Good Morning!
If you've been on Facebook or Instagram for the last three-and-a-half years you'll know that every morning (most of the time) I put put some kind of picture with a short statement either of devotional value or a word challenging us to greater faith and life in Christ on our church's FB and Insta pages.
I have to admit something to you.
I don't always have a reason/purpose in what I post. A lot of the time I'll see one on someone else's public page or on a website, hit the save button, and then upload it the next day. One of the things about doing something like this is that you are never quite sure how that may be used in God's providence to speak to a situation going on in someone's life. I can't tell you how many times since I started uploading them that a person has commented or private messaged me and said that the particular image helped them that morning, that day, etc... I don't claim to have any special powers that let me know what is going to have an impact or what is just going to get ignored that day. :) Yet, it is a small, ordinary work that in some cases has a big effect on people. The daily devotionals we upload to Youtube, while planned out a little more, have the same effect. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason why one Tuesday devotional will receive three views, and another will receive thirty. It just seems to work out that way. To quote my favorite internet emoticon: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .
While I don't spend a whole lot of time worrying about it this does lead to a question: What is it about the ordinary, regular work that the Lord gives us to do that allows it to have the power that it does?
We live in a culture that values the big, the amazing, the transformative, and the special. It looks for the "wow factor" in every little thing. Our world operates in a very business-like cost-benefit-analysis of whether or not to do this or that. However, that is not how God usually works. This past week those of our brothers and sisters in more liturgically grounded churches celebrated Pentecost. Now, we all know of the history there in Acts 1 and 2 and the unique presence of the Holy Spirit in those days. It is good for us to pray for another earth-shattering outpouring of the power of God to convert sinners to Christ and recognize how the Lord blessed the Apostles in the earliest moments of the new covenant Church. Yet, we also know that this is not the ordinary way that Jehovah works. It is through the every day, regular, and ordinary labors of prayer, Scripture reading, and Godly conference with the weekly attendance to the means of grace found in the Sabbath rest on Sunday, the hearing of the preaching of the Word, and the blessings of this time granted and gifted by Jesus for His people that we get what we need. To be sure you never know when that little bit of Bible time in the morning, or at night, will open your soul to the riches of the glory of God in a way that you have not experienced before. But if you keep searching for that mental high then you'll miss the way that the daily movement of the word of Christ into your heart adds up to a mountain of mercy and strength. Aesop's fable of the ant and the grasshopper is apropos here.
As you continue in faithfulness this week I want you to consider these words from Zechariah 4:10:
"For who has despised the day of small things? For these seven rejoice to see The plumb line in the hand of Zerubbabel. They are the eyes of the Lord, Which scan to and fro throughout the whole earth.”.
Be in remembrance of the importance of the daily work. For it is through the placing of that one stone upon another that great cities are built.
For today's reading here is a word from Reformation Scotland on the ordinary means of grace:
https://www.reformationscotland.org/2018/11/30/ordinary-means-of-extraordinary-grace/
Blessings in Christ,
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
Pastor, Bethany ARP Church