The things that are despised, did God choose, yea and the things that are not.
1 Corinthians 1:28
What an unusual God we have. He chooses the least likely to be His tools, exactly what we would never do. I can remember as a young Christian thinking how great it would be if this rock star or that celebrity would become a Christian. I used to think that would be the greatest thing ever and surely many people would be converted. It took a while for me to learn that that was not the Lord’s way of operating. I remember being so excited back in the seventies when Bob Dylan confessed to being a born again Christian. He even wrote and recorded a couple of Christian albums. That didn’t last long. His fans hated him, the media slammed him, and the church exploited him; what a fiasco. No wonder the Lord chooses nobodies; that way He gets the glory, not the celebrity and his great talent and influence. Here is how Watchman Nee describes this characteristic of God.
“The cross is the greatest leveler in the universe. It brings every one of us to zero…. The difference between a Christian who progresses fast and one who progresses slowly is in the faithfulness and obedience of the former, never in anything he possesses by nature. There are many things too strong and too imposing for God to use. Instead, He not only chooses the weak things and the despised: He goes further. The apostle seems almost at a loss to know how to define the things, so weak and despicable in men’s eyes, that God elects to use. In a telling phrase he sums them up as the “things which are not.” Do you fall into that category? Do not despair. Far from being at a disadvantage as compared with others, you may in fact have the edge over them. For at least you are already at zero and have not a long way still to go to reach God’s starting point!”
That brings us back to us; we not may have much celebrity stature or a whole lot of talent, that is exactly the qualifications the Lord is looking for. Here is how Paul says it in 1Cor. 1:26-28 – The Message, “Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of ‘the brightest and the best’ among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these ‘nobodies’ to expose the hollow pretensions of the ‘somebodies’?”