The People God Uses John 17:6, 9

“I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. ⁹ I am praying for them. I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have given me, for they are yours.

There’s a story that’s often told that has Jesus returning to heaven and the angels inquiring about His time on earth. With much detail, he rehearses all the events of His ministry and, at the end, the angels ask a question that we can apply to ourselves today: What is the plan for the future spreading of this message? Who will continue this important ministry? Their surprise at His answer: You left it in whose hands?

How the Lord launched the worldwide movement called “the church”? If He had only asked me, I would have advised Him to do things differently!

• You need to pick men with the proper education and experi
• They should be graduates of the most prestigious theological institutions in the world.
• They need to have a track record of impressive results in the ministry. After all, their past performance indicates their future potential. But these guys have no degrees and no achievements!”
• “Furthermore, You need men of influence who have connections with important wealthy, powerful people. They need to know how to network with the movers and shakers. No offense, but these men have accents that make them sound like hicks from the sticks. They’re Galileans!
• The religious elite in Jerusalem are going to laugh them out of town if they try to persuade them that You are the Messiah.”
• You need to pick some men who know how to grow a business. They need to know how to recruit and manage a competent team. They need to know how to read a spread sheet. A Galilean fishing business doesn’t cut it! At least get someone with an M.B.A. on the team! Too bad about that guy, Judas! He would have been a real asset to the cause!”

To launch the church the Lord chose a bunch of uneducated, unsophisticated Galilean fishermen, who would have been laughed out of the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem.

Among those who stayed with Christ were the Twelve, whom He had personally selected and appointed to represent Him. They were 12 perfectly ordinary, unexceptional men.

He chose to work through these fallible individuals rather than advance His agenda through mob force, military might, personal popularity, or a public-relations campaign.

From a human perspective, the future of the church and the long-term success of the gospel depended entirely on the faithfulness of that handful of disciples. There was no plan B if they failed.

Some might imagine that if Christ had wanted His message to have maximum impact, He could have played off His popularity more effectively.

Modern conventional wisdom would suggest that Jesus ought to have done everything possible to exploit His fame, tone down the controversies that arose out of His teaching, and employ whatever strategies He could use to maximize the crowds around Him.

But He did not do that. In fact, He did precisely the opposite. Instead of taking the populist route and exploiting His fame, He began to emphasize the very things that made His message so controversial.

At about the time the crowds reached their peak, He preached a message so boldly confrontive and so offensive in its content that the multitude melted away, leaving only the most devoted few:

John 6:66-70 (ESV) After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. ⁶⁷  So Jesus said to the Twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” ⁶⁸  Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, ⁶⁹  and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”

The strategy Jesus chose typified the character of the kingdom itself. “The kingdom of God does not come with observation; nor will they say, ‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20–21).

The kingdom advances “‘Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ says the Lord of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6).

A dozen men under the power of the Holy Spirit are a more potent force than the teeming masses whose initial enthusiasm for Jesus was apparently provoked by little more than sheer curiosity or a full stomach.

If you’ve ever visited the great cathedrals in Europe, you might assume that the apostles were larger-than-life stained-glass saints with shining halos who represented an exalted degree of spirituality.

It’s a shame they have so often been put on pedestals as magnificent marble figures or portrayed in paintings like some kind of Roman gods. That dehumanizes them. They were just 12 completely ordinary men—perfectly human in every way. We mustn’t lose touch with who they really were.

Many Christians become discouraged and disheartened when their spiritual life and witness suffer because of sin or failure. We tend to think we’re worthless nobodies—and left to ourselves, that would be true! But worthless nobodies are just the kind of people God uses, because that is all He has to work with.

Satan may even attempt to convince us that our shortcomings render us useless to God and to His church. But Christ’s choice of the apostles testifies to the fact that God can use the unworthy and the unqualified. He can use nobodies.

It was not because they had extraordinary talents, unusual intellectual abilities, powerful political influence, or some special social status. They turned the world upside down because God worked in them to do it.

God chooses the humble, the lowly, the meek, and the weak so that there’s never any question about the source of power when their lives change the world.

It’s not the man; it’s the truth of God and the power of God in the man. (We need to remind some preachers today of this. It’s not their cleverness or their personality. The power is in the Word—the truth that we preach—not in us.)

And apart from one Person—one extraordinary human being who was God incarnate, the Lord Jesus Christ—the history of God’s work on earth is the story of His using the unworthy and molding them for His use the same careful way a potter fashions clay.

The Corinthian church to which Paul wrote was an unimpressive lot—hardly the cream of the social crop. These are those of whom Paul admitted, “not many wise, not many mighty, not many noble are called.”

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. ²⁷ But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; ²⁸ God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, ²⁹ so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. ³⁰ And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, ³¹ so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

The fact that He used such humanly unimpressive men should give us hope that perhaps He can use common people like us today to help further His kingdom.

His way of reaching this hostile world was to call these men out of the world, share His life with them, and send them back into the world. That’s still His strategy.

We also need to remember the success rate…who did they attract, teach, convert to Christ? 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (ESV) Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, ¹⁰  nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.
¹¹  And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

As we gasp at the possibility of sitting in worship with that kind of ‘church family,’ it ought to remind us that the gospel message works!

The gospel is the one great treasure of the church. It is the “pearl of great price” for which the jeweler will pay all that he has (Matthew 13:45–46 (ESV) “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, ⁴⁶ who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.

It is the great truth for which Stephen died and which Paul devoted his life to proclaim. It is the one thing which clearly distinguishes the church from all other religious and benevolent organizations.

The church today, however, does not always prize the gospel as its greatest treasure. The church is sometimes tempted to emphasize its own human dynamics rather than that which God offers us in Jesus Christ.

Paul’s words: 2 Corinthians 4:7 (ESV) But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.

Paul, himself, was a most “earthen vessel”—haunted by his past, crippled by his inadequacies, continually challenged by his never-ending struggle with temptation.

A pot or jar made of “clay” would be the least valuable in an ancient Greek or Jewish household. Once broken, clay jars could not be repaired nor melted down and recast, although they often were used as barely functional writing surfaces for sales receipts.

It is possible that Paul’s Corinthian readers might even picture the special, nighttime oil lamps manufactured in and marketed from their city. These were especially thin and delicate to allow light to penetrate from them but were also cheap and easily breakable. It is less likely that Paul has in mind the exclusively Greek idea of vessels containing sacred objects of a deity used in parades to draw to attention to that deity.

Connecting the imagery of clay jars to human beings is not much of a stretch from a biblical point of view. Not only is man viewed as being created from dust (Gen 2:7), God is pictured as a potter (Isa 29:16; 45:9; 64:8), who can if he chooses, destroy his bad pots (Isa 30:14; Jer 18:1–22; 19:1–13).

Some of the world’s most priceless treasures have been placed in its most worthless containers. But the contrast between treasure and vessel was never greater than when God committed the saving gospel of His Son to mortal men, when His extraordinary truth was committed to such an ordinary church.

He picked a bunch of earthen vessels in which to put His treasure (the gospel), so that the surpassing greatness of the power would be of God and not from any man. (I entitle a sermon on this verse as “God’s treasure in brown paper bags” to depict a common item in our time since we don’t often transport things in ‘earthen’ vessels.)

Though we would expect the world’s greatest treasure to be placed in its most priceless container, we find the gospel committed to a very ordinary church.

The church today is still very “earthen.” It can be crippled by its lack of commitment, its divisions, its worldliness. Its ministry is sometimes weak, susceptible to burnout and moral failure.

Dealing with the Disparity.

It have often spoken of the “church of faith compared to the church of fact.” It’s the difference of what the church is (as talked about in the New Testament) compared to what we ‘really are’

• Some people are not content to allow the contrast to exist. Some would try to accept the treasure but reject the jar. They say “yes” to Christ but “no” to the church, and in the process scorn the very ones for whom Christ died.
• Others try to make the treasure more like the vessel, stripping Christ of His divinity.
• Still others try to make the vessel more “worthy” of the treasure by changing the clay pot into a silver chalice. This leads to a situation where the vessel takes on more importance than the treasure.

The proper response is to acknowledge the disparity and learn the great lesson which it teaches. The disparity is there by God’s design to demonstrate that it is upon human weakness, not human strength that God chooses to build His church.

God can use the church best when it depends less on its own resources and learns to trust in the power of the God who alone can save.

To begin with, God has made us the way we are so that we can do the work He wants us to do.

No Christian should ever complain to God because of his lack of gifts or abilities, or because of his limitations or handicaps.

The important thing about a vessel is that it be clean, empty, and available for service. Each of us must seek to become “a vessel unto honor, sanctified [set apart], and meet for the master’s use, and prepared unto every good work” (2 Tim. 2:21).

God permits trials, God controls trials, and God uses trials for His own glory. God is glorified through weak vessels.

Sometimes God permits our vessels to be jarred so that some of the treasure will spill out and enrich others. Suffering reveals not only the weakness of man but also the glory of God.

Not only must we focus on the treasure and not on the vessel, but we must also focus on the Master and not on the servant.

If we suffer, it is for Jesus’ sake. If we die to self, it is so that the life of Christ might be revealed in us. If we go through trials, it is so that Christ might be glorified. And all of this is for the sake of others. As we serve Christ, death works in us—but life works in those to whom we minister.

I want to challenge each of us “get the pandemic” behind us! I want us to rededicate ourselves, as we end/begin a new year to seek to “sow seed” every day…and depend of the power of the gospel and God to produce lasting fruit.