Your Ordained Ordinary

Tyler Thornton

Romans 12:1 (MSG)

Place Your Life Before God

“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.“

I often struggled to see God in the mundane, the aspects of my life that I would define as “tedious” or “boring.” Where does God exist in my grocery shopping, my chores, or my commute to work? 

Oswald Chambers said, “The real test of a saint is not one's willingness to preach the gospel, but one's willingness to do something like washing the disciples' feet - that is, being willing to do those things that seem unimportant in human estimation but count as everything to God.” 

Therein lies the problem, what am I seeing as unimportant because I am measuring it against human valuation?

My wife and I are expecting a baby any day now and I can with 100% certainty tell you that stocking up on diapers seems incredibly mundane in comparison to the excitement of our due date. And while we have been praying over and anticipating a day yet to come, I wonder where I have missed God in my runs to Costco while stocking up on baby supplies. I was so numb to something that I valued as ordinary that I never stopped to think where God could be glorified in it. You see I don’t think God wants us living lives waiting for the next big “thing,” I think God seeks to ordain our ordinary, to give purpose to our tedious.

When we experience God in an incredible way and we think the only possible response to Him is to quit our jobs, sell our belongings, and move to the mission field, we miss the mission we are currently living in. While God may call you and your family to serve in missions full time, often the call to serve hits closer to home. Kingdom work is not escape from the real world, it is engagement in it. 

What parts of my ordinary life can I place before God on the altar and allow Him to ascribe value to? This is an everyday, every moment reflection of our lives that shapes our thinking to align with Gods. God invites you and I into seeing our life through a new lens, where the ordinary becomes ordained as we lay our everyday lives before God as an offering.