(Un)Qualified by Steven Furtick proclaims that the One who created us can also use our broken pieces. God can use people who are not whole.
God loves the real you and can use you with all your flaws and weaknesses.
Many Christians don’t feel good enough to serve God. There is a message in Christian communities that we have to be good and talented for God to use us. And that simply isn’t true. God is not looking for people who are qualified, but rather is calling people first and then making them qualified. While we may think that our weaknesses prevent us from fulfilling the calling that God places on our lives, God has anticipated using our weaknesses for His glory.
God is not interested in the inauthentic images of ourselves that we project our comparisons to others. Attempts to fake being someone that we are not in order to please the numerous people in our lives will leave us with a fragmented, incoherent identity. God is calling us back to wholeness in Him.
In this summary, you will learn:
- how the world turns us into someone that we are not;
- ways to stop comparing oneself to others and simply live for Christ; and
- the many ways God can use our authentic selves.
Recognize your standard for qualification and adjust it.
Have you ever felt that you might not be quite good enough for something that God is calling you to? Maybe you are a pastor and think that you have a fatal weakness or a whole set of weaknesses that will eventually be the downfall of your ministry. Maybe you’re just a Christian who is worried that all your past, your temptations, and previous actions have put you in a situation where you don’t think that you’ll be able to continue. You worry that you are not who you claim to be, suffer from imposter syndrome, and feel unqualified to be a representative of God.
Many are worried about the way that they are perceived or that they aren’t good enough. The approach taken here is not to convince us that we are more qualified or skilled than we are because that isn’t a good way to proceed. Instead, we need to know who we already are so that we can find out where we are going next. We need to realize that we are unqualified but that God is infinitely overqualified, and He will be our qualifications.
First, we should note that “qualification” is a word that is always in reference to some standard. Therefore, what is our standard? Who determines whether we are succeeding or failing? The standard that we set will have all the power to determine our qualifications.
If we make the world our standard, we will probably fail. If the critics are our standard, then we will certainly fail. Imagine only thinking you’re qualified if, and only if, the people who criticize you and bring you down think that you’re qualified. It is, by definition, a standard that is impossible to meet. We often fail to meet the standards that the world puts on us, and so we fall into a fallacy of qualifications. We think that if we were just a bit more talented or had a little more integrity, then we’d qualify. Yet the problem is usually not our talents and abilities but the source of qualification.
We can only decide what to do with our weaknesses, not whether to have them.
There’s a moment in the Bible when Moses is way out in the middle of nowhere, and God calls Moses from the middle of a burning bush that doesn’t burn up. Moses runs over to the bush, and God starts explaining His plans to use Moses to guide the people of Israel out of their slavery in Egypt. Moses is, naturally, overwhelmed and confused. Eventually, he asks for God’s name, and God tells him, “I am.” This “I am,” the name of God, has only the first and second terms. It says that God is. But we can’t describe ourselves in the same way. We need a third term: “I am this or that.” We have to be something to be.
We can change things about ourselves. We can fill in the “third word” in our identity with more positive and better descriptors. We can make promises that help us achieve our goals. We face dichotomies in identity for this reason because we all have weaknesses that interfere with the gap between who we are and who we want to become. And we believe that if we removed the weaknesses and disorder in our minds, then we could close the gap between who we are and who we want to become. We feel stuck, like we can’t quite reach what we are trying to get to.
Some define their “third word” by using a weakness or trademark inability in their lives. So many think that they’d be successful only if they didn’t have that one thing in their lives, that one weakness or temptation that seems to be holding them back. But the truth is that God is not calling us to be perfect at the moment; God is calling us to be real.
The weaknesses that we have are supposed to be encountered head-on so that God can transform both them and us. We all have weaknesses. The only thing we have to decide is what to do with them. We can’t decide whether to have them, just what to do with them…
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