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Looking for the Miraculous

Audio / Produced by The High Calling

Transcript

We want to see God in the miraculous. We want to see God in the spectacular. We want to see God in the inexplicable. I go through life wanting earthquakes and thunder and lightening and visions, and I refuse to see God in the dusty, ordinary affairs of every day. And when I lust for the miraculous or some inexplicable thing to happen in my life, I am really kicking at the God who has given me these pesky, dusty, ordinary problems. Looking for the miraculous, looking for the spiritual, looking for the religious, I stumble over the ordinary.

Some men die by shrapnel and some go down in flames, but most men perish inch by inch in play at little games.*

And, my friend, it is in the little games of your life where you either become like Jesus Christ or you become like his enemy.

Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.

(1 Thes. 4:11-12)

Editor's Note: This classic audio recording of Howard Butt, Jr., is from a talk called "God of the Commonplace" delivered in 1974 at the Layman's Leadership Institute in Atlanta, Georgia; lines of poetry excerpted from "The Night They Burned Shanghai," The Saturday Evening Post, Mar. 25, 1939.