Daily Devotionals
Devotional: November 28th
“By the grace of God I am what 1 am.”
One of the self-inflicted agonies of life is trying to be someone you were never intended to be. Everyone is a unique creation of God. As someone has said, “When He made us, He threw away the pattern.” He never intended us to try to change it.
Maxwell Maltz wrote, “‘You’ as a personality are not in competition with any other personality simply because there is not another person on the face of the earth like you, or in your particular class. You are an individual. You are unique. You are not ‘like’ any other person and can never become ‘like’ any other person. You are not ‘supposed’ to be like any other person and no other person is ‘supposed’ to be like you.”
“God did not create a standard person and in some way label that person by saying ‘this is it.’ He made every human being individual and unique just as He made every snowflake individual and unique.”
Everyone of us is the product of the wisdom and love of God. In making us as we are, He knew exactly what He was doing. Our appearance, our intelligence and our talents represent His best for us. Anyone with infinite knowledge and infinite love would have done the same.
Now then, to wish we were someone else is an insult to God. It suggests that He has made a mistake or has withheld from us something that would have been for our good.
Lusting to be like someone else is futile. There is a finality about what God has made us and what He has given us. Of course we can imitate the virtues of other people, but what we are thinking about here is what we are as God’s creation.
If we go through life dissatisfied with God’s design for our lives, we will be paralyzed with feelings of inferiority. But it is not a question of inferiority. We are not inferior—just individual and unique.
The attempt to be someone else is doomed to end in failure. It is as unthinkable as a little finger trying to do the work of the heart. That was not God’s design and it simply won’t work.
The proper attitude is to say with Paul, “By the grace of God I am what I am”. We should rejoice in what we are as a distinct design of God and determine to use what we are and have to the maximum for His glory. There are many things we won’t be able to do, but there are other things we can do that others cannot.
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