Use Somebody - Sermon to Youth Nov. 22, 2009

In the spring of 2003, I had only been a Christian for a few months when I had this overwhelming sense that God was calling me to serve him fulltime in ministry. If you had known me at the time, you would have known that this was a crazy idea. God wanted to use me, me of all people. I can remember that day in April when I attempted to email the pastor of my church to tell him that I thought I was being called into ministry.

I was teaching 6th grade and while my kids were working on an assignment, I quickly typed a short email telling him I wanted to meet with him because I thought I was being called into ministry. But I couldn’t hit the send button. I knew that once I hit that send button that it was a done deal that there was no going back. For the next three hours, I would teach some, get my kids working on an assignment then walk over to my computer put my hand on the mouse, look at the send button, then walk away.

As time passed and I went back and forth to my computer, God was patient with me – he’d been patient with me for the past 30 years – what was another couple of hours. Eventually, God began to whisper to me that he could “Use Somebody, Someone Like Me.”

Play Song – 1:25 minutes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugpjfYA1hZ4

I struggled to hit that send button because I had done a so many bad things in my life. Like many of you, my parents were Christians and went to church all the time - more times than I wanted to go. I was involved in the youth group and all of their events, but when I was in middle school things started to change.

My older sister got pregnant when she was 18 and I was in the seventh grade, and my sister’s pregnancy crushed my parents. They had lived in this perfect little bubble where unexpected things, bad things didn’t happen to them. I can still remember the day my parents told my older brother and me about my sister’s pregnancy. I had never seen them so devastated or upset. It made me so angry that I rode my bike over to the guy’s house who got my sister pregnant and threw rocks at his windows.

After my sister gave birth to my nephew, they moved back in with us and lived with us for the next 5 years. Those next 5 years were tough. We moved from Washington D.C. to Atlanta where we didn’t know anyone. My family started to fall apart. We couldn’t sit down and eat a meal together or even be in the same room together without an argument or a screaming match breaking out. I hated being at home and I couldn’t wait to graduate from High School and go to college.

I had so much frustration and anger inside of me; I didn’t know what to do with it. I hated my sister for getting pregnant, I hated my parents for letting their marriage fall apart, and I hated the church for being a bunch of hypocrites. I was angry at the world, and I began to rebel against anyone and everything. By the time I graduated from high school, I was determined to never step into another church or move back to my parent’s house. In the fall of 1991, I headed off to college with gangsta rap playing on the radio and a determination in my heart to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, with whomever I wanted.

By the end of my freshman year of college I had gotten drunk more times than I could remember, smoked marijuana, and had sex for the first time. I was doing all of the things my parents and my church had tried to teach me not to do, but honestly I didn’t care. I didn’t care about my parents, or God, or Jesus, or if I lived or died.

I can remember one night in particular when all of my anger and frustration came pouring out of me. I had been drinking and I was driving on these windy mountain roads and I just snapped. I started cussing at God and I told him I was going to drive my truck as fast as I could and it was up to him if I lived or died. I was giving God the middle finger; I was tempting him; I was trying to use my truck to commit suicide. But what I didn’t know then was that God was trying to tell me that he “Could Use Somebody, Someone like me.”

The remainder of my time is college was filled with drinking, girls, and pretty much whatever I wanted to do. A year after I miraculously graduated from college my life was pretty much the same except I was out in Wyoming and Montana site-seeing with my girlfriend at the time. We were driving all over the place going to the Grand Tetons, to Yellow Stone, to Glacier National Park. This was before DVD players and iPods, so we filled our driving times by taking turns reading a loud a book named Animal Dreams. The more we read the book the more I got the sense that I was going to die that summer. I didn’t know exactly when or how, but I just knew that I was going to die. One day this feeling became so real, so tangible that I freaked out and I had to pull my truck over on the side of the road. I couldn’t breathe. I was having a panic attack. For the first time in my life I realized that I was going to die and that one day I would not exist. The realization of my mortality scared the H-E-Double-Chopsticks out off me.

About a month after I had freaked out about dying, I watched my dad die of a heart attack. I watched as paramedics tried to give him CPR, I watched as different people pushed on his chest. I watched as they squeezed air into his lungs. I, the one who had tried to do anything and everything to rebel against my parents and what they believed, watched the man who’d loved me regardless of what I did slip into eternity. I could have never imagined on that night in college when I dared God to let me die that my dad’s death would be the moment that I began to hear God softly whisper, “Allen, I could use somebody, someone like you.”

Today God wants each of you to know that he can “Use Somebody, Someone Like You.” You may be sitting there thinking, no he can’t use me because I’m only a kid, or he can’t use me because I’m over-weight, I’m not popular, or he can’t use me because people at school pick on me and make fun of me.

Maybe your sitting there thinking, God can’t use me because I’ve made some serious mistakes; I’ve already done some really messed up things. I’ve gotten drunk, smoked, tried drugs. I’ve had sex with my girlfriend or boyfriend. I’ve done things that no one knows about, that I’m ashamed of, that my parents could never imagine.

I am here to tell you this morning that God wants to forgive you that he wants to forgive you so badly that he sent his only Son to die on a cross. God’s looking at each of you and he is reaching out his arms longing to hold you, to embrace you. He wants you to know that no matter what you have done, and no matter what other people have done to you that “he can use somebody, someone like you.”