Accepting Yourself Is the Key to Usefulness - One Year Devotions for Women

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And yet, LORD, you are our Father. We are the clay, and you are the potter. We are all formed by your hand. - Isaiah 64:8

Do you want to be useful to God? Maybe you feel that some of your personality characteristics get in the way. However, to serve God you need not change your entire personality. God made you just the way you are and wants you to serve him with who you are.

God wants us to understand that he lovingly made us, and he wants us to accept how he made us. When you become a disciple, God the potter doesn’t change who you are; instead, he changes what you are without Christ. The potter won’t change your personality—he simply will use who you are to better effect.

Self-acceptance is a key to usefulness for God. When I was eighteen, I became ill and was taken to a hospital. Maureen, the nurse assigned to me, immediately made me worse! She was impatient, rude, and very brusque. Then she became a Christian. God tempered her impatience into swift efficiency and transformed her brusqueness into briskness. She would come back in her spare time and give herself to her patients. All things had become new, although Maureen’s basic personality was the same. God did not change who she was but what she had been without Christ.

We can ask the potter who formed us what he has in mind for us. Accept how he made you, and then step back and let him transform you!

For Further Study: Isaiah 64:1-9

Excerpted from The One Year Devotions for Women, Copyright ©2000 by Jill Briscoe. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers. All rights reserved.

For more from Jill Briscoe, please visit TellingtheTruth.org.

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