What makes you so special?

So you think you are beyond the reach of God’s grace and mercy?

The skeletons in your closet are too scary to be let out into the light?

You have sunk too low, and your regrets have piled up higher than your deepest fears (and that’s saying a lot)?

Well, what makes you so special?

I don’t mean to sound harsh . . . it’s just that, well, I know a guy.

Let me introduce you to Moses.

Not the Moses who led the Jewish people out of slavery. Not the Moses who took off his shoes before a burning bush and heard the voice of God. Not the Moses who crossed a parted sea and ate bread falling from Heaven and visited with God on a mountain.

I’m talking about the Moses who lost his temper and

killed

a

man.

I’m talking about the Moses who committed SECOND DEGREE MURDER and had to run for his life in the dark of night, leaving behind everything he knew and all the riches he had enjoyed to live in a tent in the desert smelling like sweat and sheep and shame.

Yeah, that Moses.

That’s the one.

He spent the next 40 years hiding from who he was and what he had done, carrying the weight of that momentary murderous thought that sprang into action and changed his life forever. Then God looked down and saw a man who was more than his mistakes and his misgivings, and he chose him to do a great and mighty thing. When Moses hemmed and hawed and said he wasn’t good enough or strong enough or savvy enough, God didn’t leave him there standing in the desert sand to go find a more suitable candidate. He wanted Moses. Moses the momentary murderer, the fleeing felon, the man of few words. God knew his past – he had watched the whole thing unfold – and yet he singled this guy out to be the key player in one of the most epic stories in ancient history.

Because no matter how inadequate you may feel, or how incapable you actually are, or how far you have fallen from where you were aiming to be in this life,

GOD WANTS YOU.

Maybe not to approach a king or rain down plagues or lead a nation, but he has chosen you for a purpose designed just for you.

You may not believe God could use you in spite of your past, but I promise you he’s in the business of using people not in spite of their past but BECAUSE of it. He specializes in redeeming ruined lives, and he does not waste a single sordid story. The darker the secret, the deeper his mercy.

And you are no exception.

If Moses’s life story is not enough to convince you that God’s biggest heroes were usually pulled from the least of these, then how about all the other murderers, aldulterers, prostitutes, liars, cheaters, doubters, and cowards in the lineup of God’s faithful?

You are no different. I am no different. If God can turn their shameful stories of miserable failure into his eternal story of mighty success, then he can and will do the same with us, no matter how much we may protest and tell him to go find someone more worthy.

I think it’s time we quit giving all the reasons we aren’t equipped to be set apart for greater things and start listening to him telling us about the things he has chosen for us to do.

There’s a whole world out there in need of his saving grace, and then there’s you and me who have experienced his healing touch, and if we will just stop making excuses and remove our shoes, standing still and quiet before him, we will smell the smoke and feel the heat because

the bush is burning.