Get the appYour God Is Too Glorious: A 7-Day Devotional by Chad BirdSample
Thin Places
When you step into God’s personal space, you won’t spy a white-bearded old man glowing like fire atop a gilded throne. God looks like a school cafeteria full of third graders. He looks like your nephew who got caught dealing pot and ended up in the county jail. He looks like that guy from accounting who was put in the ICU over the weekend. Wherever the last, the lost, the least, and the little are, that’s where God hangs out. If there are thin places in this world, they are thick with the everyday needs of the world.
I haven’t visited the Holy Land. I hope to someday. People who have made this pilgrimage tell me it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But to visit the site where Jesus was crucified, you need only spend some time with those who bear the crosses of sickness, loss, grief, loneliness, persecution. Golgotha is as close as the nearest hospital. It’s at the Starbucks where you meet a friend who got laid off and is fighting the demons of depression. Calvary is as close as the nearest person in need of grace and mercy.
We learn this truth from Jesus’s life. The places where Jesus did his most extraordinary work were ordinary places. A boat floating in the water where he taught the crowds gathered on the shore. A house where Peter’s mother-in-law lay sick in bed. An upper room where he washed the feet of his disciples and shared one final meal with them. And a patch of ground outside the city where criminals were nailed to beams of wood and forced to endure an agonizing death.
God doesn’t play by our rules. He doesn’t conform to our expectations. Rather, he enlightens our eyes so that we might see him where he is unseeable. In thin places thick with suffering, sweat, and tears, he will be present.
The thinnest place in the history of the world was where all the glory of the almighty God was wrapped in the skin of a dying man. The Son of God lamented, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46, NIV). And in that still, small voice of our crucified Savior we hear the certainty that God will never forsake us.
When have you experienced a “thin place” between you and God, when you sensed his presence clearly?
Scripture
About this Plan
Do you ever feel you’re the only one in the room without the impressive degree, the high-profile workday, the great calling? Yet God uses ordinary people to do extraordinary work. He may very well be hiding in your mundane commute, the late-night feeding, even that hundredth load of laundry you just did. May this week-long devotional remind you that God is in the most inglorious places—and uses the people there to change the world.
More
We would like to thank Chad Bird and Baker Publishing for providing this plan. For more information, please visit: http://www.chadbird.com/yourgod
