“For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;” (Romans 3:23)
The colonel was trying to get a convoy of trucks out of the battle zone. The trucks had been under siege by the enemy and there had been terrible wounds and deaths that had occurred. They had to get out of there if they were going to survive. The colonel went to the lead truck where the driver had been killed and pulled the body out. Then he turned to a Sergeant and told him to drive the truck out of there. The sergeant responded that he had been shot and therefore wouldn’t be able to drive, to which the colonel replied, “We’ve all been shot! Now drive the truck.”
When I first heard this story told from the book Black Hawk Down, immediately I thought of the church and what happens there or, for the case of this article, what doesn’t happen because we allow ourselves to make excuses.
We all have a person, or maybe even a few people, in our church that are ready and willing to do whatever it is that we ask of them. Whether it be cleaning the restrooms, mowing the lawn, greeting everyone that enters the church, teaching home bible studies, teaching Sunday School, etc., they will do it. You know who I’m talking about. They never stop asking you if you have something that they can do. They are always the first to greet you after service. They seem like they are always there. These people are great and wonderful to have in our congregation. When you ask them to do something you never have to worry about it getting done, because they have a desire to be used for the Kingdom. However, these people are usually few in number.
On the other hand, trying to get the rest of the church to do something is a different story. Usually, we have to teach lessons on servitude, hold seminars, or have retreats just to get people to want to be involved more. And all too often we hear the same reasons of why they think they can’t or shouldn’t be used. “I haven’t always lived for God”, “I’ve only been in church a few years and I’m still getting over my past” are all things we’ve heard said or have even said them ourselves, maybe even recently. And although these and many other reasons we could think of may be true, they should not be a crutch that we lean on and, as a result, are never used by God. The enemy would want nothing more than for us to just give in and concede that “we have failed God and therefore we will just exist and be around church.”
We’ve all failed God at some point in our lives. We are human and the flesh is doing nothing to help us out. We have all sinned. From the platform to the back door. David said, “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.”(Psalm 51:5) What is done is done. There’s nothing that we can do about our past. So realizing this, Paul wrote in Philippians 3:13-14, “Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” Forget about it and press on.
If it were true that God couldn’t use us because we have failed, then who would he use? All throughout Scripture we find God using people mightily who, at some point in their lives, had failed God. Abraham lied about Sarah being his wife (Genesis 20:2) but later on we read that Abraham was called a friend of God (James 2:23). Moses didn’t fully obey God at Meribah ( Numbers 20), but lifted up his rod and stretched out his hand over the sea and the Red Sea parted (Exodus 14). David looked on Bathsheba with lust in his heart (2 Samuel 11:2), but was referred to as a man after God’s own heart (Acts 13:22). The apostle Paul persecuted Christians and made havoc of the church (Acts 8:3), but was converted (Acts 9) and ended up writing most of the New Testament. Peter denied the Lord three times (Matthew 26), but preached on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2). There are many more instances that we could refer to.
We can’t use our past failings or mistakes to excuse us from the work of the Kingdom. We’ve all failed. Or in other words, “We’ve all been shot. Now drive the truck.”
