The Ordinary Is Really Extraordinary!
Good Morning Friends,
I give calendars as Christmas gifts to my family to help them to look ahead to the next year. It is scriptural. Just check out Psalm 90. It helps us to gain perspective. On the countdown to Christmas we had Advent calendars. Christmas is a special time, but there is more power and wisdom in everyday worship of God than most give credit. Here we discover that The Ordinary Is Really Extraordinary!
Scripture: Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
Psalm 90:12 (NIV)
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
Romans 12:1-2 (MSG)
Message: In scripture we find God ascribing divine influence to the circumstance of daily life. Here we learn the basics of being faithful in the ordinary in preparation for the extraordinary. Jesus was always taking the ordinary and turning it into the extraordinary. In the birth of Jesus we see ordinary shepherds in an extraordinary situation. In Jesus’ miracles we see foot washing water turned into the best of wine, a couple of loaves and a few fish into a feast for thousands. It was as if Jesus, in the fight for justice, in the middle of a hidden war, was consciously focusing on ordinary people. Mother Teresa put it this way, “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.” Oswald Chambers said that, “It is ingrained in us that we have to do exceptional things for God – but we do not. We have to be exceptional in the ordinary things of life and holy on ordinary streets, among ordinary people.” Friends, do not underestimate the importance or the power of small acts of loving service. Without them, there is an awful hole in the experience of life. With them a man’s life, a woman’s life, can be a wonderful life that can touch many other lives in what appears to be an insignificant. Occasionally we will wonder if our efforts are making a difference. But scripture tells us to not become weary in doing good because God will determine the proper time we will reap a harvest… if we do not give up. Here destinies turn on simple moments. Look at Rosa Parks, an ordinary woman from Alabama, who refused to give up her seat on a bus because of her color and because the white section was full. It’s amazing how God takes the ordinary, even the mundane, and opens our eyes to see a larger story one day at a time.
Pray we learn day by day to trust God…to risk enough to accept his love and not hide it. Pray we are never indifferent to the plain and ordinary. Pray we see beyond the moment. Pray we have a passion to live life each and every day with God. Pray we realize that God’s love does not seek value but creates it. Pray we are willing to risk enough to experience something extraordinary in everyday actions. Pray that God take our weakness and gives us His strength in return. Pray we allow God use our ordinary lives multiplying our daily actions as He did the loaves and fishes to accomplish his desires.
Blessings,
John Lawson
Daily Devotionals 