God has the ability to take the pure chaos of a life filled with divorce, drug addictions, sexual misconduct, mental depression, and every negative experience known to humans, and make a life filled with unending peace and power. He alone has the power to change an unchangeable thing into something that it could never have become by itself. In Finish Me: A Beautiful Revelation of the "Finished" You, Kevin A. Johnson shows that God has a finished plan for our lives, although our imperfect circumstances seem to dictate differently. Just as God took seven days to complete His creation as shown in the Book of Genesis, God works faithfully in the lives of Christian believers to bring them to the "finish" He desires for them. Apostle Johnson demonstrates, through sound wisdom, that the sum total of our lives is not in the way in which our lives might have begun, but is fully discovered in the way in which our lives are finished. He wants us to realize that dealing with the experiences of poverty, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, depression, or rape does not mean that our lives are over. Rather, he implores us to believe that God has a far more perfect finish for us, even though Satan has hit us with such darkened chaos. The author also wishes for us to understand that God has millions of days of continuous sunshine for every infrequent scary and dark moment of our lives. Author Kevin A. Johnson, of Nashville, Tennessee, is a popular speaker and is the author of other books on living a Christian life of vision, purpose, and joy. He is a passionate servant of his God and Savior, Jesus Christ. We must know that even in the midst of our worst chaos, there exists an unseen "supernatural blueprint" of what we are truly meant to become. Kevin A. Johnson's Finish Me: A Beautiful Revelation of the "Finished" You inspires us to believe in and completely accept this truth.

FINISH ME

A BEAUTIFUL REVELATION OF THE "FINISHED" YOUBy Kevin A. Johnson

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2012 Kevin A. Johnson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4772-0261-6

Contents

Introduction...................................................................xiiiOne A Chaotic Beginning.......................................................1Two First Day Christians......................................................9Three Second Day Christians...................................................15Four Third Day Christians.....................................................19Five Fourth Day Christians....................................................23Six Fifth Day Christians......................................................27Seven Sixth and Seventh Day Christians........................................31Eight How to Guard What God Wishes to Finish..................................37Nine Not Everyone Should Be Allowed In........................................43Ten Watch Out for Intimacy Counterfeits.......................................49Eleven Knowing Who Should Be Granted Access...................................53Twelve Whatever You Allow In Is Going to Be Hard to Evict.....................59Thirteen Arming Yourself to Protect the Finished Thing........................65Fourteen Living with God-Breathed Qualities within You........................77Fifteen Recovery Mode.........................................................83About The Author...............................................................89

Chapter One

A Chaotic Beginning

God is able to make the most perfect ending out of the most chaotic and messy beginning.

YOU ARE a beautiful yet unfinished individual. Have you fallen and feel that you cannot get up? Maybe you are a Christian who feels that you have just made the biggest mistake in your walk with God and that there is no hope of recovery. You might just be a person who has been battling a long time with the drug addiction of your past. Or it could be that you have fallen into an adulterous affair and you feel like you just died inside. If you find yourself in the midst of any of these heartbreaking and conscience-rattling experiences and you feel as though you should just put a gun to your head, ending what seems to be an unfixable life, please do not do it! God is able to repair what appears to be beyond fixing. In fact, He remakes things to be as if they had never been broken.

It is so easy for people in today's world to fall down and break into a million pieces. What is far more dangerous, however, is when Satan convinces them to judge themselves right into an early grave because of it. When faithful Christians fall because of a temporary lapse in godly judgment, Satan even convinces some of them that the salvation that God has given them is so weak that one sin destroys it and them. Thus, many Christians never truly come into the full understanding of the awesome depth of God's grace.

Moreover, in the face of their personal failures, they eventually become judge, juror, and executioner of their own existence. Unfortunately, they do not even permit their most passionate defender to come to their rescue and fix their brokenness. They never allow their most-loving God to take them into His strong arms and mend the broken bones of their lives and destiny. How very sad!

God wants all of His Spirit-born children to know that He knows exactly who we are. He is fully aware that even though He has placed His Holy living spirit within us, making us able to fulfill His every command and desire, each of us still wears the ugly body paint of human fallen flesh—which at any time can and will deter us from performing God's most precious will.

When God first found us, He knew what an untidy and ungodly mess we all were. We should not for one moment think that He is unaware of what He discovered when He saved us from the judgment to come. When God saw us from the distant expanse of eternity, He loved us. He adored us even while we were simply common, disorderly dust. God looked past the chaos that our lives were and decided to see the order that He could make of us. He chose us without giving any care to how unfixable we might have appeared to be to others. In truth, God stopped to love us when others ran quickly past us or avoided us. Have we still not figured this out yet?

God loves to begin a most beautiful work of creation right in the face of the most dark and gloomy presence of chaos. Therefore, if we ever feel as though our walk with God has come to a very familiar and chaotic place, let us not give up hope. We must get up out of the dust of emotional anguish by realizing that God has not finished finishing us!

He is the master maker who paints the priceless works of art on the most empty and rough canvases of life. Thus, the chaotic darkness of our failures affords God the opportunity to remake us in ways that are beyond our abilities to think or reason. He makes the loveliest fragrances out of the most pungent, nasty odors of our lives. Hallelujah!

In the book of Genesis, we discover that when God first began the process of creation, nothing but confusion and chaos existed. The Genesis account informs us that the norm was utter darkness and emptiness; there was no distinctive shape or fixed form. What a depressed state!

The Genesis account also says that the Spirit of God was moving and caressing all this chaos. It is almost as though God is not only in love with the wonderful beauty that He can make but also is in love with the chaos that He intends to transform into a beauty that never existed before. This shows us that God is excited about getting His creating hands on the deformed clay of our lives and then shaping and forming it into a sculptured image that shows off His creative power.

The reasons why our God of order chooses to play in the dirt of our chaos are simpler than we would have imagined. The first reason why God chooses to make a play-date with our chaos is that no one else can handle it. God has the ability to take the pure chaos of a life filled with divorce, drug addictions, sexual misconduct, mental depression, and every negative experience known to humans, and make a life filled with unending peace and power. He alone has the power to change an "unchangeable" thing into something that it could never have become by itself. This is what God has done for every Christian on the planet! He turned strangers into His children! He transformed darkened lives into lives of radiant light! In addition, He forged dying sinners into eternally living saints!

The second reason why God loves to perform His greatest creative works in the ugly vacuum of chaos is so that when He has finished, there can be no disputing who performed the work. When God gets through finishing what others have confirmed to have been an impossible project, based upon the material with which He had to work, no one else in heaven or earth can take any credit. God alone reserves the right and deserves the right of all praise for any work that He has done. By using what nobody else can in order to create what nobody else could, He ensures that no one else can ever receive any praise for His works.

This should remind us not to be too hasty to throw away our lives when we have failed somewhere in our lives. We are too quick to give up our walk with God or our walk with humanity because of our own personal failures or the failures of others. We must stop beating ourselves up over every mistake or sin in our lives. We should feel sorrow over these sins and...