God Chooses Unlikely People for His Purposes

Ah, another year of Bible Study Fellowship (BSF) has started and as usual, I'm amazed at how useful, powerful and in-depth it is.

We're studying Matthew this year, which means I get to revisit a lot of stories and verses that I've read growing up and look at them through a completely different lens than the felt board* from Sunday school.

This is why I like BSF:

We studied the first 17 verses--16 verses of listing out Christ's lineage to Abraham and David--and picked out 5 women (prostitutes, foreigners, schemers, etc) that were in the lineage and discussed why we thought Matthew included them. In the lecture, it was pointed out that God included them to show that he came from simple and broken ancestors and highlight the grace of God. Since he had sinners for ancestors, he'll have sinners as his descendants (that's us!), the whole point of Jesus' coming, to erase the sin from his family, his spiritual family.

God doesn't just see us for who we are, but for who we can become; he takes our failures and uses them for his glory. God chooses unlikely people for his purposes.


*felt board: an old, 2-dimensional educational device to visually depict various bible stories to help children understand a little better with a piece of felt as a background and various people and props cut out of smaller pieces of felt.

In rare cases, felt boards were left alone after story time. from 1984-1990, 95% of Sunday school classroom teachers reported children playing with the felt board and cringing as children depicted their lack of understanding of gravity as clouds were placed on the ground, sheep floated in the sky, shepherds gravitated just above ground and rocks were placed precariously on both people and animal heads.