My past disqualifies me. (Joshua 2:1-21, 6:25; James 2:25)
All she’d known from men was rejection and abuse. As long as she could remember, she’d been selling her soul for a few coins. Life was hard, but her heart was harder, softened only by stories of Israel’s strange God. The idols of Jericho certainly couldn’t do miracles. They didn’t love, provide, and protect like the God of Israel did. Imagine being part of nation with a God like that! But their God didn’t want women like Rahab. A prostitute. A foreigner. He was holy. Perfect. She was who she was, and nothing could change that. Her course had been set before she was born, so she might as well stop dreaming.
Then…a knock on her door. Men again, but these men were from Israel and they needed protection. Israel? Hope flickered inside Rahab’s heart. These men knew the God she’d heard about! How odd that of all the houses in Jericho they’d chosen hers. Could it be that their God saw her after all? In one courageous act of faith, Rahab the prostitute became Rahab the Israelite. Because she chose to trust that Israel’s God could change her future, her past crumbled with the walls of Jericho. When she joined God’s people, she left her old identity behind and joyfully accepted the one God gave her. In fact, she married a godly Israelite man, became the great-grandmother of King David, and God picked her to be an ancestor of Jesus Christ.
Your past no longer disqualifies you when you surrender to the God of Israel.
He changes your identity.
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