I need, like the Christians in this passage, to pray for God to give me courageous confidence. Too often I let fear and intimidation silence me. All the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit, and they began speaking God’s message with courageous confidence. They finished their prayer, and immediately the whole place where they had gathered began to shake. Grant us, Your servants, the courageous confidence we need to go ahead and proclaim Your message while You reach out Your hand to heal people, enabling us to perform signs and wonders through the name of Your holy servant Jesus. Courage was the quality for which the first century Christians prayed.Īnd now, Lord, take note of their intimidations intended to silence us. Winston Churchill said that courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all of the others. Here are 4 ingredients that come from God that enable him to use us to do the unexpected: 1. As verse 30 describes, these qualities do not come from man and are not talents, but all are drawn from a close relationship with God. While there are no qualities or failings that disqualify us, there are some common “ingredients” we can find in the people God uses to do the extraordinary. For it is not from man that we draw our life but from God as we are being joined to Jesus, the Anointed One.Īnd now he is our God-given wisdom, our virtue, our holiness, and our redemption. so that there would be no place for prideful boasting in God’s presence. For he chose what is regarded as insignificant in order to supersede what is regarded as prominent, He chose the lowly, the laughable in the world’s eyes-nobodies-so that he would shame the somebodies. But God chose those whom the world considers foolish to shame those who think they are wise, and God chose the puny and powerless to shame the high and mighty. Not many of you were considered the elite when you answered God’s call. Not many of you were wise scholars by human standards, nor were many of you in positions of power. Pick one or all of these characters and do your own Bible study on them to build your faith that God can work through you no matter what.īrothers and sisters, consider who you were when God called you to salvation. This inspires me because I can so often feel like I have sinned too much, or missed my opportunity for God to work through me. ( Acts 7-9)Īs you can see, there is literally nothing we can do to disqualify ourselves from being a candidate who God chooses to work through.
Moses – He was a stutterer who was God’s spokesman and leader.Joseph – He was an entitled teen who went through God’s classroom, training him to save both Egypt and Israel.Abraham and Sarah – They were an old, washed-up couple who God used to build a nation.Noah – He drank too much, but, God used him to build the ark to save the world.
Let’s just take a moment and go through a list of some of the unqualified and ordinary men and women God chose to work through to do the most unexpected things. Their only explanation for what they saw was that their time with Jesus had completely transformed them. The established leaders were stunned at the boldness of the untrained, unqualified, and ordinary men Peter and John. And seeing the man who had been healed standing there with them, they had nothing to say in reply. Now when the men of the Sanhedrin (Jewish High Court) saw the confidence and boldness of Peter and John, and grasped the fact that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were astounded, and began to recognize that they had been with Jesus. In fact, the entire book of Acts is a narrative of story after story of how God uses people to shape the world. It has become a habit that God uses ordinary people to change the course of history.
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