Yesterday, we started looking at the story of David, and reflected briefly on how he was the one chosen and anointed as the future king of Israel, even though he was the ‘kid at the end of the line’ – the youngest and most insignificant member of his family.
Over and over again throughout Scripture, God demonstrates a remarkable eagerness to use the kinds of people that would normally not be given a second look by the world. God is not concerned about external appearances, about outward qualities and qualifications. God is far more interested with what is going on inside of us – with our hearts. And God is able to recognize the best within us, and the capacity for true greatness that lies within all people, because all of us have been created in God’s image, and there is in us a divine likeness that we all bear.
Which means that nobody is beyond the call of God. There is nobody whom God would regard as useless. And when God’s call is heard and we realize that God has plans for our lives, something comes alive within us.
Jim Harnish writes, “A calling is an inner awareness that God has a divine purpose for our existence. It is a deep sense of being ‘at home’ with the person we are becoming. It is a maturing consciousness of our value as a person created in God’s image, redeemed by God’s love, and chosen by God for the abundant life that Jesus said he came to bring.”
As you think about your own life, do you think that you are of little or even no use to God? Stop! The truth is that God continues to see things within us that others, and especially ourselves, often miss. And while God can do His work on His own, He chooses not to. For God delights in calling ordinary people like you and me to move beyond the narrowness of our self-absorbed lives into the wide open spaces of God’s plan and purposes for the entire world. He longs for us to be a part of that.
What is God calling you to do for Him today?
PRAY AS YOU GO
O God, it’s hard for me to believe that you want me, and need me, to be part of your loving purposes in the world. Help me to accept that your perspective really can be trusted, and that if you believe in me, then who am I am to argue. Help me to listen to your Spirit’s stirring within me, that your calling for my life would become clear. And help me to embrace your calling, whatever the cost or inconvenience of doing so may be, and to follow it with courage, obedience and determination. Amen.
FOCUS SCRIPTURE
Our scripture reading today comes from Psalm 8, one of the psalms that David wrote. It is a beautiful psalm that affirms the central place and the purpose that humans have been given by God within the world.
O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory
above the heavens.
From the lips of children and infants
you have ordained praise
because of your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger.
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what are human beings that you are mindful of them
mortals that you care for him?
You made them a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned them with glory and honour.
You made them rulers over the works of your hands;
you put everything under their feet:
all flocks and herds,
and the beasts of the field,
the birds of the air,
and the fish of the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas.
O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
