God Stuff - Big Aha Moments - God Recycles

My women's Bible study is doing a Beth Moore series on Esther. Through it, I've had one of those life-altering revelations about God that I get every so often.

I've always seen my life in two big chunks. One is the pre-God chunk.  Even after I walked down the aisle at a Petra concert as a young teen, "praying the prayer" that supposedly made me a Christian, I spent about ten years, beginning in college and through most of my twenties, living like a non-believer. I did my own thing, and during that whole time, I sort of hoped no one would discover I was a Christian. It would have made God look incredibly bad.

Then, at around 27 or so, I feel like God really turned me around - He changed my heart forever, and I became a true follower of Christ - not just one in name only.  

I've always thought that once I became a believer, God sort of did this huge dump of the hard drive of my life - a giant re-boot. He tossed out all the old stuff, and replaced my heart of stone with a heart of flesh. The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 5:17: "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." So it would seem that everything before Christ is just -- poof -- gone. NOW, at last, God can begin working on me and making me look more like Christ.

But what I'm realizing now is that God uses EVERYTHING. He recycles! Priscilla Shirer talks about the fact that every single event and circumstance in our lives was first sifted through the fingers of his sovereign control. Nothing has happened in my life outside the control and design of God. While many things -- well, all things -- were not godly or God-honoring, they were ordained by God, and not a one of them happened as a surprise to Him.

So the cool thing about this is that He uses EVERYTHING. He has used every experience I've ever had to shape me and mold me into the service He has planned for me now.  Beth Moore says that God doesn't fulfill our destiny without using our history.  God is not bummed about my past life. It was all in His total control - He uses every experience I had to make me who I am. I am uniquely suited to the work He has for me BECAUSE of, not in spite of, my past.

There's a lot of mystery in God's sovereignty... like how it can be that He ordains things without actually CAUSING evil things.  I've been listening a lot to R.C. Sproul teaching on the sovereignty of God, and I'm not sure I'll ever feel like I really grasp it. The bottom line is that God is way bigger and more complicated than my little pea brain can handle. But I know that He's totally GOOD, and that I can trust him. And He was "green" before any of us even considered the idea!