From Matthew 4:18-22 / Finding the Ordinary – It can be a bit trite and unfair when we hear some give their testimony saying something like “I found the Lord” – and we pedantically correct them with something like: “He wasn’t lost, you were, so He found you!” Technically that’s correct. Paul’s citation of Isa. that “no man seeks after God, no not one” is true enough as it stands. Though it can be cited in such a way as to ignore that since the advent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, He has been in the world working in men’s hearts to indeed seek the Lord. There are genuine seekers out there. Not of their fallenness, but out of the glorious grace of God secretly at work. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, like Jesus seeking out and calling the disciples in this passage, or the woman at the well of Samaria and others – He is a seeking Christ. He Himself tells us, “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” What I find delight in here is the simple reality of where He finds any of us. Nowhere else but doing what we do, because of who and what we are. It is one more reminder that when all was said and done, these men, were not special men in and of themselves. He did not seek out pre-existing and pre-qualified “disciples”. He made them disciples. He calls ordinary people in ordinary circumstance with ordinary backgrounds, ordinary skills, ordinary families, ordinary life experiences (good and bad), wrestling with ordinary sins, ordinary thoughts, feelings, faults, brains and bodies. Out of the same lump of fallen humanity, He pinches off some pieces of soiled clay, and forms them into vessels for honor and service in His household. He neither rejects us nor accepts us because of our ordinariness. He receives us and forms us out of love, uninfluenced by us. If He did not save the ordinary and the lost, He would save no one. For there is nothing in any of us to commend us to Him. In a day where everyone wishes to establish their personal exceptionalism – Christ still saves the unexceptional. Indeed, only the unexceptional. Come to Him. He calls to you even now. Come and be His disciple. Even your best nets are full of holes and need continual mending. He calls you right where you are, to follow Him.