I believe that there is a time and place for the spectacular. But more than anything, I believe that God wants to move in people’s lives in what I call the everyday supernatural. The everyday supernatural is those things that happen in our lives that are a miracle in themselves, but we often just pass them off with a logical, perhaps scientific, explanation.
Childbirth, for instance, falls within this bracket of the everyday supernatural. The everyday supernatural includes those things that we know are a miracle from God, an answer to prayer. Although some people might not see it the same way we do, it will be enough to make some people think and perhaps wonder if indeed there was a supernatural agency involved in that situation.
We think that with faith we have to go around changing everything that does not seem to be the way we want, suppose and expect them to be. But in doing so we often miss out on what God is doing. God can set the scene by allowing us to go through challenging times, but we then ruin it all by getting anxious and frustrated and seeking to escape the situation by making all of our selfish demands by “faith”. It is a classic case of man’s desires clashing with God’s desires.
16 This then is what I mean. Let your lives be guided by the Spirit, and then you will certainly not indulge the cravings of your lower natures. 17 For the cravings of the lower nature are opposed to those of the Spirit, and the cravings of the Spirit are opposed to those of the lower nature; because these are antagonistic to each other, so that you cannot do everything to which you are inclined.
Galatians 5:16-17 WNT
We must remind ourselves that God’s ways are not always in synch with our ways:
8 "This plan of mine is not what you would work out, neither are my thoughts the same as yours!
9 For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than yours, and my thoughts than yours.
Isaiah 55:8-9 TLB
8 "I don't think the way you think. The way you work isn't the way I work." God's Decree. 9 "For as the sky soars high above earth, so the way I work surpasses the way you work, and the way I think is beyond the way you think.
Isaiah 55:8-9 MSG
God wants to move in our lives in such a way that we put a poignant message across to other people about whom God is and who we are in Christ. You could say that a lot of the time, God wants to make us an enigma. God wants us to be so strategically placed and so yielded to Him, that we can provoke other people to think in such a way that challenges the beliefs that the world has instilled in them.
But we often get in His way because we don’t know what God’s plans are and we assume that we know what God wants us to do. We have to look beyond the most logical things sometimes and suppose that God might actually want to do things differently.
We are not meant to work out everything little detail of what God wants us to do. We are meant to work towards being more Christ-like, being more responsive to the direction of the Holy Spirit. This is what it means to work out our own salvation. Part of that process includes a moving away from supposing that we know how, and when, God wants to move in our lives and just being willing to trust Him, no matter what happens. In trusting God we must be willing to forfeit our own plans, our own understanding of the situation and our own need to control what happens.
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