God wants to use you. Oh yes, he does … he has found a way to use you for his good works and, girl, he’s been trying to get you to see what he’s doing here. What he’s doing is taking the very thing you struggled with in your past to be used for good in the future. What … you think you can’t be used? You think you’re insignificant with nothing to offer? You think you’ve been disqualified from goodness? You’re wrong. One very wise preacher once said, “There is no reason why if you’ve gone very far in sin, you should not go very far in usefulness.” The further you’ve been on the wrong path, the further God can take you on the right path. The more you personally know what doesn’t work, the more you fully trust what does. This is why God used Paul in such powerful ways. He had gone really far down the wrong path. He had passionately persecuted all followers of Christ, trying to kill them. I mean really, you can’t be any more wrong than that, right? I bet you’ve been wrong, but have you been that wrong? And yet this man, Paul, the one who had spent years being really wrong, is the one God chose to write the majority of the New Testament in our Bible. He is the one charged with the mission of bringing God’s word. If God can find a way to use Paul, don’t you think he can find a way to use you? Paul writes in 1 Timothy 1: 15-16, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners – and I am the worst of them all. But God had mercy on me so that Christ Jesus could use me as a prime example of his great patience with even the worst sinners. Then others will realize that they, too, can believe in him and receive eternal life.” He fully recognized the power of God’s mercy that covered how terribly wrong he had been, then he stepped into his calling to use that for good. And, my sister, this is the calling he has on my life and on your life. We are to live in the power of God’s mercy that covers our wrongs and start using it all for good. That’s why I’m here today. It’s why I’m talking to you. Because I was the girl who was wrong … really wrong, now I’m just trying to let God use that for good. Do you know why I can sometimes say things that make you feel like I’ve somehow tapped into your deepest inner thoughts and feelings and bared the things you can’t even put words to? BECAUSE I GET IT. You and I are not that different. You struggle … I struggle. Let me tell you where I was so wrong before that required God’s mercy. My priorities were all jacked up. I rushed through absolutely everything. Beneath everything I did was a selfish layer of it being about me. How would this make me look? Would it make them love me? Would it make them say nice things about me? I would elaborate the story to make it bigger. I would twist the truth to make it fit me. All while everything in me had gotten twisted. I was a really nice person … on the outside.I would do anything for anyone … as long as it made me look good.I was there … but I wasn’t really there.God and my family got my sloppy seconds because I was too busy trying to impress someone else. And that’s the truth of how I was living. Everything was surface level and superficial. Spiritually I was dried up. Oh, but I was running marathons and making all the money. I had the big house, the great body, and the perfectly dressed kids. I would wake up on Sunday morning before the sun came up, run 20 miles, then sit with my family in Church and feel absolutely nothing. Nothing.