I feel like a phony almost all of the time. I know all the ways, left to my own devices and my normal way of behaving, that I would utterly destroy every area of my life. I don’t need any help, I don’t need any temptation, I don’t need anyone trying to trick me. I have done it all by myself. It’s probably my only true natural talent.
In most of my life, I feel like an actor. I believe and tell students Jesus can set you free, but I live my life a slave to other people’s approval. I say Jesus’ way is better, but I act like a slave to everyone and everything around me.
I feel like an imposter. Shouldn’t God get somebody else to do this? Shouldn’t God call somebody that has everything together to follow him?
And yet the more broken I am, the more called I feel. It’s the more that I feel like a phony that I realize that I can’t do any of this without God. Because I know me. I know I’m going to blow this up without him. And sometimes I wonder if I’ll still blow it up anyway.
And I wonder if that’s exactly why I am called. The more I realize how broken and fake and phony I am, the more I and everybody else realizes that what God does through me, can’t possibly be because of me. I wonder if God doesn’t just call us despite our brokennes, but if he actually calls us because of our brokenness.
I love how Paul talks about God storing his treasure in broken clay pots. Clay pots in his time were literally used as toilets. Nobody would store anything important in a clay pot. Only sewage. But, according to Paul, God chose to take the incredible treasure of the gospel and store it in an unlikely place: broken, despised and foolish people.
Most of the time I don’t know why God picked me. It makes me tear up when I consider how much he has given to me in every area of life. And how I would squander and ruin every last drop and every last penny when I do it all on my own. I feel like a phony because here I am a sewage pot storing the greatest treasure ever known. It doesn’t make sense.
But God. God chose the world’s fools. Because the foolishness of God is better than the wisdom of the world. And the weakness of God is unfathomably stronger than the strength of man. God seems to like to turn things upside down to show how messed up our world is and how he can take anybody – even me and even you – and do amazing things through them. He picks fools like us even though we feel like phonies because he knows no one would credit to us what he does.