God does extraordinary work through ordinary means

God does extraordinary work through ordinary means

When we use God’s ordinary means, we get God’s power with them.

Cal Ripken Junior became an extraordinary baseball player by doing an ordinary thing: he showed up for work. He did it again and again and again—a record 2,632 consecutive times. The hall-of-fame shortstop first appeared in the Baltimore Orioles starting lineup on May 30, 1982 in a game against the Seattle Mariners and his name was next absent from it on September 20, 1998.

Barry Bonds became an infamous footnote to baseball history by attempting to do something extraordinary in an extraordinary way: he bent the rules. One of the most feared sluggers of the 1990s and 2000s, Bonds broke one of the game’s most hallowed records—Hank Aaron’s all-time home run mark of 755 homers. Bonds did it by cheating. For the last several years of his career, he took drugs that artificially enhanced his performance—and inflated his home run totals—enabling him to pass Aaron. To many fans, Bonds is baseball’s Benedict Arnold.

These two players illustrate well two different approaches to ministry—God’s way and our way. In the historic evangelical tradition, preaching, prayer, and the ordinances—baptism and the Lord’s Supper—have often been referred to as “the ordinary means of grace” because they form the heart of corporate worship and the main methods of ministry in a faithful, biblical church.

They’re God’s means of transforming sinners.But I fear, in our good and right desire to see God’s church built, we get thrown by the term “ordinary.”

Think Ripken, not Bonds.

Grace is not ordinary

The phrase “ordinary means of grace” can be interpreted as suggesting that God’s work is dull and unspectacular. But there is nothing ordinary about God’s grace. God uses the public proclamation of a book that’s at least 6,000 years old in places and his Spirit to cause a gargantuan army of his enemies to love him and desire to join his family. What are the ordinary means of grace? The answer to question 95 of the Baptist Catechism defines them this way:The outward and ordinary means whereby Christ communicates to us the benefits of redemption are His ordinances, especially the Word, Baptism, the Lord’s Supper and Prayer; all which are made effectual to the elect for salvation. (; ; ; ; ,).A few months ago, a man from my hometown told me he had planted a new church. I asked him to tell me a little more about it. As only a mountain man from north Georgia could put it, he said, “Well, it ain’t much. Just preachin’, prayin’, and sangin.’ I figure that’s plenty.”Plenty, indeed.

When we use extraordinary means

It’s plenty because tragic things happen when we exchange God’s means of grace for our own—or when we misuse his means. Just ask Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu. While handling the sacred things in the worship of God, they rebelliously offered “strange fire” on the altar of God—a means of worship the Lord did not command. The result? God vaporized them in his wrath.Ask Old Testament Israel who embraced the pantheon of deities worshiped by the nations around them and God used Assyria and Babylon—wicked nations—as instruments of judgment. Of course, God in his holiness, turned around and poured out his judgment on those nations for their sin as well.