I doubted God’s ability to redeem: Confession #77

God is about the business of redeeming his creation and making it new.

When I attended Catalyst Dallas last May, I heard from a man named Scott Harrison who started the charitable organization Charity: Water. Harrison’s group has the ambitious goal of working toward providing every single person on the planet with clean water.

The part of his story that affected me the most was how God used even his previous sinful life for the good of others.

Harrison grew up in a Christian home but had no interest in Jesus or the church himself. When he turned 18 he moved to New York City and like many he pursued all of the things in life that his Christian parents had kept him from.

Eventually he discovered that he could make a living doing what he was already busy doing as a night club promoter. His job was to get people into night clubs and get them drunk. He was paid to party. He was paid to drink. Apparently he was qute good at it.

After 10 years of this life God saved him.

He called him to something better. He called him too a life of charity.

Needing to do something different, he found himself on a year long trip with Mercy Ships as a photo journalist. On this trip he noticed that much of the disease that people suffered from was related to unclean drinking water.

When he returned home he then set out to start Charity: Water with the hope of solving this problem. Although some of the solutions for providing clean water are simple, paying for these solutions is difficult.

Then comes the part of the story that I find unbleleivably beautiful and causes me to wonder at the mystery and love of our God. Harrison was then able to use all of the skills and contacts that he had developed in his sinful life as a nght club promoter to be incredibly effective at raising money for his organization.

Let me rephrase that. His charity is successful because he developed skills through a sinful life that God then redeemed and now he uses it for the good of others.

Harrison would not be as good at his current job if not for his previous sinful one.

I have to confess that if I had ever come across Harrison in his hey day as a promoter, I would have chosen to have been offended by him. I would have seen his lifestyle as pitiful. I would have viewed him as hopeless. I would have judged him as a sinner.

But I would have been wrong in the end. It turns out that God was using his sin to train him for something better. Harrison chose sin for himself, but God used this for good.

Does that mean that God wants us to sin? No, but it does mean that God can redeem anything. Even our sin and selfishness.

Have you seen God take something that seemed too bad or too sinful and wath him make it into something amazing? Have you ever doubted God’s ability to do something? Leave a comment.