No Experience Necessary

Readers digest printed an advertisement which was originally published in a Mining Company magazine. The ad read: “Wanted: man to work on nuclear fissionable isotope molecular reactive counters and three-phase cyclotronic uranium photosynthesisers. No experience necessary.” But how do you find experienced men in a field that never existed before? 

Did you ever consider that that’s what Jesus had to do when He launched His evangelistic mission to save the world? He had to take men who had absolutely no experience in soul winning, and make them into world changers. He wasn’t looking for experienced men, there were none! 

The 400 years during what is called the Intertestamental Period, between the ending of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament, God was silent. Not a word from heaven was heard, until John the Baptist burst on the scene preparing the way for Jesus to begin His ministry. Jesus was about to launch something this world had never seen before. So He wasn’t looking for experienced men. He was looking for raw recruits. Those that He could shape and mould into the kind of people who would continue His mission on earth, long after He had returned to Heaven. 

They certainly seemed an unlikely lot. Not one rabbi or scholar among them. None had rabbinical training. None were theologians. None were priests, Scribes or Pharisees. Instead, some were fishermen, a tax collector, a zealot (paramilitary). These weren’t sophisticated people, just ordinary plain vanilla folks. Your regular garden variety type. But in just over three years they became the nucleus of the Church that turned their world upside down.

Later Paul would become the leading figurehead of the Church. Now he was a highly educated man. He was a rabbinically trained Pharisee. He had a forensic mind. But even Paul confessed that all his pedigree in the Jewish religion, in which he was an expert, counted for nothing that he might win Christ. (Philippians 3:4-9)

That is why he would write in 1 Corinthians 1:26-29 “For you see your calling brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called. But God has chosen the foolish things of this world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak thing of the world to put to shame the things are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence.”

When we all began our journey with Christ we had no previous experience. We were all raw recruits in the Kingdom of God. That’s the way it was supposed to be. Anything we have accomplished for Christ since is because of His grace. We agree with Paul when he said, “But by the grace of God I am what I am.”  (1 Corinthians 15:10)  Only He gets the glory. 

- Pastor David Goudy