…When God chose for Jesus to die a criminal’s death on a lowly cross, rather than a hero’s death, He was putting an exclamation point on the message He’d been communicating all along: God does extraordinary things through ordinary (and even lowly) people and circumstances. He always has… and He still does. -Dwight Robertson, You Are God’s Plan A {and there is no plan b} (pg. 39)
I live with a fervent audacity to really believe the quote above. Too few people realize that we, the ordinary, are the best equipped through our inabilities and lack of special talent to be extraordinarily used by God. Having read the Bible more than 20 times straight through, I never ceased to be amazed at God’s consistent choice of the weakest, smallest, most ordinary of people through whom He causes extraordinary things to be accomplished for His glory! He gets the credit because He accomplishes things that only He can bring to fruition through the weakest, smallest, and the most ordinary and most often overlooked! I know this truth very intimately in my own life!
Jesus didn’t come to earth as the superhero that the population of His day was expecting! They were looking for a warring Savior who would overthrow the oppressive and corrupt Roman Empire and restore freedom and liberty to live in peace in a land of milk and honey! Jesus came as a babe in a lowly manger, lived as a carpenter’s son and learned the trade, and then didn’t begin ministering fully in His role of humble servant and Savior until He was 30 years old! Jesus’ confrontation against powerful entities, religious entities, and oppression was not in the extraordinary way most expected. Yet is was extraordinary; for He came to love, simply love. He started with the ordinary; calling to Himself disciples who were not the most elite, the most powerful, nor the most reliable. And yet, this group of 12 minus 1 was just a mixture of an ordinary group who after three years of unimaginable highs, lows, joys, and pains would do the extraordinary of sharing the Gospel to the earth while facing such intense persecution that almost all died as martyrs! Yet extraordinarily, the message of the Gospel has continued spreading for roughly 2000 years, still is spreading, and will not stop!!
Many think of the disciples as extraordinary people. I disagree. Jesus chose just the ordinary Joe Schmoe, and I believe that though they were very ordinary, they chose to allow God to use them extraordinarily. I don’t believe that God reserves His desire to use people to just a few, nor to just the extraordinary. On the contrary, as Dwight Robertson’s quote above states, I believe it has been God’s plan and still is God’s plan every day to do “extraordinary things through ordinary (and even lowly) people and circumstances.”
While much of the ‘church’ of today seems so caught up in image, appearance, ‘super’ pastors, theologians, artists, and the ‘qualifications and abilities’ of each person to minister, I agree with Dwight that God still wants, as His core purpose and mode of working, to use ordinary people (YOU and ME) to do extraordinary things for His Kingdom!! The choice is yours and mine though. God won’t force us to be used for His glory but He invites us to surrender ourselves to His greater good for our lives! Will you choose it? Will I choose it? Are you willing to let God use your ordinary life for His extraordinary purposes? Let God use you, right where you are at, in your every day life, in small acts of love and kindness to others… though they seem small God can and will use them extraordinarily!! There is nothing more extraordinary than the love of God, and He wants to pour it out through your and my ordinary lives! I live with the audacity of believing that I truly am being extraordinary in the ordinary, as I allow the love and power of God to flow through me!! Do you choose this as well?!?! We can change the world, loving it with the extraordinary love and power of God, when we invite and choose to let God move extraordinarily through us, even and especially in the ordinary spaces of our lives!!
