“So, here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.”

Romans 12:2 MSG

Take your everyday, ordinary life and live it generously, radically, expansively, creatively, courageously, compassionately, redemptively. Live it gloriously. Live in His story. Live out your story. Live, knowing that God is with you, He’s for you, and He is in you. 

God ordains your ordinary. Yet there remains a tendency to separate the miraculous from menial. When that happens, our life at work becomes divorced from our faith. This is dangerous because when we fail to see the story of God at work, we miss the opportunity to partner with God at work and other commonplace contexts. We begin dividing work into sacred and secular: jobs that release the kingdom and jobs that resist the kingdom; the important and irrelevant; regular employment and kingdom assignment.

God invites us to rethink everything we are and everything we do through the lens of mercy. The vision of expansive grace infiltrates our everyday story. Gripped by mercy, we slowly understand that God’s mercy is everywhere, for everyone. Gradually, instead of colliding, our faith and work connect. Instead of wrestling with the dilemma of quitting our jobs to pursue kingdom ministry, we realize that our job is kingdom ministry.

 “Your level of belief is often the only thing that holds you where you are. One of the first objectives in creating your life blueprint is to lift the lid off your level of belief. Your own level of belief is likely to be the biggest limitation in terms of discovering all that God has in store for you.”

The kingdom is not an escape from real work; it is an engagement with real work. Kingdom carriers are jewelers and gardeners, carpenters and bricklayers, shopkeepers and engineers, lawyers and doctors, architects and designers. 

If we are to fulfill our mandate of bringing life to everything everywhere, we must see our involvement in institutions and industries and workplaces as kingdom work. We must reject the idea that kingdom work happens mainly in services, on stages, or on street corners and respond to God’s invitation to join Him in His work of reshaping the world in ordinary places like shopping centers, farms, factories, and offices.

And do not be conformed to this world [any longer with its superficial values and customs], but be ^[c]transformed and progressively changed [as you mature spiritually] by the renewing of your mind [focusing on godly values and ethical attitudes], so that you may prove [for yourselves] what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect [in His plan and purpose for you].

Romans 12:2 amp