Why Ordinary People Matter to God
Very Ordinary
One of the things that I love about the stories in the Bible is how many ordinary people you meet. Some of them are very famous—think of Moses, for example, and his story that’s told in the book of Exodus. He truly is a great man of God from one perspective. But he’s also a very ordinary person with a lot of humble circumstances in his life and some failures and some very common problems.
For one, Moses had conflicts within his family. What’s more, he tried to serve God by delivering the Israelites from Egypt one Egyptian at a time and that didn’t work so well. So he had to leave for forty years and spent a long time in the wilderness—a long time of preparation.
I think these are all things that ordinary people can relate to. We, too, have problems in our own families. There are things we try to do to serve God that don’t work out the way that we hoped they would—and may not even turn out to be God’s purpose for us at all! Most of us have long periods of waiting and long periods of preparation where we're studying for something or waiting for God’s will to be revealed to us.
Moses went through all of those things. And, at the end of his life, he didn’t even get a chance to lead people into the Promised Land, which is what he wanted to do. In the same way, not all of our ambitions are satisfied either. Yet each one of us has an opportunity to live a life that’s pleasing to God and ultimately for his glory.
We may not be as famous as Moses, but I think Moses (and the other people we meet in the Bible) are accessible to us because they’re wrestling with the same real-world issues that we are.
