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Extraordinary Faith

There’s nothing common about those who respond to the call of God.

Joseph Miller May 19, 2022

The Bible has many accounts of different kinds of people. And they’re all ordinary people through whom God has done some extraordinary things. Oftentimes we think that the Lord’s servants have to be very gifted, talented, skilled people, with maybe lots of education and all the rest. But here’s a whole Book of people who were ordinary in their day, but when God touched their life—when He spoke to them and they responded in the proper way—He made their life extraordinary.
Charles F. Stanley, “The Life of Faith”

Illustration by Adam Cruft

As part of my role at In Touch, I reach out to people who’ve shared snippets of their stories—perhaps through a phone call or an email—and ask them more about what God has been doing in their lives. A common refrain I’ve heard goes something like, “But why my story? What’s so interesting about me?” It’s easy for us as believers to read about the men and women of the Bible and think, Wow, they led an amazing life but to look at our own as somehow spiritually “less than.”
Even with the imagination of a writer, I have a hard time seeing many of the amazing people from the Bible as anything other than complete saints or sinners. I don’t imagine them as average people, yet most of them were. Yes, David rose from the position of a humble shepherd to become God’s chosen king. Yes, Solomon possessed wisdom no scholar of his era could hope to attain. But most of the people who became extraordinary were poor and unknown. Think of Mary, a teenager from a backwoods place like Nazareth, carrying the Son of God in her womb; or Gideon, a man hiding from his enemies when the Lord called him to action. Yet because they and many others “responded in the proper way,” their lives became extraordinary.

It's an honor as an outsider to hear the testimonies of our partners—humble, Christ-loving people who walk in faithfulness to God’s calling—and to remind them that they indeed have a story worth sharing. We all do.

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