Will God use you?

Will God Use You?

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            I often hear Christians talking about what it is we need to do, if we hope to be used by God. For some reason we think such conversations are useful and will lead us to somehow glorify God.

            I am increasingly not impressed by that sort of thinking. What do we normally think of when we describe someone who uses people? Is it a good thing when an employer uses his employees? Is it a good thing when a guy uses a girlfriend? What do we think of people when they have lost their last shred of dignity and self-respect that hang on to a relationship trying to continue being used by someone? I am sure that we imagine we are using the description of being used in a different way than in these other instances. But could it be that something deep inside us is driving us to imagine ourselves as those who need to find a way to be used by God? Could it be that we imagine that God is very distant from us, but if we learn to do all the right spiritual things we will be able to be used by God? I increasingly believe that if our thinking is at all like that then we have completely misunderstood and will completely misrepresent who God is.

 

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Do we somehow imagine God as a Taskmaster for whom we need to become usable?

 

            Perhaps this is one of the fundamental reasons why the religious leaders of Jesus’ day did not understand what Jesus was saying when he tried to reach them. He did try to reach them. You can see it in Luke 15 when Jesus is trying to tell the religious leaders that he has come to bring forgiveness, healing, redemption to the world. You can see when he pictures the understanding of the religious leaders, who like the older brother in the story of the Father and the prodigal is upset because the father throws a party for the return of the younger brother who had squandered his inheritance. The older brother is upset. Doesn’t this father understand how much this older brother had sacrificed to be the son like his father wanted? But that as it turns out was the older brother’s great fault.

            The older brother never understood what a father wanted in his relationship with his two sons. He wanted a family that was connected in love for one another. The younger son had turned his back on that. The older son had never really thought about that. For the older son, he had remained loyal to his father no matter how he didn’t spend his money on the wild trips and weak willed women. That tells us something of the older brother. He was upset that he had given up all those things when evidently he didn’t need to. The younger son comes back and the father throws him a big party. The older brother wonders why he sacrificed so much as if living a decent and faithful life was a sacrifice rather than a privilege.

            We have come up with the idea that God uses people, even if that sounds like a horrid attribute in anybody else we describe as using others. But I don’t recall this popular phrase being used in the Scriptures, this phrase of how God was able to use someone. Instead there are other descriptions. The prophets were men, and sometimes women (Deborah and the daughters of Agabus come to mind) who were granted to receive insights from God, and participated in visions God gave to them. These prophets were not described as used by God, but rather as called. Once they were called they shared that which they had received in their participation in what God had given them. The Apostles were not used by God but after being granted to spend years with Jesus had the opportunity of being taught by him so that they who had fellowship with our Lord could then open up a communal fellowship that opened the doors to those who now heard the Gospel message. The Apostles were not used. They were sent. They shared what they had participated in with others.

            But perhaps we see the fullness of how God relates to us through His Son Jesus Christ. Jesus was the only begotten Son who God loved with perfect love. Jesus was the adult son of the Living God who was regarded as being equal to the Father. This was the one who the Father was willing to give all authority. God showed his love for the world in giving his Son. He did not redeem the world by using his Son but by giving his son.

            I have come to believe that I will never be used by God. I don’t believe God wants to use you either. But I do believe that He who is love, wants us to participate in that divine love shared between the Father and Son and Holy Spirit and made ours through Jesus Christ in whom God and man are made one. He wants us to participate in this eternal divine display of God’s infinite love. As we participate in this love, our Father wants it to reshape us. As it reshapes us He wants it to be reflected through our lives into the lives of those around us. He wants us to live lives in which we live lives shaped by God’s divine love and so that in our lives we will bear image of the God who is described by the Apostle as love.

            God doesn’t want to use us. He wants to love us. He wants shape us by his goodness and love until having been shaped by his love, we will bear his image; the image of the one who is love. This is why God both created and redeemed us.