What If I'm Just Ordinary?

When God wants to do something in the earth, He always starts with a leader. That leader has a God-given assignment, but he can’t do it alone. Even the best leader knows that a team must be built to help bring about God’s desires and plan. But that team must be made of people who have the right stuff.

While God always starts His work with a leader, it appears that He always endeavors to finish His work through a team.

Our society adores teams that are comprised of super-stars and celebrities. Perhaps no other team has been so celebrated or captured the mind of American sports fans like the 1992 U.S. Olympic basketball team. Along with legends such as Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and Michael Jordan, it was clear that every member of the “Dream Team” was an outstanding, world-class player in his own right. No opponent even came close to beating the Dream Team. Defeating opponents by an average of more than forty-three points per game, the Dream Team took its place in the annals of athletic history.The members of the ’92 Dream Team were all superstars. Yet the members of the Dream Team that Jesus assembled were all completely ordinary. They were common people with regular lives. They had not distinguished themselves as great philosophers, scholars, orators, or achievers. Scripture makes no attempt to glamorize these twelve men; instead, we see them in all of their raw humanity. As He was training them, Jesus noted that (on occasion) they were slow learners and spiritually dense; they lacked faith and understanding and had hard hearts; and they were fearful and full of unbelief.The disciples ultimately became a great team through their association with Jesus and by the influence of the Holy Spirit, but they had to overcome problems common to all: inferiority, pride, jealousy, foot-in-mouth disease, doubts, fear, failure, and so forth. They even slept through some of their most crucial times of training! But Jesus—the Captain of our salvation— saw beyond their faults and recognized their potential. He didn’t see them only as they were, but He also envisioned all that they could become.Jesus looked beyond the clumsiness and impulsivity of Peter and saw an empowered preacher. Jesus saw more than the rambunctious turbulence of John; He also saw the “Apostle of Love.” Jesus acknowledged the checkered past of the woman at the well, but He also saw a transformed testifier. And Jesus looked beyond the rage of Saul of Tarsus and saw a church builder and an epistle writer.One of the main lessons from the lives of the original twelve disciples is that if God can use them, then He can use us. And God will use us to the degree to which we yield to Him, cooperate with Him, and work with one another. The Church is God’s “Plan A.” There is no Plan B.The Apostle Paul was a man who loved, valued, and relied heavily upon his team. He also wanted to see teams of leaders and workers established in every church he started. But he understood the “raw materials” from which these teams would be built, and he addressed them accordingly.Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, not man from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow  pretensions of the “somebodies”? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That’s why we have the saying, “If you’re going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God” (1 Corinthians 1:26-31, MSG).This passage is especially meaningful to those who feel that they’re not talented enough, not brilliant enough, or not gifted enough. We may start out rough around the edges, but God wants to take our lives and transform us, empower us, and form us into teams of believers who will work mightily and effectively for His glory in the earth.Individual performances are great, but Jesus wants to build a Dream Team out of us.