A Great God, No A Great People

A Great People, No A Great God

2/22/2004 NLF Exodus 12:37-42 Galatians 3:23-29

What do you do if you want to build a great team in professional sports? The first thing you do is try to find the best coach that is available. Then you begin to scout other teams to see who you might can get in trade deal from other teams. Then you wait for the draft to come up. In the draft, you look for the players with the greatest athletic ability who can truly make a difference on your team. Most of the time you know ahead of time who you want because of their past performance on the court or on the field

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Now when God set out to establish a great people, God did not look for the strongest, the biggest, the brightest or the best. In the Old Testament, God said, “I did not choose to love you because you were the largest group of people, but because you actually was the smallest group. The Jews or Israelites were nobodies until God came on the scene and chose them for Himself.

When you look at Jesus’ choice of the disciples, the only one among them that had much social standing was Matthew or Levi the tax collector and we know little about what Levi did when he was with Jesus. If you had of evaluated Jesus’ choice of the 12, you would have realized this too is a group of nobodies. One was a thief before Jesus called him, and remained a thief the whole time he was with Jesus.

In the New Testament, Paul lets the Christians know in Corinthians, that when God made a choice to save them to start the church, not many of them were super intelligent, not many of them were well known in the community, and not many of them had a lot of power. In other words, once again a group of nobodies.

Yet God used the Israelites, the disciples, and the early church to change the course of the world through His power at work in their lives. Although we may be tempted to say, “wow, what a great group of people”, the reality is , they were a part of Great God.

God cannot use people who think they are all that. Why? Because they think they are doing God a favor by serving him, by coming to church, by singing songs, and by giving money. God is not like Nike. Now Nike knows, there is nothing really special in a pair of Nike shoes. It’s basically rubber, plastic, and cloth. Nike needs a name like Labron James to give its shoes a value above other identical shoes. So Nike goes after the name of someone to accomplish what it wants to do.

God has value in and of Himself. God is great all by himself. God does not know go after big names in order to accomplish great works. He seems to prefer to use some nobodies and turn them into somebodies, who know they are still nobodies, without continuing to stand next to God.

The one person God calls in the New Testament that was a somebody before he came to Jesus was the apostle Paul. But Paul said, “all that stuff I had before I came to Christ, I don’t even consider it worth having, because it almost kept me from knowing Christ.” Paul recognized he had to become a nobody in order to know Christ. He was a nobody for 14 years after he had gotten saved as far as his being known throughout the church. Today we take someone with a big name in the world who gets saved and the next day we have him or her preaching to the church. We want to use people to endorse God as though again God needed an endorsement.

God has always reserved the right to choose whomever He wants to choose, at whatever time He wants to use them, for whatever purpose He has in mind. Now we all came from Adam and Eve. Our genetic makeup is basically the same no matter what race we are a part of in any part of the world. In the beginning, we all worshipped the one true God.

In chapter 11 of Genesis, the people had a common language and were attempting to build a city to make a name for themselves that would reach into heaven. God had told them to fill the earth. They decided they would not be scattered. Let’s read Genesis 11:8 & 9 Genesis 11:8-9 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9That is why it was called Babel--because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.