Yesterday my husband finished the book of Romans, and what a rich wrap-up it was! I’ll just select one point that I particularly appreciated, but it’s hard to choose. (You’ll have to listen to the sermon yourself!)

God made us to be small creatures, but He did not make us petty creatures. When Christ became a man, He humbled Himself, but His humility wasn’t in the fact that He became small; it was because He took on our sins.

We, on the other hand, turn small things into petty things. We focus on rules about petty things rather than seeing the big picture. We get all worked up over mud tracked in on the carpet, and that is a petty thing! We let petty things become enormous things.

The gospel sheds light on all the small, ordinary things in our lives and transforms them into extraordinary things. And so we can glory in the mundane. Quoting Thomas Howard, we can find “splendor in the ordinary.”

There are big things afoot in the universe, so we ought to look up! We are going to live forever! When we stare at our feet and the ground under them, we miss what is really going on around us, and we get wrapped up in petty things. Instead, we need to look up! We need to quit looking down and start looking up to Christ, for that is where our life is hidden. God does not want us to settle for petty things or get submerged in the petty things, caught up in shuffling our stuff around. God created us for so much more.

Nothing like the book of Romans to lift us up out of ourselves!

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