Broken and Chosen

The Advertisement God Never Placed

Imagine the notice. Wanted, a deliverer for a nation of slaves. Must speak well, carry himself like a man who has stood before kings, and have nothing in his past that a newspaper could use. No speech difficulty. No family trouble. Certainly no record of killing a man and burying him in the sand. Apply in person.

Nobody posted that notice, and the man who got the job would have failed every line of it. He was somewhere at the back of the Midian desert, a shepherd who had spent decades away from the palace that raised him, and when God told him he was the one, he did the sensible thing and listed his reasons why not.

Moses said, in effect, that the Lord had clearly not thought this through.

I’d like to put a question to you, as one person to another, and then spend the rest of this essay answering it. If you carry something that makes you feel you’re the wrong person for whatever God has been stirring in you, an illness, an old wound, a failure you can’t undo, does that thing disqualify you? The Bible’s answer is no. It’s also more interesting than a plain no, and a good deal less comfortable than most of what gets said on the subject.

Who Counts as Unhealthy Here

Let me say what I mean, because the word can be made too small. I’m not only talking about people with a diagnosis, though they’re included. I mean the woman whose pain has outlasted six months of prayer and a good many visitors who told her to claim her healing. I mean the man who walks into church with depression sitting on his chest like a stone, and sings loudly because he’s afraid that if he stops the stone will get heavier. I mean the leader who mentors fifty people and then drives home alone to cry. I mean people whose nervous systems were set to high alert by something that happened before they were old enough to say no to it, and people whose failures were public and humiliating and still come back at three in the morning.

Sickness, weakness, grief, trauma, failure. All of it. The question is whether any of it takes you out of the running. I’ll try to answer that slowly, because the people who most need the answer are the ones least likely to believe a quick one.

Three Callings That Began With an Excuse

Start with Moses, because he’s the plainest case. In Exodus 4 he lays out his objection honestly.

“Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, either in the past or since you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and of tongue.”

— Exodus 4:10 (ESV)

The older English versions render the Hebrew as heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue, which sounds less like nerves and more like a real difficulty with speech. I wouldn’t diagnose a man across three thousand years. I’d just say that he believed it about himself, and so did God, because God doesn’t argue the point. He answers it.

“Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the LORD? Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak.”

— Exodus 4:11 to 12 (ESV)

Notice what God doesn’t do. He doesn’t heal Moses first and send him afterwards. He sends him with the mouth he has, and promises to be present in it.

Gideon is the next, and he’s a funnier case. The angel finds him threshing wheat in a winepress, hiding from the Midianites, and greets him as “O mighty man of valor” (Judges 6:12, ESV). Gideon, who knows exactly what he is, replies with a complaint about his family. His clan, he says, is the weakest in Manasseh, and he is “the least in my father’s house” (Judges 6:15, ESV). God doesn’t correct the CV. He says, “But I will be with you” (Judges 6:16, ESV).

Then Jeremiah, who tells God he’s too young and doesn’t know how to speak, and gets the same reply. “Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, declares the LORD” (Jeremiah 1:8, ESV).

Three men, three excuses, and one answer each time. The excuse is never refuted. It’s outweighed by a presence. If you’ve been waiting for God to argue you out of your list of reasons, you may be waiting for something he has never once done.

What Jacob, Timothy and Paul Carried

The Bible is not shy about bodies. After wrestling through the night at the Jabbok, Jacob’s hip was put out of joint, and as the sun rose he passed Penuel “limping because of his hip” (Genesis 32:31, ESV). He kept that limp for the rest of the story. I find it striking that the text never pretends otherwise.

Timothy was young, and sent by Paul to carry weight in a major church. Paul also tells him, in the middle of a letter about church order, to stop drinking only water and “use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments” (1 Timothy 5:23, ESV). A man with a stomach that gave him trouble, leading a congregation. And the second letter reads to me like an older man steadying a nervous younger one, though that’s my reading and not a diagnosis the text gives.

Then Paul, the man credited with thirteen of the New Testament’s twenty seven books, who writes about a thorn.

“So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me.”

— 2 Corinthians 12:7 to 8 (ESV)

He never names it. Scholars have guessed at an eye complaint, a recurring fever, an opponent, and I think the silence is a kindness, because it means anyone in any century can read their own pain into it. What matters is the answer he got.

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

— 2 Corinthians 12:9 (ESV)

Read it slowly. Paul asked for removal and God answered with sufficiency. The weakness stayed, and the power arrived inside it.

An Objection From the Sickroom

Now the sceptic in the back row deserves a hearing, and he has a good point. It goes like this. Preachers who tell the sick that their weakness is a calling are doing something suspect. They’re dressing up unanswered prayer as strategy. The Bible also records Jesus healing people on the roadside, Peter’s mother in law up from her fever, a paralysed man carried through a roof. If God can heal, then talk of power in weakness is a theology for people who haven’t been healed, and a convenient one for pastors who can’t deliver.

I’ll concede a good deal of that. Healing is real in Scripture and I’d never tell anyone to stop praying for it. Paul himself prayed three times. And it would be cruel to read this passage to someone in a hospital ward and imply that their illness was God’s plan for their ministry. Nor does Paul tell Timothy to endure his stomach in silence. He prescribes medicine. Anyone who has sat beside a sickbed in a Nigerian hospital knows the visitor who says the patient only needs more faith, and knows what that sentence does to a family at two in the morning. It isn’t in the Bible.

Here’s where the objection stops short, though. It assumes that the only options are healing or abandonment. Paul’s story has a third. The prayer was heard, the thorn stayed, and the call went on. Whether God heals is one question. Whether the unhealed are still wanted is another, and the Bible answers the second with a firm yes whatever happens with the first.

A Man Who Still Prays for Arms and Legs

You may want a living example, and there’s one I find hard to dismiss. I should say that I know Nick Vujicic only through what he and others have published.

He was born in Melbourne on 4 December 1982 without arms or legs, and nobody could say why. Three sonograms had shown nothing unusual. His parents, according to an ABC News profile, went through grief and confusion, and it took about four months before they came to terms with it. His father, Boris, was a church founder and an author. By the age of ten Nick has said he was suicidal, and that he blamed God for his pain. I mention that plainly because it’s part of the story and because some readers will have walked that road. If the stone on your chest is that heavy, tell a doctor or someone you trust this week, and don’t wait for a better moment.

Today his ministry’s own website reports that it has reached 946 million people digitally and 11 million in person, that 1.5 million have started a relationship with Jesus Christ, and that he has spoken in 87 countries, with a goal of one billion more by 2028. Those are the organisation’s figures. They’re counted by the ministry and not audited by anyone I can point you to, and the numbers that appear on other pages differ a little, so hold them as an estimate of scale and not a score.

What I find more telling is what he said this year. A documentary about his life, called No Limbs, No Limits, was scheduled for release in American cinemas from 25 September, and I haven’t seen it. In coverage of it in May, he was quoted as saying, “I still pray for arms and legs,” and “God is not a genie.” He is not a man who got his miracle and then told the story. He is a man who didn’t, and told it anyway. The film also deals with the death of his father in 2017, a loss that he says he found hard to talk about.

So here is where I’d turn the whole argument. The stronger case for God using broken people isn’t the person who got well and then became useful. It’s the person who is still praying, still limited, and being used in the meantime.

Where the Glory Lands

So why does God work this way? Paul gives his reason in 1 Corinthians 1, and he doesn’t soften it.

“But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.”

— 1 Corinthians 1:27 to 29 (ESV)

Read it against the way many of us have learned to pick leaders. We look for the flawless testimony, the confident voice, the suit that sits right on the platform, and we quietly decide that anyone with a visible struggle should sit nearer the back. Paul’s list is the reverse of that seating plan. The foolish, the weak, the low and the despised aren’t a reserve team called on when the strong ones are unavailable. They are the first choice.

Look at the last clause. The purpose is that nobody boasts. When a gifted, polished, healthy person does great things, people talk about the gift, and they’re not wrong to, because that’s how attention works. But when it’s somebody sick, shaking or limping, the conversation has nowhere else to land. Dane Ortlund puts it well in an article for Crossway on Paul’s thorn: “Competence is not where God’s power lies. Frailty is.”

C. S. Lewis made a related point in The Problem of Pain (1940), when he described pain as God’s megaphone to a deaf world. I don’t think he meant that suffering is good. He meant that it can strip away the noise that keeps us from hearing. Many believers could tell you that their most useful season came after the worst one, and that what they have to give now comes from what they went through. Anyone who has spent time among Nigerian congregations knows that the prayers that carry weight are often prayed by people who have been through the fire, and they don’t need to say so. Ask them to pray for you, if you doubt it.

What You Might Do This Week

If you’ve been reading this with something on your chest, I’d offer one small thing, and not a slogan.

Think of the line you’ve been using to tell yourself that you’re the wrong person. Maybe it’s the health condition, the divorce, the breakdown, the old failure, or the stammer. Now notice that Moses, Gideon, Jeremiah and Paul all had a line like that, and God answered each of them in the same way. Not with a refutation, but with himself.

“The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”

— Psalm 34:18 (ESV)

He isn’t waiting for you to get well before he turns up. Paul came to the same conclusion about his thorn, and wrote it down.

“For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

— 2 Corinthians 12:10 (ESV)

So say the thing out loud to one person this week. Tell a friend, a pastor, a cell leader, or your sister on the phone what you think disqualifies you, and ask them to pray with you about it. Then see what God does with a vessel that has stopped hiding its cracks.

References

Biblical References

Exodus 2:12 (referenced, not quoted). Moses killing an Egyptian, the record the imagined notice could not accept.
Exodus 4:10 (ESV). Moses names his speech difficulty as his reason to refuse the call.
Exodus 4:11 to 12 (ESV). God’s reply to Moses, which promises presence and does not offer a cure first.
Judges 6:11 (referenced, not quoted). Gideon threshing wheat in a winepress.
Judges 6:12, 15, 16 (ESV). Gideon’s greeting, his protest that he is the least, and God’s promise to be with him.
Jeremiah 1:8 (ESV). God answers Jeremiah’s youth and fear with his own presence (verse 6 referenced for the protest).
Matthew 8:14 to 15 and Mark 2:1 to 12 (referenced, not quoted). Peter’s mother in law and the paralysed man, used for the sceptic’s point that Jesus healed.
Genesis 32:22 to 31 (referenced; verse 31 quoted, ESV). Jacob limping after the wrestling at the Jabbok.
1 Timothy 5:23 (ESV). Paul’s practical advice to Timothy about his stomach and frequent ailments.
2 Timothy 1:6 to 7 (referenced, not quoted). The background for reading the second letter as encouragement to a nervous younger leader.
2 Corinthians 12:7 to 8 (ESV). Paul’s thorn and his three petitions.
2 Corinthians 12:9 (ESV). The answer that grace is sufficient and power is made perfect in weakness.
2 Corinthians 12:10 (ESV). Paul’s conclusion, used in the closing invitation.
1 Corinthians 1:27 to 29 (ESV). Paul’s stated reason that God chooses the weak, so that no one boasts.
Psalm 34:18 (ESV). God’s nearness to the brokenhearted, used in the closing.

Other Sources

ABC News. (n.d.). Born without limbs, refusing limitations. https://abcnews.com/Health/story?id=4531209
Christianity.com. (2026, August 18). Nick Vujicic reflects on loss, fatherhood, and faith in new film. https://www.christianity.com/wiki/current-events/nick-vujicic-reflects-on-loss-fatherhood-and-faith-in-new-film.html
K24 Digital. (2026, May 17). Evangelist Nick Vujicic opens up on almost ending his life at age 10. https://k24.digital/entertainment/evangelist-nick-vujicic-opens-up-on-almost-ending-his-life-at-age-10
Lewis, C. S. (1940). The problem of pain. Geoffrey Bles.
NickV Ministries. (2024). Nick biography. https://nickvministries.org/about/nick-biography/
NickV Ministries. (2026). Home. https://nickvministries.org/
Nick Vujicic doc “No Limbs, No Limits” explores faith, family and finding purpose through pain. (2026, May 6). The Christian Post. https://www.christianpost.com/news/nick-vujicic-doc-no-limbs-no-limits-explores-faith-family.html
Ortlund, D. C. (2021, December 29). What was Paul’s thorn in the flesh? (2 Corinthians 12). Crossway. https://www.crossway.org/articles/what-was-pauls-thorn-in-the-flesh-2-corinthians-12/
WaterBrook & Multnomah. (2017, May 16). WaterBrook & Multnomah mourns the loss of author Boris Vujicic [Press release]. https://waterbrookmultnomah.com/?p=27679

Translation Notices

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.