Perhaps one of the hardest areas to clarify is the place of personal ambition – is it right to have ambition or not? We have our culture that tells us we need to do something great with our life – and the great western dream is that ordinary people can do something extraordinary with their lives –“rags to riches”; “the ordinary hero”, “anyone can do something great if they just believe”, “girls can do anything” “do something with your life,” etc. Whether you are aware of it or not, this drive to do something incredible for God is pervasive. This feeling will drive you – but it will drive you places you don’t want to go. People get bored with the ordinary life – it’s just not enough. So we attempt something “important” for God. Ordinary doesn’t feel like it is enough – so people do things like change church, change job, change city, change country, change spouse, etc

So we live in this culture that expects everyone to do something spectacular with their lives if they will just believe – and then we are confronted with scriptures like “Make it your ambition to live a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you… 1 Thess 4.11

So should we be ambitious or passive? Well, as so often is the case, the truth is held in tension. We are all very ordinary people, living ordinary lives, doing ordinary things that human beings do. And being ordinary is actually very good!

If we will live the ordinary life (loving & enjoying our spouse, family and friends, working diligently at our work, watching for and taking opportunities to love and bless people, growing in our relationship with God, eating good food, and having fun along the way, loving and serving God with our whole heart, watching for and acting on the invitations/nudges from God to do or speak for Him into a person’s life, etc, etc), God can use it to reach into the extraordinary, or invite us to do something extra-ordinary. If we will do the possible, He will do the impossible.

So often we want to reverse the relationship. For example as a church leader we may think “If You will love the people Jesus, I’ll focus on building the church.” But the Bible tells us we need to love people, and He will build His Church.

I want to invite you to step back from well-meaning personal ambition & simply do the possible and live the ordinary life to its fullness, and see what God will turn the possible and ordinary into.

So many Christians wear themselves out striving to do something significant. They are so caught up with wanting to do something great FOR God that they often end up doing nothing and missing out on the wonderful ordinariness of their lives.

I so appreciated hearing John Wimber  say “I am tired of hearing about  all the great men of God – I want to hear about the great God of men!”

Let’s give ourselves to fully living an ordinary life and see what the other member of our partnership, Jesus, will do with it! Let’s re-claim the ordinary!

If you would like to hear more check this link Download An ordinary life with an extra-ordinary God 4 July 2010

The Kingdom is a little like this – you very rarely get to have a season of joy and victory, and then you leave that and enter a season of sorrow and defeat! Instead we tend to have both joy and sadness simultaneously; we experience victory in one area and defeat in another.

I have found one of the most helpful metaphors for understanding this tension in life are parallel train tracks. Your life runs along these 2 tracks constantly – at any moment you are full of joy and contentment – and simultaneously you can equally feel pain and disappointment. We even experience this in God’s nature – He is at the same time a God of love AND a God who judges. He is full of mercy, yet jealous for purity.

In our understanding of the Kingdom we call this experience eschatological tension. The Kingdom is here – but it is yet to come! It is now – but not yet! We struggle to live with this tension and the temptation is to break the tension and to hold only 1 truth, especially when we are considering why some are healed and some aren’t, why sometimes good things happen to “bad” people and bad things happen to “good” people, and so on. The agony and ecstasy of life. So we are tempted to break the tension and believe only 1 of the truths- either the Kingdom is here right now and everyone should be healed and happy and prosperous. Or – the Kingdom is yet to come so right now no-one will get healed and suffering is all we should expect. But both of these truths become errors without the tension of holding them both to be true at the same time.

So may God meet you between the tracks, and may you know His Presence in you and around as you move forward in life, at one moment in joy and in other in sadness. He is there in the midst of you!

Picture a person standing upright – when they are in a balanced position they are in fact going nowhere – they are stationary. But to make progress – to walk – you must actually throw yourself off balance. So you push a leg forward – and then when you are off balance you need to bring your other leg forward or you will fall over!! (watching a baby take its first steps is a wonderful example of lack of balance leading to growth and progress). But the wonderful result of being off balance is that you are making progress – you are going somewhere! And when you stop – you are balanced!

So what is happening to you that feels like it is pushing you off balance? Maybe you need to take a step in that direction and then see where the next step will take you. Don’t strive for balance – go for growth.