Beautiful, broken people

When my wife and I planted a church in Seattle in the 90’s we occasionally had some good-natured person suggest something along the lines of, “if you could just get Bill Gates saved and tithing to your church, you’d be set”.

It was the same in Youth Ministry. When discussing growth strategies among our leaders, someone would always recommend more targeted outreach to the athletes, the preps, and the other ultra-popular kids.

Somehow we think that if we focus on the beautiful people first, then everyone else will follow. I call that idea “trickle-down grace”.

In Acts 3, Peter and John were walking through the beautiful gate. Some say it was called this because it was a magnificent entrance to the temple area that the important people liked to walk through.

It’s even possible that this is the very place where the wealthy people were giving their offerings when Jesus talked to his disciples about a widow’s coin in Luke 21. If this is the case, it makes sense why someone would be dropped off every day to beg there.

This gate also represented something that all gates represent, regardless of how beautiful they are: Gates keep people out. This gate was no exception. Only those who were whole and religiously acceptable could get closer to the temple to properly worship through this beautiful gate.

Beautiful gates are for beautiful people, not broken ones.

Broken people sit just outside of the gate. And often, we ignore them. We think if we can get the beautiful, wealthy or important people saved that might start a movement, and the broken people will also be impacted.

Trickle-down grace.

But God thinks very differently than we do.

This is the first recorded physical healing to happen in the Early Church era. For that first candidate, God did not choose someone with influence, wealth, or beauty, but someone who had nothing.

Then again, Jesus was always looking for the blind, the bound and the broken. If you were beautiful, you had a hurdle to get over (or an eye of a needle to get through), because you first had to recognize your need.

When this guy sitting at the gate gets healed, all heaven breaks loose. It’s the manifestation of the power of God, the love of God and the grace of God—to the least likely. (Jesus would have passed him many times without healing him, but now he’s the first one healed in a new era of the Church…I wonder if Jesus secretly knew what He had in store for him later every time He walked by?)

Are we too focused on the “beautiful” people? Do we search out the best and brightest to the exclusion of the least? Or do we forget that God delights in using and touching those who don’t have much to offer?

Our ministries must be full of folks who know they are nothing without Jesus. We need to notice them, and talk to them and touch them with the life of the Holy Spirit. We have to remember that we, also, are nothing without Jesus. If that’s not happening, we’re missing the whole point of the gospel.

And the point is that in God’s eyes, broken people are the truly beautiful ones—and when God gets a hold of them their beauty shines through.