A More Abundant Life

Dec 03, 2013 08:39 PM EST

"Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about thirty..." Luke 3:23

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A life lived like Jesus can be truly unremarkable. The vast majority of it might be incredibly normal, seemingly uneventful, and at times quite boring. After all, nine-tenths of Jesus' life was spent in small-town Nazareth, engaged in ostensibly ordinary things like learning, working, sleeping, eating and spending time with family and friends.

If you want to imitate Jesus, you must be ready, like the meek, to inherit a world filled with normalcy. Being 'on fire' for Jesus isn't all miracles, ministry, sermons, stories, transfigurations and trials. In fact it is quite the opposite. As C.S. Lewis put it, to "imitate God incarnate: our model is the Jesus, not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the roads, the crowds, the clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and privacy, the interruptions..." It involves early mornings, lost earnings, and investing many hours in the lives of others. Its lack of excitement is what separates faith from fantasy, like wheat from chaff. Most of the time, "God doesn't call us to do extraordinary things, but to do ordinary things with extraordinary love." And He, in turn, endows each moment of ordinary life with His own eternal and extraordinary love.

Real devotion is grounded in real life. It "seeks the Lord [where] He can be found." So it doesn't restrict itself to scripture and religious ceremony: but eagerly seeks God's glory in amongst life's little drudgeries like doing the dishes or during inconvenient encounters. It's express aim, is "to do all to the glory of God." As such, it is as content in the valleys, living for God's glory, as on the mountaintops living in God's glory. Whatever pleases the Lord is well with such a soul.

If you're unwilling to truly seek God in the life you have, you'll do no better in the life you'd like to have. False sanctity feverishly seeks ways to honor God in the future - genuine faithfulness preoccupies itself with the present. It focuses more on what it will do, not what it could do. And this is also much less interesting and exciting. But it is also more important: real devotion is sometimes hardest to find, "not when it is dangerous [or demanding], but rather when it is boring."