Grace in the Ordinary

A s a 13-year-old, I believed in Jesus for my salvation. I was saved by grace. Yes, I was in rebellion against God and separated from Him. But redemption was mine through faith alone in Christ alone.

My story wasn’t the dramatic, infamous kind. My testimony didn’t attract much attention. I never stole a neighbor’s bicycle, never smoked cigarettes, never shot anyone, and I cussed only when it was absolutely necessary.

But I was then and still am a sinful person. My sin put Jesus Christ on the cross. He took my sin, and the sin of every other person, on Himself and died as our substitute. He took our place. His grace is truly scandalous. We might even say absurd.

In my early days of life with God, I wanted a dramatic experience with Him. The trembling kind. Noise and fireworks from heaven. I wanted to be in the room when they opened the lid on the ark of the covenant like they did in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Such extraordinary, divine power. Dangerous power. The bad guys got their faces melted off. Would I ever need to be strapped down and told not to look in the direction of God’s fierce glory if I wanted to stay alive?

The raw power of God is unimaginable. And His character is white-hot-holy. Maybe that’s why we’re warned about the terror of the Lord (2 Cor. 5:11). It makes sense that we’re urged to worship God in reverence and fear because He’s a consuming fire (Heb. 12:28-29).

The reality of God’s terrible presence makes it all the more incomprehensible that He would move in our direction. And that He would do so with unabated love and compassion. His gameplan for entering the world is mystifying. God would embrace the ordinary.

God abandoned the glory and comfort of heaven and came to earth as a human baby. And He arrives not with the fanfare one would expect for deity. Instead, He enters the world in obscurity without even a whiff of pretense. That first Christmas, a single angel announces Jesus’ birth but only to a group of shepherds tending their sheep across the Judean countryside. So much for the big reveal.

Joseph and the “great-with-child” Mary are pushed to the margins in the small town of Bethlehem and turned away from respectable accommodations. No vacancy. Then the newborn Jesus is swaddled in strips of cloth and placed in a feeding trough—the kind animals eat out of.

Watching the divine plan unfold, we can conclude that God is extraordinary, but He often works in the trenches of the ordinary. He gravitates to the normal, the everyday, the routine, the commonplace, even to what appears mundane. We should find that astonishing and comforting at the same time.

Have you encountered Him there, in the ordinary? Are you experiencing God in your everyday, normal routine? That’s where God enjoys hanging out. It’s the place we spend most of our time. And God likes to meet us there.

Maybe the lesson is as obvious as it is unusual: Don’t be obsessed with the extraordinary since God’s grace most often waits for us in the ordinary.