Where Value Is Earned
Day 190 – 9 July
Already His Will
“as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.” (Ephesians 6:6, NKJV)
Straining for the Grand Assignment
A great many sincere people spend years straining to hear the will of God, listening hard for something grand and unmistakable: a dramatic calling, a mission with their name on it, an assignment large enough to make their one life finally count. They scan the horizon for it. They pray for a sign, wait for a door, and half wonder whether they have somehow missed the memo, while the ordinary work already in their hands sits ignored in the foreground, filed under “just a job” and beneath serious spiritual notice. The irony runs deep, because the New Testament, whenever it speaks plainly of the will of God, keeps pointing almost the opposite way.
Where Scripture Puts “the Will of God”
Look at where the phrase truly lands. When the New Testament says, in so many words, “this is the will of God,” it fastens those weighty words to remarkably ordinary things. “This is the will of God, even your sanctification,” Paul writes, meaning plain daily purity of life (1 Thessalonians 4:3). “In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God,” he adds, meaning a grateful heart on a grey morning (1 Thessalonians 5:18). “So is the will of God, that with well doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men,” writes Peter, meaning simply doing good where you already are (1 Peter 2:15). And here in Ephesians, “the will of God” (θέλημα τοῦ θεοῦ, thelēma tou theou) is nothing more dramatic than a servant getting on with honest work. The word θέλημα (thelēma, “will” or “desire”) leans towards the sense of a heart’s pleasure, what delights and gladdens the one who wills it. So the will of God is less a sealed envelope of secret instructions and more His glad desire, and that desire settles, over and over, on the humble and the everyday. The grand calling so many are hunting turns out to be hiding in plain sight, tucked inside the very tasks they were tempted to despise.
The Man on the Early Round
Out before the streets have properly woken, a man works the early refuse round. He rides the back step in the cold, drops down at each stop, hauls the week’s rubbish, heaves it into the crusher, and moves on, house after house, in rain that soaks through and a stench that never quite washes out. The world files this work near the bottom of its rankings, somewhere below the jobs that come with a title and a desk. Most of the people still asleep behind those doors will never see him, and fewer still will thank him. Yet remove workers like him for even a fortnight, and every street he serves would turn unliveable, buried under its own waste with disease following close behind. His labour holds the ordinary world together at a seam most people never once think about. Before God, that seam is no less holy than any pulpit, and the man who tends it is doing, in the plainest terms, an honest and honourable thing.
No Menial Work in His Sight
This is where the truth about God reframes an ordinary Thursday. He is no respecter of persons, and He keeps no secret ranking of holy work above humble work, of the celebrated calling above the unnoticed shift. The distinctions we draw so confidently, between the impressive and the invisible, the spiritual and the merely practical, have no place at all in His sight. The servant sweeping a floor and the preacher climbing a pulpit stand on entirely level ground before Him, and so do the parent settling a fractious child and the clerk answering one more email with care. What makes any of it the will of God is never the size of the task but the heart that offers it up to Him. So the work already in your hands this morning needs no upgrade to matter. It carries all the dignity it will ever require the moment you do it for Him, faithfully and well. You can stop waiting for a grander summons and simply begin, because the summons has already arrived, wearing the plain clothes of whatever sits in front of you.
Declaration
Today I stop waiting for a grander assignment and take up the one already in my hands. The work before me may look small and unremarkable, the sort no one records or applauds, and I will do it anyway as something that matters, because it is the very thing given me for this hour. I let go of the notion that only large and visible tasks count for anything, and I trust that the One I work for ranks no honest labour as beneath Him. Whatever this day asks of me, however plain, I will offer it up and do it faithfully and well. My ordinary Thursday is holy ground, and the humblest thing I do within it, done for Him, is His will being carried out through my two hands.
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