Message

Today, we’re going to talk about the question “Can God Use Me?” Some of you may be wondering “Why would I want God to use me anyway?” Let’s take a look at the picture for this message, it’s a picture of interlocking gears. Those gears represent you. God created you and fitted you together in a far more intricate pattern than any complex machine that man has ever made. When people make a machine with gears, they always make it with a purpose in mind. When God fitted you together, He made you with a purpose in mind. God wants to use you to accomplish something wonderful with your life.

Many people use their lives to do things that God never intended. The Bible calls that sin and the results are always tragic. However, when you let God use you for His purpose, the results are wonderful. They will make you the most happy and fulfilled in life that you possibly could be. The problem for many people is that they don’t think they’re of much use to God. They believe that they have too many weaknesses and imperfections for God to use them. However, the fact of the matter is that everyone has weaknesses and God chooses to use weak and imperfect people to accomplish great things. NLT 1 Corinthians 1:27 God deliberately chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose those who are powerless to shame those who are powerful. So, if you consider yourself foolish, if you consider yourself powerless, there’s good news. You are the kind of person that God deliberately chooses to do great things.

If you look closely at a golf ball, you can see that the surface is covered with pock-marks or dimples. Those dimples make the ball look less than perfect, it is not perfectly smooth. However, experts tell us that a perfectly smooth golf ball would only travel about half the distance as the ball “flawed” with dimples. Those apparent imperfections minimize the ball’s air resistance and allow it to travel further than a perfect ball would. In a similar way, God has designed you with imperfections and weaknesses. You have limitations of various kinds in your life. However, it is those very limitations, those very weaknesses, that make you a prime candidate for God to use and work through. So, don’t count yourself out. God wants to use you to do great things for Him. Let’s look at how you can cooperate with God to change your world.

To hear more about this topic, listen to my October 8, 2006 message entitled Can God Use Me?

After Hurricane Katrina last year, an English atheist named Roy Hattersley wrote an interesting article. In his article he observed that almost all of the disaster relief was being done by religious groups of one kind or another. There were no teams of atheists or free thinkers or rationalists. He concluded that he wished it was possible to live a Christian life without being a Christian, yet it didn’t seem to work that way. The faith of believers gives rise to serving others.

Hattersley was right that serving others is a mark of a believer. NIV 1 John 3:17 If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Love for God expresses itself in love for others. Love for God expresses itself in acts of service to those within and without the church. One of the marks of a believer is that he is a servant.

God is interested in your actions of service and He is also interested in your attitudes behind your actions, both are incredibly important. An action done with a bad attitude doesn’t accomplish anything in God’s eyes. However, when our attitudes are right, we will be motivated to serve others, as if we were serving God Himself. NIV 1 Corinthians 13:3 If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing. Serving others needs to come from a heart of love, from thoughts motivated by God’s Spirit.

Today I want to talk about the topic “Adjusting Your Thinking.” Everything you do in life begins in your thought life. The things you do wrong, begin with wrong thinking. The difficulty you have in serving God, stems from wrong thinking. If you and I can get our thinking in line with God’s Word, then we will learn to please God. When you please God, your life will be the best life it could be.

The difficulty is that most people around you are thinking the wrong way about life and that influences all of us. However, as we focus on what God’s Word, the Bible says, not what we heard on television or read in the newspaper or saw at a movie, then God can begin to adjust our thinking. Serving God begins in the mind. Having a successful life begins in the mind. Pleasing God begins in your thoughts. NCV Numbers 14:24 My servant Caleb thinks differently and follows me completely. If you want to serve and follow God completely, you’ve got to think differently than the people around you. So, today we’re going to ask some questions about how a servant of God thinks.

To hear more about this topic, listen to my October 1, 2006 message entitled Adjusting Your Thinking

Currently, we’re in a message series which I’ve entitled “Created To Do What?” The basic truth underlying this series is that you and I were created by God with a purpose in mind. God created you to do something special with your life, to do something unique that only you can do.

When you become a believer, God implants a desire in your heart to please God. God gives you a desire to fulfill the purpose you were created to fulfill. The desire of an unbeliever is to please himself first and foremost, but the desire of a believer is to please God first and foremost. If you’re living life with a me-first please myself mentality, you’re headed down a dead-end street, you’ll never fulfill the potential God created you with. But that can change this morning and you can become a God pleaser, you can become someone who serves God.

This morning I want to address and answer the question “How Can I Serve God”? The short answer to that question is to live as Jesus lived. Jesus is our example. When we pattern our lives after Him we will serve God as He did. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to just get by in life.I want to be great in the Kingdom of God, I want to be great in God’s eyes. How about you? Here’s what Jesus said to His disciples who also wanted to be great. NIV Matthew 20:26,28 Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. So the key to become great in serving God is to be a servant of others, just as Jesus came to serve others and not to be served. Now this runs contrary to the me-first culture of our time. Jesus is saying that you become great by serving God and others rather than serving yourself.

Now for a lot of people this is a scary and frightening thought. I hear it nearly every week from people and it basically goes like this. “My life is in such trouble that I’ve got to look out for myself first. I don’t have any time or resources to help anybody else, in fact I’m so busy taking care of myself that I don’t have much time for God or the church either. Maybe when I pull myself together, I’ll have time for God and serving others.” People are basically afraid that if they give to God and others that they’ll come out on the short end of the stick and their stick is pretty short to begin with. If you’re one of those people this morning, here’s what God says to you “Just close your eyes and jump into serving me and others and see what happens. See if your life doesn’t change for the better, don’t be afraid just jump in.”

So today I challenge you to make a decision to just jump into all that God has for you in serving Him and others Just jump in.

To hear more about this topic, listen to my message entitled How Can I Serve God?

God is by definition incredibly creative. He has created a universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each one containing up to a trillion stars. The current scientific estimate of the total number of stars in the universe keeps increasing and is now about 70 sextillion. That’s a number with 22 zeroes, 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

NIV Psalm 147:4 He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name. God knows the number of stars and I guarantee you it’s a lot more than 70 sextillion. Not only does He know how many stars there are, but He has given each one a name. Each star that God created is different. Seventy sextillion and no two alike and so each one has a unique name. And on one planet, circling one average star, in one galaxy that we call the Milky Way, composed of 300 billion stars, God created human beings in His image.

God put you together in a unique pattern. Did you know that you are created with approximately 7 octillion atoms. That’s a number with 27 zeroes 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. God knows all about you and your atoms. NIV Matthew 10:30 And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. That number is somewhere between zero and one million, with most of us averaging about 150,000 hairs. God has created you with a unique SHAPE that is perfectly suited to carry out His plan for your life. One way to begin to understand the wonderful way that God has created you is with the acronym SHAPE. S – Spiritual gifts H – Heart A – Abilities P – Personality E – Experience. Each of those five aspects makes you who you are and makes you completely different than anyone else who has every lived or who will ever live.

Today I want to talk about “Putting Your Abilities To Work.” How can you use your unique SHAPE to make the impact in this world that God created you to make? You make the biggest impact with your life when who you are and what you do match, just as God intended. Today I want to further answer the question, How can you use your unique SHAPE to serve God? I’m going to focus on using your SHAPE in ministry, but the principles can be adapted to using your SHAPE in a career

To hear more about this topic, listen to my September 17, 2006 message entitled Putting Your Abilities To Work

Today I am going to talk about “Understanding How God Created You.” Why would you want to understand how God created you? The answer is that when you understand how God created you, you are much closer to figuring out what you were created to do. And when you are doing in life what you were created to do, you couldn’t live a better life.

As a human being, you are the pinnacle of God’s creation on earth. You are not just a better monkey, God created man in a class of it’s own, you were created in the very image of God. To better understand how God created you with a unique divine design, we are going to use the acronym SHAPE. S – Spiritual gifts, H – Heart, A – Abilities, P – Personality and E – Experiences. Each of those five aspects makes you who you are and makes you completely different than anyone else who has every lived or who will ever live.

God created you to use your unique SHAPE to serve Him in the various parts of your life. You use your SHAPE to serve God in your family. You use your SHAPE to serve God in your work. You should use your SHAPE to serve God in your church. Using your SHAPE to serve God in your church is called ministry. My ministry as a pastor is to equip you as a believer to fulfill your ministry. NRS Eph. 4:11-12 Pastors and teachers equip the saints for the work of ministry building up the body of Christ.

If you are a believer, you are a saint, according to the Bible, and your ministry is to serve others in the church and build them up. Being a believer is not a spectator sport, just sitting and listening to someone else teach or preach. Being a believer is a participatory sport, you get involved in helping others. Now some of you are thinking, I really don’t have the SHAPE or ability to help someone else in the church. I can’t teach, I can’t speak in public, I can’t sing, what could I do?

Let me briefly tell you my story. I became interested in science and chemistry in grade school. I pursued that passion, eventually receiving a doctorate in organic chemistry from University of California, Berkeley. While working at Monsanto as a research chemist, I felt God calling me to serve Him as a pastor. Imagine what thoughts went through my head: “God, I think you’ve made a big mistake. I don’t think the church needs any chemicals mixed. I get petrified with public speaking, just leave me in my lab mixing chemicals.” Then God began to show me some of the abilities and spiritual gifts he had given me: abilities of organization, administration, studying, communicating in writing and faith. He began to help me overcome my fear of speaking and to get better at it and here I am today, no longer mixing chemicals, but serving as a pastor.

If God can turn a chemist into a pastor, don’t count yourself out. God may not be calling you as a pastor, but He is calling you to minister. Begin to ask God to show you how the SHAPE He has given you can be used to minister in the church. Your life will never be the same. So how can you use your SHAPE to minister to others and serve God?

To hear more about this topic, listen to my September 10, 2006 message entitled Understanding How God Created You

Currently we’re in a message series I’ve entitled “Created To Do What?” You were created by God with a purpose in mind, you were created with an assignment to carry out. Many people never figure out what God created them to do and they live miserable, unfulfilled lives. Other people have an idea what God created them to do but they’re afraid to do it or they don’t want to do it, so they too live miserable unfulfilled lives. To live a happy, fulfilled life, you have only one option, to do what God created you to do.

This morning some of you may think that it’s too late for you, that you’ve gone off track from God’s plan and you can’t get back on. I want to tell you this morning that it’s never too late to get back onto God’s plan for your life. God can take you from wherever you are and help you to get on track to exactly what you were created to do from this day forward.

Today I want to talk about the question “Why Was I Created As I Am?” Why do I look the way I do? Why do I have the set of abilities and gifts that I have? Why do I live in St Louis and not in China? Why do I like the things I like? Why have I gone through the things that I’ve gone through in life? T]Part of the answer to all those questions is that you were created to help others, you were created to minister. God shaped you in a special way because He has a special task, a special ministry for you.

NIV Isaiah 64:8 O LORD, you are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand. God is the potter, you and I are the clay. God has shaped and formed you exactly the way that he wanted, you are the work of His hand. There are many different kinds of pots, each to serve a different function. So too God has created each one of us differently, because He has a different function, a different ministry for each person to fulfill.

Some of you today feel like you have gotten a raw deal in life, that the potter did not know what He was doing when he created you and placed you in your life circumstances. NIV Isaiah 29:16 You turn things upside down, as if the potter were thought to be like the clay! Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, “He did not make me”? Can the pot say of the potter, “He knows nothing”? If you as the clay tell the potter that He doesn’t know what He is doing, you will remain miserable. But today, God wants to do something new in your life. He wants you to acknowledge that God created you and He did a good job. God wants you to know deep down in your heart that you were created just as you are to do something special.

To hear more about this topic, listen to my September 3, 2006 message entitled Why Was I Created As I Am?