The Blessing of OrdinarySample

Faithful Fans

I wish the writer of Hebrews included a behind-the-scenes look at these heroes of the faith after their famous acts were performed…

Moses stood before the Red Sea and it split, but then he had to babysit a million whiners for forty years in the desert…

Gideon went from a nobody to deliverer of God’s people, but then dealt with idolatrous pride…

Noah built the ark for decades, endured the flood, and then shamed himself before God and his family…

Mary raised Jesus, only to watch her son be wrongly accused by her religious leaders and tortured to death by the Roman Empire…

Maybe having an “ordinary” life might mean you never kill a Goliath, but it also means you won’t have to escape a murderous king by living in a cave. But the greater thing to realize is: Performing a “great act” for God doesn’t mean you’ve “arrived” at the final stop of your faith. 

There will always be more, and the more will always include the mundane. The writer of Hebrews says all these were living by faith when they died and none of them had received what had been promised. The message of Hebrews 11 and 12 is “KEEP GOING,” not “DO SOMETHING AWESOME.”

Any sense of a final destination of arrival in our faith journey is an illusion: there is no arriving, there is only following. And we do not follow just as a means to an end—the following is both the means and the end. We follow Jesus one faithful step after one faithful step, growing in love and knowledge. 

The faithful life I’m talking about is the race marked out for YOU. There was only one David, only one Rahab, and there’s only one YOU. You can’t focus on what race others are running or how fast they seem to be going; you have to lock your eyes on Jesus and His grace for you in your next step, which most likely will be a tiny action that you may repeat countless times. 

And when you’re exhausted, and need a boost to faithfully complete a simple task, remember the great cloud of witnesses, full of those who finished the race, that now surrounds you and cheers you on…

Picture David holding a poster that says “Cheese and Bread!” and Mary waving a banner that reads: “Just Be Faithful!”