Our God Sees Potential
Recently at my youth group we have been completing a preaching series called Same God. The series is themed around the worship song recently released by Elevation Worship, Same God, and focuses on the fact that the God of today is the same God who worked all through the whole Bible, OT & NT, to work His power on the earth and bring people to know Him and be in relationship with Him.
As I am focusing on Mary, Jesus’ mother, this week, the line “His favour rests upon the lowly” stuck out to me. We hear these words in different arrangements constantly over the Christmas period, and since it is halfway through the year I haven’t heard them for a while. But they are so true!
Jesus looked for people who were poor. He found the sick and healed them. He saw the broken hearted and had compassion on them. This was someone who favoured those who were of a lower importance to the majority; who saw the poverty and the potential in the same glance.
And this is the same God who saw Mary; someone whom others didn’t recognise as worthy to carry the Son of God in her womb. She was from Nazareth, not from Jerusalem; she was not wealthy and she did not have servants to call her own. But still God saw potential in her and chose her to carry His Son into this Earth in one of the humblest ways imaginable in that culture.
The character of this God who sees potential where no one else sees it shines through so beautifully in the Bible but also in youth ministry where we see God’s love shining through to those whom society does not value. As we work with young people who are involved in ASB, crime, drugs or alcoholism we can be tempted to only see the outer covering but God sees potential in every young person’s life.
This week, let’s remember that the same God who saw people who could be a part of His kingdom throughout the Bible is the the God who has favour upon the lowly of our society today.
Pray for:
1) Young people to be valued in their community
2) Youth work to be modelled around this potential-seeing mindset
3) Swindon as a whole to see the potential in its young people
Written by Jamie McNutt, Intern for Swindon Youth for Christ