“By your endurance you will gain your lives.” Luke 21:19

Our lives are incredibly normal. Kamloops is a fairly ordinary place with completely typical happenings. We all experience the same tedious tasks day to day. We all face the same tiresome troubles. There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly heroic about working at our jobs. There doesn’t seem to be anything incredibly noble about persistently attending church week in and week out. There doesn’t seem to be anything monumental happening. From all outward appearances we are living a lazy, normal, boring life.

But, having met Christ and embracing the fate that awaits those who have inherited eternity, we simply cannot see our day to day living here in Kamloops and the interior as ‘mundane.’ It will appear that way to the casual observer, but it should never feel that way to us. Oswald Chambers makes an interesting statement regarding this phenomenon:

“We have to make an expression of this new life, to form the mind of Christ. ‘Acquire your soul with patience.’ Many of us prefer to stay at the threshold of the Christian life instead of going on to construct a soul in accordance with the new life God has put within.”^[1]

I think that Chambers hits the nail on the head. Never are we called to work for our salvation. Our salvation is firm in the cross, but now that we have acquired this salvation… what are we doing with it? I find that many Christians are living life as though Jesus has just purchased them a shiny new car, but they are all content to let the fancy automobile sit in the drive way while they continue to bicycle to work, the grocery store, and the rest of their activities. Life is moving slower, far too slow, than the power that Christ has given us in the new birth.

So what to do? Begin living Christian in every instance. Share your faith. Preach the Gospel. Be an evangelist. Keep your eyes open to do good. Look for ways to bless others. Be a Christian. These activities shape and change who we are, and before long you will feel the wind in your hair and sense that you are living life in a different way – God’s way.

But you must endure. You must persist. You must believe that something monumental is happening even though neither you nor the world can see it. You must live the mundane believing Jesus more than your own observations. This life, boring though it may seem, is monumental to the Kingdom of God. Chase after every opportunity with faith. Go on and be the Christian that this world needs!