You Are Not Disqualified

Somewhere along the way you decided you were out.

Not out of heaven, maybe. Out of being useful. Out of being the kind of man God actually does something with. You look at your past, or your weakness, or the thing you keep failing at, or even just how ordinary and unimpressive you are, and you have quietly filed yourself under disqualified. God uses other men. The clean ones. The gifted ones. The ones who have it together. Not you. You will sit in the back and be grateful you got in the door.

I want to take that whole idea and put it up against what God actually said about who He picks, because you have it exactly backwards.

"but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God."

1 Corinthians 1:27 through 29, NASB 1995

Read who He chooses. The foolish. The weak. The base. The despised. The things that are not. That is not the leftover pile He settles for. That is His deliberate, on-purpose draft strategy. God looks at the men the world counts out, the ones who would never make the highlight reel, and He says those. Those are the ones I want.

And He tells you exactly why. So that no man may boast before God. If God only used the impressive, the strong, the qualified, then the credit would go to them and their qualifications. So He does the opposite. He picks the guy nobody would have picked, and does something through him that he plainly could not have done himself, so that when it is over there is only one place the glory can possibly go. Up. Your weakness is not a problem God is working around. It is the point. It is the thing that makes it obvious the power was His and not yours.

So look again at the things you have been using to disqualify yourself.

Your past. You think what you did rules you out. God has a long history of using men with a record. The man who led His early church had denied Him three times. The man who wrote a huge chunk of the New Testament had hunted Christians down. Your past is not too dirty for God. Handled right, it becomes the exact place your testimony has power, because a clean story convinces no one, and a rescued one convinces everybody.

Your weakness. You think you are too weak, too prone to fall, too much of a mess to be handed anything real. Read the verse again. He chose the weak things on purpose. The weakness you are ashamed of is the specific qualification He was looking for, because a strong man trusts his strength and a weak man has no choice but to trust God, and the second one is the man God can actually use.

How you look, how ordinary you are, what people think of you. The base and the despised, He chose. The world runs on being impressive. The kingdom runs on being available. God has never once needed you to be impressive. He has needed you to say yes.

Here is the lie underneath all of it, and it is worth naming. When you disqualify yourself, it sounds like humility. Who am I to be used by God. But it is not humility, not really. It is a quiet kind of pride, because it still makes the whole thing about your resume. Real humility says I am not qualified and I never will be, and He chose me anyway, so I will get up and go do the thing while giving Him every ounce of the credit. That man is dangerous for the kingdom. The man sitting in the back protecting his sense of unworthiness is just disobedient with good manners.

You are waiting to be qualified. That day is not coming, and it was never supposed to. Paul did not wait for it. He called himself the foremost of sinners in one breath and got on with the work in the next, because he understood that the mercy was the qualification. The disqualification you feel so sure of is the raw material God specifically asked for.

So stop sitting in the back. Stop waiting to feel worthy, to get clean enough, to become impressive enough, to earn a place you were freely given. God has already chosen the foolish, the weak, the base, the despised, the men who are so sure they are nothing. If that is how you have been describing yourself, I have news that should get you on your feet.

That is not a description of a disqualified man. In the economy of God, that is a description of exactly the kind of man He picks.