November 26
Scripture focus: 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 The MessageHere’s ANOTHER thing that distracts me in my quest for spiritual living.
I keep thinking that an abundant life lived within the prevailing purposes of God should be extra-ordinary.
My everyday, ordinary life – the sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life – feels like living small.
In the world of God-economy, yet again, I find myself on the wrong side of truth. It is in the midst of the ordinary that God is so delighted with our offerings.
He is delighted when we embrace what he is doing for us, especially in the small things – the sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking around life.
Last Sunday my husband Pete, did what he always does – a small thing in his own mind. He got up and went to his men’s bible study. Pete has shown up at Sunday morning bible studies practically every single Sunday of his everyday, ordinary life.
But on this Sunday, there was such a God moment amongst the community gathered around bagels and coffee and the word of God, that even a distracted man with several woes that weighed down his heart in his ordinary life could not miss the Spirit of God.
It was a thing of grace, two men, both weary of a life lived with regrets, coming together in conversation in such a way that both recognized how God was using the moment to heal, transform and conform those willing to heed in the room on that day.
I’ve seen the numbers. I know that the fact that my husband willingly and gladly chooses to order his life around attending a Sunday morning bible study seems like a small thing. Certainly he sees it that way. He thinks it’s no big deal, doesn’t everyone do it?
I see it differently. I see his faithfulness and joy in the ordinary as a testament to Romans 12 – he’s doing the will of his Father, in the everyday ritual of showing up for spiritual community day in and day out.
Recommended reading: Jeremiah 27 - 32
1 comment:
What a great message today. Made up in our mind exciting shake and bake living being given up for a life that seems so ordinary. By society standards my life is ordinary and precieved by some as a stick in the mud dull. My view of life today is it is fuller than it has ever been. I have more gratitude of the day to day things that seem ordinary to me such as going to a few meetings a week, reading Gods word, sharing at a homeless/recovery center, going on a golf outing with my men friends, going to work 5 days a week, spending time in our family room with my wife even if we are not saying anything, watching our goofy muts be well....goofy muts. I feel blessed by all of these and others. One thing I have learned to love is being present for the moment and being amazed at the daily God monents as they unfold. I love my life with HIM today.
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