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By Pastor Glenn Pease
David Semands in his book Living With Dreams tells of his experience as a first term missionary in India in the 1950's.
He caught an early morning train to get to a committee meeting at the mission station.
He expected to return that day, and so he took very little with him and nothing to read.
Half way there the train stopped.
A derailment up ahead had damaged the tracks.
So they backed up a few miles and pulled into a small station in the middle of nowhere.
There they sat until the next day.
He was so frustrated because he had nothing to read.
The tiny food shop had a few magazines, but they were all in a language he had never seen before.
The shop keeper, sensing his plight, pulled out a well worn paperback addition of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
The only book in English anywhere to be found, and it was 11 hundred pages of anti-Christian philosophy.
Just what a Christian missionary dreams of.
It was a nightmare, but he was so bored that he spent the day reading that book.
He was not thankful for the book, nor did he see this as the providence of God in his life.
It was just misery and pain.
Ten years later a young student came to his office with intellectual problems regarding the Christian faith.
He had read a book that shook him up, and it was the book Atlas shrugged.
The student was shocked when he heard that the missionary had read the book.
There was immediate rapport established, and they spent a lot of time dealing with the issues of that book.
The young man went on to become a Christian physician loyal to his faith in Christ.
David Semands said, "I considered the day I spent reading that book one of the worse days of my life.
It was a wasted day with no redeeming value.
It took ten years before he could see God working in his life that day in making a difference for the future.
He now keeps this little saying before him to remind him that God is involved in his everyday-even the bad ones.
"He is always around the corner to meet me,
So I can enter the future unafraid
For nothing can come to me
That cannot be used
By the grace of God,
For the glory of God,
My own growth,
And the good of others."
Even the painful past that God wants us to let go of can be used if we pray for God to open our eyes to track his involvement in our everyday.
Paul is speaking in our text to idol worshiping pagans, and yet he stresses that God is even involved in their everyday.
God has given life, breath, and all their blessings.
Theologians call this the prevenient grace of God.
This is the grace that shows even to the unbelievers of the world.
The sun and the rain blesses the evil as well as the good.
Paul says that God's goodness is designed to motivate men to seek Him and find Him, for He is never far from anyone.
He is involved with every life on the planet, and then Paul even quotes a pagan poet who said, "For in Him we live and move and have our being.
We are His offspring."
Paul is saying to these pagan people that there is a sense in which all men are children of God, and God is involved in their lives.
But they are lost children, and they need to be born anew into His family by faith in Christ in order to be saved and have the hope of eternal life.
The point is, if God is involved in the everyday of even His lost children who do not acknowledge Him as their heavenly Father, how much more is He involved in the everyday of those who do?
This involvement does not mean that God is doing wonders and miracles everyday in our lives, but that He is providentially guiding, protecting, and nudging us in the direction which is best for us.
Karen Mains tells an example of this in her life.
She and David were in a motel in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
She got up early to go get coffee.
As she was walking back to the room with two hot styrofoam cups in her hand, it suddenly dawned on her that she did not have a key to the room, and she had forgotten the number of the room.
She stood there feeling somewhat panicky, but she calmed herself down and stood there in the long hallway quietly trying to think.
Then she heard a man blowing his nose a few doors down, and having been married to that man for 22 years she recognized the sound.
She followed the sound and knocked on the door, and her husband opened it.
Ordinarily the blowing of one's nose is not heard by anyone as a blessing, nor is it any sign of God's providence in life, but here was a case where Karen added it to her list of God's involvement in her everyday.
God can and does use the ordinary, the commonplace, and the trivial to express His guidance and care.
If you are looking for super-nova explosions in the heavens, or the ability to fed thousands with your lunch, you are looking for God in all the wrong places.
Focus on the trivial and the mundane, and you will see the hand of God at work daily.
If you are looking for a burning bush, forget it.
It's been done, and God will not likely do it again.
This does not mean God does not do some amazing things in our lives.
He does, but they are rare and not everyday things.
Alan Finney tells of driving down a four lane highway in the fast lane.
He looked into the rear view mirror and saw a white Lincoln Continental blinking his headlights to say, "Move over."
He was annoyed by it, for there was no traffic in the other lane, and he wondered why the guy did not just go around him.
Reluctantly he eased over to the other side.
Just then they came to a top of a hill, and an oncoming car driving the wrong direction came flying over the hill in that fast lane where he had been.
He was startled and thought there would be a head on collision with the white Continental.
But as he looked in his mirror the white Continental was gone.
Whoever it was saved his life, but he never even got a chance to wave and say thanks.
It was apparently a vision God gave him to spare his life.
This is a major work of God, and it is going on all the time, but for most of us there is no need for being saved everyday.
So we need to focus on the commonplace to see God's involvement in our everyday.
The woman at the well was a less than ordinary woman.
She was divorced 5 times and living with another man she was not married to.
She went on an ordinary day to an ordinary well to get some ordinary water.
She met to what appeared to be an ordinary man, but she discovered He was far more than that.
He was the Messiah, and he could love one even like her.
That ordinary day changed her life forever, and the lives of many others in Samaria.
The ordinary and the extraordinary are all united when God is at work in our lives.
Never dismiss the ordinary, for it is one of God's most useful tools.
One of the paradoxes of life is the fact that the ordinary may be the most extraordinary factor in our lives.
The Bible, for example, is the most commonly found book in our culture.
Every home has several, and they are found in every hotel and motel.
We take it for granted and do not realize its value until we lose the opportunity to be exposed to its light.
When Terry Anderson was captured and held hostage in Lebanon he was kept chained and blindfolded for 24 days.
He had read parts of the Bible, but it was no big deal.
Now he longed for a Bible.
He begged the guard of his basement prison to get him a Bible.
He could not believe it when the guard took his blindfold off the next day and laid a Bible in his lap.
He devoured that Bible.
He read it through 50 times.
He was a captive, but every day admit the filth and the beatings he was growing in his Christian life.
The result was that after 2,455 days when his ordeal was over, reporters asked him if he could forgive his captives, and he was able to respond, "Yes, as a Christian I am required to forgive, no matter how hard it may be."
He could let go of his painful past because he had been tracking God's involvement in his everyday-even the everyday of one in captivity.
God was working in his life everyday as he exposed himself to the Word of God.
If we would search the Word daily, we would sense more of the reality that Paul speaks of in our text.
God is never far away from any of us, and in Him we live and move and have our being.
The problem is never that God is not involved in our everyday.
The problem is that we miss it because we are not aware.
We are not interacting with him and so we miss the signs.
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