Day 3 of 6 — Glow in the Dark. About 3 minutes.
But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace,
Galatians 1:15
Mary Slessor went into the jute mills of Dundee as a girl of about eleven, and by fourteen she was a skilled hand working from six in the morning until six at night. That was the whole shape of her life. A mill, a tenement, a wage. The mills of Dundee did not produce missionaries. But she read, and she taught a rough class of boys at a mission in the slums, and something in her would not settle. In 1876, at twenty eight, she applied to a mission board, and that August she sailed for Calabar in what is now south eastern Nigeria. She stayed nearly forty years and died there in 1915. Nigeria buried her with a state funeral. A mill girl from Dundee.
Paul looked back over his own life and reached for an unusual word to describe it. It pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace. Separated. The word means to mark off by a boundary, to draw a line around something and say that this one is Mine, for My purpose. It is the same word the Holy Ghost used at Antioch. Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them.
Notice when the marking happened. Not when Paul volunteered. Not when the church agreed to it. From his mother’s womb, long before he knew anything about it and long before he had done a thing to deserve it. What happened at Antioch was not the beginning of God’s intention toward that man. It was the announcement of a decision already made.
Which means the question is not whether you are missionary material. Nobody is. A mill girl was not missionary material and a man who had hunted down Christians was not either, and God had drawn a line around both of them long before anyone could see the reason. What He has for you may look nothing like either of them. But He has not left you unmarked. Ask Him this week what He set you apart for, and be careful about the answer you are hoping to hear. Most of us ask that question already knowing which answers we will accept. Try asking it the other way round.
Growth principle: God marks a person off for Himself long before anyone else can see the reason.
Take it with you: Ask God this week what He has set you apart for, and leave the answer genuinely open.
Pause and pray: Lord, You chose me before I could have earned it, and I still do not know what for. Show me what You separated me to do, and keep me from flinching when You answer. Amen.
From Sunday’s message: A Church That Sends (Acts 13 and Philippians 4) · Sunday, October 11, 2026
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