Focus: Favor for the Rejected

Text: Act.7:35

"This Moses whom they REFUSED... the same did God SEND to be a ruler and a deliverer."

People ignorantly conclude over your life. They think your future is already swallowed up by your past failures. People look at you and see nothing but an ugly past and a sad present, and so they conclude nothing good can ever come out of your life, and see your future as futile. On a particular day, a lady took her own life, and when the police arrived, they saw she left a note, and in it are two words, "They Said." She took her life for what people said. What are people making you do by what they say?

Are you being refused or rejected by men? Have people reached a conclusion that you are nothing but a misfit, a riffraff, or a good-for-nothing individual? Are you judged as unfit or unworthy of the high calling of God? Moses was rejected by his own people based on his immediate past - the crime he committed. But God saw in him, not a criminal, but a ruler and a deliverer. God picked him up, dusted him and made out of him a vessel of honor. Look at God calling and commissioning a reject! Grace is truly amazing.

Get this into your spirit, your destiny is never determined by or dependent on man's conclusion or condemnation. God has not left your destiny in another man's hands to decide. Grace has enough capacity to radically change the story of your life - vertically and horizontally. Moses is a witness.

Paul, too, can attest to the power of grace in his own life. In Act.9:13,14, we read, "Then Ananias answered, Lord, I have heard by many of this man, how MUCH EVIL he hath done to thy saints at Jerusalem: And here he hath authority from the chief priests to bind all that call on thy name."

Ananias was trying to inform God about Saul as if God were ignorant. Little did he know that supernatural change had already taken place in the man. He was a changed man. I could hear God say to Ananias, 'He was once all that and truly did all that, but he is different now. All the evil he committed is now in the past. He has a clean slate with me. I have remade him from a sinner to a saint.'

In Act.9:15 we read of God's quick response to Ananias, "BUT the Lord said unto him, Go thy way: for he is a CHOSEN VESSEL unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel."

This reminds me of what a wise minister once said, that "God does not consult your past to determine your future."

God is like saying, 'The man you are rehearsing his past happens to be the one I have chosen for my number one job.' Glory!!!

Grace is powerful; it makes a saint out of a sinner and turns a persecutor into a preacher. By grace Saul is now Paul. Paul testifies, "But I obtained mercy..." "But by the grace of God I am what I am" (1Tim.1:13,16; 1Cor.15:10).

One more thing: grace makes us grateful and humble. Paul later said, "And I THANK Christ Jesus our Lord, who hath enabled me, for that he counted me faithful, putting me into the ministry" (1Tim.1:12). Hallelujah! Amen.

by Bishop Moses E. Peter