How God’s ‘I Am’ Makes Up for What I’m Not
By Jessica Brodie
Do you ever have those days where you feel utterly worthless? Maybe an encounter with a child went horribly wrong, ending in slammed doors and a screaming fit. Maybe you tried to mend a rift with a friend and it backfired, or a challenging work project crashed and burned, causing embarrassment and disappointment for you or your team.
Whatever the cause, every inch of you feels inadequate, useless, unimportant, and it’s a feeling no pep talk or dose of fresh air can fix.
I used to have low self-esteem. I didn’t feel good enough, didn’t feel anyone liked me, and I kept the world at arm’s length because I was afraid if people got too close they’d see me for the inadequate, boring, imperfect person I really was. It took me a long time to get over my self-esteem troubles (learning to like my own company and nix people-pleasing played a huge role, but that’s a whole other blog topic, ha!).
Today, I’m happy to say I genuinely like myself, and that low self-esteem seems to have disappeared. Yet every once in a while, when something bad happens, a flicker of worthlessness rears its head. Doubts loom.
“And who do you think you are, Miss Thing?” that sassy, hand-on-hip alter ego challenges me with a sideways glance.
Here’s what helps: Remembering that for everything I’m not, God is.
Scripture gives us a good example. In Exodus 3, Moses had fled to Midian after killing an Egyptian man. He got married and started a family, and years passed. One day while Moses was tending sheep near Mount Horeb, he encountered a bush alive with fire, yet it didn’t burn up. When he went to investigate, he had an unexpected encounter with the divine. God Himself spoke with Moses from the bush, telling Moses He’d heard the cries of the Israelites suffering under Egyptian slavery, and He wanted Moses to go rescue them from Pharoah and bring them out of Egypt.
Moses was a God-fearing man, but his first reaction wasn’t, “Yes, Lord.” As with many of us, it was self-doubt.
As Exodus 3:11 recounts, “Moses said to God, ‘Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?’” (NIV).
Moses, who’d spent years in hiding after his sin of murder, who felt like an outcast, who considered himself to be “slow of speech and tongue” and decidedly not eloquent (Exodus 4:10), instead asked that most insecure of all insecure questions: “Why me?”
I can relate. Why me? How should I be so special? I’m nothing. I’m not good enough to even stand in Your presence, Lord, and yet You want little-old-nothing-me to play a role in the rescue of Your people Israel? You’ve got to be kidding.
But God wasn’t kidding.
As God reminded Moses, “‘I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you’” (Exodus 3:14).
God’s “I Am” made up for everything Moses wasn’t. And today, He does the same. God, the “Great I Am,” makes up for everything I’m not, everything you’re not, everything this world can never possibly provide.
For everything you are not, God is.
For everything I am not, God is.
So if you feel God calling you to something special, some task or role you are certain is beyond your capabilities, remember: You’re tasked to be God’s vessel, God’s helper. Sure, God can do it all without us. But He wants us to participate in His plan. So He invites us, calls us: Go! Do!
Write this. Say that. Travel here. Whatever it is God is calling you to do, He equips you when He calls you.
So push your doubts and insecurities aside. Stand up in faith knowing God is the great I Am.
God can use each one of us—in spite of our faults and insecurities—to do His glorious, magnificent work.
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