Your God Is Too Glorious: A 7-Day Devotional by Chad BirdSample

God's Friends

There’s no shortage of loud voices at the center of the religious establishment. Among Christians, these men and women are household names. We listen to their podcasts, ask them to autograph their books, hear them quoted in sermons. And there’s nothing wrong with this. There’s often wisdom in their words. 

The problem is this: our ears can grow so accustomed to these loud voices that we become deaf to the quiet voices whispering profound wisdom on the fringes. God’s friends in the convenience stores and soup kitchens of the world. Because the teachers who have the greatest impact on our lives are not always standing at the front of a church. They’ve written no books, earned no degrees, wouldn’t be invited to lecture at a Christian university. They are strangers to the religious system. They lack the credentials to garner interest among churchgoing people. They don’t speak Christianese.

We assume that if the Lord has friends, it wouldn’t be these people. And yet they are. God has friends in low places. He gives wisdom to those the world deems fools. He grants faith to people wrestling with twisted lives and scarred pasts. He puts prophets under interstate bridges and preachers on forklifts.

The more the Lord has strong-armed me outside my Christian comfort zone, the more I have learned of Christianity from these outsiders. And the more I learn from them, the more I realize that this is part of God’s way of hiding in our world. He cloaks himself in the garb of people who don’t have “church clothes.” 

It’s taken me years—and concrete experiences—to see this. To break down my prejudices. But that’s part of the work of the Spirit in our lives. He is reconfiguring our vision to see that to which we are usually blind. He’s teaching us to reevaluate our perception of what kind of people God might use to speak his Word to us. The Spirit opens our eyes to the fact that every day, in every encounter, the person in front of us may be the Lord’s mouthpiece. In this unexpected place, in this humble person, in this seemingly unspiritual setting, the Lord may be hiding.

What is one thing you could do this week to push yourself outside of your Christian comfort zone?