“When I first saw you walk on stage I thought to myself, “I don’t think this lady can teach me very much,”” she said.

Her words threw me for a loop, especially since this was the first time we were meeting. Our church service had just wrapped up and she had come up to me to share her feedback on my message that day. She went on to say that she had enjoyed the sermon and that it had been a blessing. But her woefully honest “opening remarks” made my head spin for a second.

Truthfully, I can’t really blame her. As you may have read here on my blog, I have a dismissively diminutive stature. If I’m teaching at Sunday School, more often than not, parents are unable to “find” me among the 8-year-olds.  If I am standing behind a counter, you might hear a disembodied voice rising from the depths below you. Let’s just say, it doesn’t really take long to size me up. You get the point.

When the lady saw me at church, unsurprisingly, she didn’t consider me “speaker material.” I just didn’t fit the bill.

But guess what? I happen to be in Excellent Company. Although I wouldn’t dare compare myself to the Lord, He did face dismissive, offhand remarks when He shared the truth, especially on home turf.

When Jesus spoke in His hometown of Nazareth, the crowds listening to Him couldn’t see past His background.

“Where did this man get these things?” they asked….Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him. (Mark 6).

They limited what Jesus could do among them because they labeled Him based on His “unimpressive” occupation, His “ordinary” family, and the fact that He was “just” one of them. The passage goes on to say that Jesus was “amazed at their lack of faith.”

Friend, at the end of my life, I don’t want to hear those words about me: that Jesus was amazed at my lack of faith. I would love to hear, instead, that even when the world dismissed me as somewhat inconsequential, He saw that I put my trust in the One who is infinitely powerful.

In believing others’ opinions and buying into their labels about yourself, you may be limiting what Jesus does in and through you.

Hear me out: I’m not endorsing the “Believe in yourself” or “Follow your heart” ideologies. I don’t believe those Insta-worthy snippets align with the truth of God’s Word.

What I am saying is this: Believe that you can be who God called you to be. Follow His lead.

It’s not easy to overcome the labels that have been carelessly slapped on us from our childhood, sometimes by those closest to us or by those we look up to. Maybe you have been dismissed as lazy or too aggressive, as being too loud or too quiet, as too particular or too laidback.

But in Christ, you are a new creation. Those labels don’t limit you. Your past doesn’t prescribe what you can and can’t do.

When your Creator has already prepared good works for you to walk in, you don’t have to worry if the world thinks you’re qualified or not. All you have to do is walk in them. His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3). That would be “HIS divine power”–not our qualifications or our measurements or our personalities.

Here’s the thing: Labels are for clothes. Not for people clothed in the power of God.

Meanwhile, who knows? Maybe it’s a good thing that people don’t have a “high” opinion of me (pun intended). It gives me a chance to show them what God is able to do through the most unlikely candidates on His “shortlist.”

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