-follower would be used to be the main proclaimer? Paul, without a doubt, was humbled!
Chuck Colson was a scoundrel! There’s no better way to describe him. He was “guilty as sin”, as some of my Kentucky relatives used to say, of crimes committed during Nixon’s Watergate scandal. And then he came to know Jesus in a personal way, and through his conviction and incarceration the ministry of “Prison Fellowship” was started.
God seems to be accustomed to using the disreputable for his purposes. Who we often discard becomes his trump card (No, that is not a political reference!).
Granted, it does not always happen that way, but we mostly write-off those who God has written into the storyline.
Words from WW Blog 