Broken and Chosen: God Has Never Once Advertised for Perfect People

The Job Description God Never Posted

Imagine the advertisement. Seeking a deliverer for three million enslaved people. Must be eloquent, commanding, confident before royalty. Fluent in Egyptian court protocol and Hebrew pastoral leadership. Strong communicator. No speech impediments. No family drama. No criminal history involving impulsive manslaughter in broad daylight. Apply within.

God never posted that advertisement.

What He did instead was walk into the back end of a Midian desert, find a man who had been in exile for forty years, who flinched at his own voice, who had run from every version of his identity that had ever been handed to him, and say: you are the one. You are going to stand in front of the most powerful man on earth and not move until he blinks.

Moses said, essentially: Lord, you have clearly not thought this through.

And God said: I made your mouth. Now go.

That exchange at the burning bush is not a minor footnote in redemption history. It is a policy statement. It tells you everything you need to know about the kind of people God has always preferred to use. Not the polished ones. Not the credentialled ones. Not the ones whose résumé reads like a devotional calendar.

The broken ones. The struggling ones. The ones you would not call up to the front of church on a Sunday morning because they might embarrass everyone, including themselves.

Those are exactly the ones He calls.

What We Mean When We Say “Unhealthy”

Before we build the case, we need to be clear about what we are arguing, because the word “unhealthy” can be narrowed in ways that miss the point entirely.

We are not talking only about people with diagnosed medical conditions, though that is certainly included. We are talking about the full spectrum of human brokenness. Chronic physical illness that does not go away despite six months of prayer and three rounds of prophetic declaration. The kind of weakness that wakes you up at 2am with pain you have learned to name but not to explain. We are talking about emotional wounds from things that happened to you before you were old enough to consent to any of it. Trauma that rewired your nervous system before you knew what a nervous system was.

We are talking about the person who walks into the building on Sunday morning carrying depression like a stone in their chest, singing praise songs with everything they have because they know that if they stop singing, the stone gets heavier. We are talking about the leader who mentors fifty people and goes home to cry in a bathroom they share with no one. We are talking about past failures of the spectacular and humiliating variety, the kind that have a way of reappearing in your mind at inconvenient moments to remind you of exactly who you used to be.

All of that is “unhealthy” as this conversation means it. Sickness. Weakness. Emotional pain. Trauma. Failure. The whole territory.

And the question on the table is whether any of that disqualifies you from being used by God.

The answer, delivered without hesitation or caveat, is no. Not even close.

The Gallery of the Cracked and the Called

Walk with me through it. This will not take long, because the Bible does not try to hide this pattern. It practically advertises it.

Moses stood before Pharaoh as the greatest liberator in Israel’s history, and he did it with a tongue that did not cooperate with his instructions. In Exodus 4, he told God explicitly:

“Please, Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither recently nor in time past, nor since You have spoken to Your servant; for I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” — Exodus 4:10 (NASB)

The Hebrew behind that phrase is heavier than the English translation suggests. The original reads “heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue.” This was not a man with mild public speaking anxiety who just needed a confidence workshop. This was a man with a genuine, documented, self-reported communication disability, standing at the hinge point of Israel’s entire history, telling God that he was the wrong person for the job.

God’s response is extraordinary. He did not say: alright, I hear you, let me heal you first and then send you. He said: Who made your mouth? Now go.

He sent Moses into the most important negotiation in the ancient world with the very same tongue that Moses considered his primary disqualification. And the conversation between Moses and Pharaoh that followed is now the founding testimony of an entire civilisation.

Then there is Jacob, who walked with a limp for the rest of his life after wrestling with God at the Jabbok crossing in Genesis 32. That limp was not incidental. It was the mark of encounter, the permanent physical testimony that he had been in a place most people only read about. Every step Jacob took after that night was a sermon. His body preached before his mouth opened.

Then there is Timothy. The young pastor Paul mentored through two letters of the New Testament was not a picture of robust health. He had a stomach problem that Paul addressed practically in 1 Timothy 5:23, telling him to take wine for his ailments. This is the man Paul called his true son in the faith and sent to represent him to entire churches in his absence. A man with a chronic digestive condition, managing anxiety that Paul acknowledged directly in 2 Timothy 1:7, leading the church at Ephesus while dealing with whatever his body and his nerves were throwing at him on any given day.

And then there is Paul himself. The most prolific theologian in the New Testament. The man who wrote nearly half the letters in the canon. The apostle who planted churches from Jerusalem to Rome and whose thinking has shaped Christian theology for two thousand years. That man carried something he called a thorn in the flesh, something permanent and painful enough that he petitioned God three times to remove it. He never named it. Scholars have speculated for centuries: an eye condition, recurring illness, a speech impediment of his own. He refused to identify it specifically, and that refusal is itself a kind of gift, because it means every suffering believer in every century can lean into Paul’s thorn as their own.

What God said to Paul when he prayed for removal is among the most important sentences in Scripture:

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.” — 2 Corinthians 12:9 (NIV)

Read that again, slowly. Not: my power will be activated despite your weakness. Not: once you are healed, my power will come. The power is made perfect in the weakness itself. The weakness is not the obstacle to anointing. The weakness is the address where anointing lives.

Strength That Looks Like a Scandal

Here is what makes this theology genuinely radical rather than merely comforting: it is not a consolation prize. God is not using weak people because He has exhausted His supply of strong ones.

He is using weak people because weakness is the optimal condition for divine power. On purpose. By design.

Paul makes the argument in 1 Corinthians 1, and he makes it without softening the edges:

“But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence.” — 1 Corinthians 1:27–29 (NKJV)

That last clause is the engine of the whole argument. “That no flesh should glory in His presence.” God is not primarily interested in making us impressive. He is interested in making Himself visible. And the problem with a strong, eloquent, healthy, put-together instrument is that when the miracle happens, people spend the next six months talking about how talented the vessel was. When the miracle happens through someone broken, shaking, sick, limping, tongue-tied, traumatised, running on empty, there is only one explanation available.

That is not a coincidence. That is a strategy.

The Crossway commentary on 2 Corinthians 12 captures this with unusual precision: “Competence is not where God’s power lies. Frailty is.” What Paul experienced when God refused to remove his thorn was not abandonment. It was initiation into a deeper operating principle of the Kingdom: that the power of God does not flow most freely through capacity. It flows most freely through surrender. And the people who are most fully surrendered are almost always the people who have run out of options, who have tried everything else, who have nothing left to pretend with.

That is not weakness being tolerated. That is weakness being weaponised for the glory of God.

C.S. Lewis, writing about pain and suffering, observed that “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.” There is a kind of hearing that only opens in suffering. There is a kind of usefulness that only unlocks in brokenness. The healthy, undisturbed person can still be used, yes. But the person who has been cracked open by life and held together by nothing but grace has a testimony that no seminar can manufacture and no curriculum can replicate.

The Man Without Arms Who Has Preached to Nearly a Billion People

If the biblical gallery feels like ancient history, then let us come forward several thousand years to a delivery room in Melbourne, Australia, on the 4th of December 1982.

Nick Vujicic was born without arms and without legs. Three separate sonograms had failed to detect what was coming. When his father, a pastor, walked into that delivery room and saw his son for the first time, he walked straight back out and was sick in the corridor. His mother would not hold the baby for four months.

By the time he was eight years old, Nick Vujicic had written his own suicide note.

Today, his ministry has shared the Gospel with nearly one billion people. According to the most recent reports from NickV Ministries, over 812 million people have heard the Gospel through his outreach, and over one million individuals have made decisions for Christ through events connected to his organisation across 87 countries. He has met 37 heads of state. He has preached to crowds of 800,000 people at a time. Billy Graham, the man history calls the greatest evangelist of the twentieth century, invited him to his home in 2012 to pray over him and encourage him, one great man commissioning another.

A man with no arms. No legs. A childhood defined by isolation and bullying and suicidal despair. Standing in stadiums that hold the population of some African cities, telling the Gospel to people who came to see what they expected to be a curiosity and left having met Jesus Christ.

You want a case for God using unhealthy people? There it is. Still breathing. Still preaching. Still counting.

Why God Does It This Way

By now the pattern is undeniable. Moses. Jacob. Paul. Timothy. Nick Vujicic. And ten thousand more whose names did not make it into the canon or the news cycle, but who led people to God from hospital beds, from wheelchairs, from the rubble of broken marriages and demolished careers and seasons of depression so dark they could taste it.

Why does God work this way? We have touched the answer already, but it deserves to be said plainly.

He works this way because the glory must land in the right place.

If you are healthy, gifted, eloquent, confident, and successful, and things go well for you in ministry, the world will praise your gifts. They will read your books and buy your conference tickets and quote your Instagram captions and the conversation will, again and again, circle back to you. This is not wickedness. It is just how human attention works. We are drawn to excellence and we attribute the results to the excellent.

But when a man with no arms leads a million people to Christ, and when a woman in the middle of clinical depression preaches a sermon that cracks someone’s wall open, and when a pastor who cries every Saturday night before Sunday morning stands at the pulpit and the Holy Spirit shows up anyway, and when a young person still raw from abuse becomes the safest person in the room for others who are raw from abuse, something else happens. The conversation cannot find anywhere to land except on God. The miracle is too obvious. The gap between the vessel and the result is too wide to fill with talent.

That gap is not a problem to be solved. That gap is the signature of grace.

Tim Keller, in his writing on suffering, observed that “one of the main ways we move from abstract knowledge about God to a personal encounter with him as a living reality is through the furnace of affliction.” The furnace does something to the person inside it that comfortable living simply cannot replicate. It burns away the pretending. It burns away the performance. What is left, when everything else is gone, is either authentic faith or nothing at all. And authentic faith, leaning hard on a God who is real and present and sufficient, is the most powerful thing this world has ever seen.

The African church knows this. You cannot spend any serious time among the churches of Nigeria, of Congo, of Uganda, of Ghana, and walk away thinking that prosperity and ease are the soil in which the most powerful testimonies grow. The testimonies that stop a room are the ones that begin with devastation. The prayers that carry the most weight are the ones prayed by people who prayed their way through the worst years of their lives and have the receipts. There is a quality of intercession that only comes from someone who has needed God at the level of desperation, not convenience. That quality is not taught. It is forged.

The Only Question That Remains

So here is where this lands.

If you are reading this while carrying something you wish you were not carrying, some physical thing, some emotional thing, some past thing, some present thing, something that has made you feel disqualified from whatever it is you sense God has been saying to you, this is what the biblical record is telling you:

You have misread the requirements.

Not that God is indifferent to your suffering. He is not. He is the God who is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit, as Psalm 34:18 tells us. He sees the thorn. He has not forgotten your name. He has not lost the address of your pain. But He is also the God who, when you ask Him to remove the thing that is humbling you, sometimes answers with something better than removal: grace that is sufficient, power that is made perfect, and a testimony that no conference speaker with a flawless life could buy at any price.

Your weakness is not evidence that God has passed you by. Your weakness is evidence that God is setting something up.

Moses went to Pharaoh with a heavy tongue and brought out a nation.

Paul wrote letters with a thorn he never named that are still being read by two billion people two thousand years later.

Nick Vujicic walked into a stadium with no arms and no legs and the people who came to see a curiosity left weeping at the cross.

None of them were qualified, by any metric the world respects, for what they did.

All of them did it anyway, leaning into a God who was not waiting for them to get well before showing up. He was already there, in the breaking.

He is already there, in yours.

“The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” — Psalm 34:18 (NIV)

“That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” — 2 Corinthians 12:10 (NIV)

References

Biblical References

• Exodus 4:10 (NASB) — Cited to establish Moses’ self-reported speech impediment and his protest against God’s commissioning; central to the argument that God calls the broken into their purpose.
• Exodus 4:11–12 (NASB) — God’s response to Moses, asserting divine sovereignty over human limitation and the promise of His presence in the act of speaking; foundational to the article’s core claim.
• Genesis 32:24–31 (NKJV) — Alluded to in the reference to Jacob’s limp as the physical mark of his encounter with God; used to show that weakness can become testimony.
• Psalm 34:18 (NIV) — Cited in the closing section to ground the comfort of the article in God’s nearness to the suffering; functions as pastoral anchor.
• 1 Corinthians 1:27–29 (NKJV) — Core theological text for the article’s central argument; cited in full to establish that God’s preference for the weak is intentional and purposive.
• 2 Corinthians 12:9 (NIV) — The defining verse of the article’s theological framework; God’s response to Paul’s request for the removal of his thorn, establishing that divine power is perfected in human weakness.
• 2 Corinthians 12:10 (NIV) — Cited in the closing as Paul’s personal resolution and doxology of weakness; used as the theological and emotional climax of the invitation.
• 1 Timothy 5:23 (NIV) — Alluded to in the section on Timothy to establish his chronic physical illness and Paul’s practical pastoral response to it; grounds the argument in the New Testament’s own acknowledgment of ministerial weakness.

Other Sources

• Crossway. (2021, December 29). What was Paul’s thorn in the flesh? (2 Corinthians 12). Crossway Articles. https://www.crossway.org/articles/what-was-pauls-thorn-in-the-flesh-2-corinthians-12/

• Hamilton Strategies. (2025, December 22). NickV Ministries plots ‘Onward for 1 Billion More’ global outreach campaign for 2026. Hamilton Strategies Press. https://hamiltonstrategies.com/2025/12/22/nickv-ministries-plots-onward-for-1-billion-more-global-outreach-campaign-for-2026/

• Keller, T. (2013). Walking with God through pain and suffering. Dutton.

• Lewis, C. S. (1940). The problem of pain. Geoffrey Bles.

• NickV Ministries. (2024). Nick biography. https://nickvministries.org/about/nick-biography/

• Shellnutt, K. (2023, September 5). Nick Vujicic challenges “delusional” American Church to repent: “Demons are laughing in your face.” The Christian Post. https://www.christianpost.com/news/nick-vujicic-challenges-delusional-american-church-to-repent.html

• Smith, J. (2026, May 6). Nick Vujicic doc “No Limbs, No Limits” explores faith, family and finding purpose through pain. The Christian Post. https://www.christianpost.com/news/nick-vujicic-doc-no-limbs-no-limits-explores-faith-family.html