🔨 God Builds Beautiful Things with Broken Pieces

 

"But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong."
— 1 Corinthians 1:27

God doesn't shop at the world's supply store. He doesn't seek the polished, the powerful, or the perfect. He builds with what others throw away.

From the very beginning, God has been forming beauty out of brokenness. The earth was "without form, and void" (Genesis 1:2), and darkness covered the deep. Yet the Spirit of God hovered over the chaos. He didn't avoid the emptiness — He entered it. He spoke into the void and didn’t stop until "Let us make man in Our image." That’s how He works. He builds from the bottom up, and He builds until what He sees reflects His image.

🌍 God Starts with the Mess

The raw material of creation was chaos. It was formless. It was empty. And yet God didn’t say, "I can’t work with this." He said, "Let there be light."

If your life feels formless right now, if it feels void or dark or unfinished — you're exactly where God does His best work.

🧠 He Uses the Foolish and the Weak

God doesn’t build according to our qualifications. He chose:

• Moses, a stutterer with a temper
  
  

• Gideon, the least of the least
  
  

• David, the forgotten youngest son
  
  

• Rahab, a prostitute
  
  

• Peter, an impulsive fisherman
  
  

And He used them not despite their weakness, but through it.

"My strength is made perfect in weakness."
— 2 Corinthians 12:9

The world sees failure; God sees foundation material.

🙏 He Calls the Too Young and the Too Old

Jeremiah said, "I am only a youth." Abraham and Sarah were well past childbearing age when God promised them a son. Yet He called them anyway, because God's timing isn't limited by human clocks.

God doesn’t care if the world says you're too much or not enough. If He’s called you, He’ll build through you.

💦 He Cleanses the Unclean

Isaiah cried, "Woe is me, I am a man of unclean lips!" And yet God took a coal from the altar, cleansed him, and sent him with a message that would echo through generations.

God isn’t afraid of your past. He knows how to cleanse, restore, and repurpose every broken, burned-out part of your life.

🚜 He Picks the Overlooked

David wasn’t even invited to the lineup of Jesse’s sons, but God saw a king in the shepherd boy. Mary was a teenage girl from Nazareth. The disciples were uneducated and ordinary.

He builds with the unlikely to display the undeniable.

📖 My Testimony: Broken but Built

I know this truth firsthand. I was voted least likely to succeed. I grew up in and out of jail, and I even carry a second-degree murder conviction. By all accounts, I was written off. But I have seen God to be exactly who He says He is:

"The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth..." (Exodus 34:6)

He met me in my brokenness and began to build. Not because I earned it, but because He's sovereign, merciful, and faithful. I’m not who I was, and that’s not because of me — it’s because of who He is.

📚 Bonus Resource: Enthroned Above the Circle of the Earth

If this post speaks to you, I go even deeper into this theme in my book, Enthroned Above the Circle of the Earth. It explores how God works with the formless and void, and how that journey culminates in humanity being made in His image. It’s a powerful meditation on God’s sovereign process — how He starts with nothing and forms something glorious.

Now, onto your encouragement:

✨ Be Encouraged

If you feel broken, unqualified, overlooked, or just plain too far gone, let this truth sink in:

God builds beautiful things with broken pieces.

He isn't looking for perfection — He's looking for surrender. He can speak light into your darkness, call strength out of your weakness, and raise you up as a vessel of His glory.

So don’t hide your scars. Don’t discount your story. Bring it all to the Builder. He's not finished with you yet.