The Ordinary Christian Life

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.”

— Isaiah 55:8–9

One of the most persistent assumptions of fallen man is that God generally agrees with us. We may concede that He possesses a little more information, a somewhat broader perspective, and perhaps a longer timetable, but deep down we imagine that He shares our ambitions. We assume that if He were sitting beside us making plans for our lives, He would simply improve the plans we have already made.

Now, we would never dream of saying this during our mid-week Bible study. We know the catechism answers far too well for that. God is sovereign, infinitely wise, and does all things well. Quite right. The trouble is that our lives have a way of revealing assumptions that our confessions never would. There is often a considerable gap between what we profess to believe about God’s wisdom and how we respond when His wisdom interrupts our plans.

Our theology may be thoroughly Reformed while our instincts remain stubbornly pagan.

The Lord is not simply smarter than we are, as though He were the cleverest man in the room. The difference is vastly greater than that. It is like a child standing beneath a sky full of stars, convinced that one good jump will allow him to pocket a constellation and take it home. The attempt is charming, but it is hopeless. The heavens are not merely high; they belong to another order altogether. And so do the thoughts and ways of God.

God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, and our ways are not His ways. This is the difference between heaven and earth. The question, then, is not whether God has slightly or greatly better ideas than we do. The question is whether we have been thinking about the Christian life in entirely the wrong category.

The Christian life begins with a radical renunciation. We are called to forsake not merely a handful of bad habits or a catalogue of obvious sins, but an entire way of thinking and living. God does not simply ask us to improve our natural instincts. He calls us to abandon them. Our thoughts, our ambitions, our priorities, our definitions of success, our instincts about power, happiness, and significance — all of these must be surrendered because God does not think as we think, nor does He work as we work.

But, don’t be discouraged at this. Take heart. The emphasis of the passage in Isaiah is not merely that God is infinitely beyond us, though He certainly is. Nor is it merely that we should be humbled by the immeasurable distance between heaven and earth. The wonder of the passage is that the God whose thoughts are so much higher than ours calls us to Himself.

Isaiah 55 is not a divine dismissal, it is a divine invitation.

God is not saying, “My thoughts are higher than yours, therefore stop asking questions and give up to fate.” He is saying, “Forsake your thoughts, forsake your ways, return to Me, and learn Mine.” The God who dwells in unapproachable light has approached us in Christ so that we might begin to think our thoughts after Him and walk in His ways.

See for yourself. Consider the verses preceding this statement.

Seek the Lord while he may be found;
call upon him while he is near;
let the wicked forsake his way,
and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him,
and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.

— Isaiah 55:6-7

That is the great hope of the Christian life. We are not left imprisoned within the limitations of our fallen minds. We are invited into the school of Christ, where our thinking is renewed, our affections reordered, and our lives gradually shaped according to the higher wisdom of God. What begins as a command to forsake ends as an invitation to fellowship. The God whose thoughts are as high as the heavens does not reject those who come to Him. He welcomes them, teaches them, and, by His grace, makes them increasingly like Himself.

If we are going to understand Isaiah’s invitation, we must first understand what it is that God asks us to forsake. He tells the wicked man to abandon both his thoughts and his ways.

The word translated thoughts does not refer to the random stream of ideas that pass through our minds on an idle afternoon. Isaiah is speaking of something much deeper. The word carries the idea of plans, intentions, purposes, counsels, and settled designs. It is the inner deliberation of the heart — the place where ambitions are conceived, priorities are arranged, and life is quietly planned long before it is publicly lived. Solomon captures the same truth when he exhorts us to

Keep your heart with all vigilance,
for from it flow the springs of life.

— Proverbs 4:23.

Jesus says much the same when He teaches that “out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders” (Matt. 15:19). Scripture consistently treats the heart as the workshop in which the whole of life is constructed. Every action begins as an affection. Every habit begins as a desire. Every pattern of life begins as an inward thought.

And as for the word — ‘ways’ — throughout the Scriptures, a man’s way is the road he walks — the settled course of his life. Proverbs constantly contrasts the path of wisdom with the path of folly. Our Lord speaks of the narrow way that leads to life and the broad way that leads to destruction. A man’s way, then, is not an isolated decision but the accumulated direction of his life.

If thoughts are the architect’s drawings, ways are the house that eventually stands. If thoughts are the roots, ways are the fruit. God therefore calls the sinner to forsake both the hidden plans of the heart and the visible life that grows out of them.

God, therefore, places two worlds alongside one another. There is His way of thinking, and there is ours. There is His manner of life, and there is ours. His thoughts produce His ways, just as our thoughts produce ours. The point is not merely that God has better ideas. It is that He inhabits an entirely different world of thought and work than what seems obvious to the human mind.

So, when an atheist like Stephen Fry asks how a good God could permit a child to suffer from bone cancer, we should recognise that, within his own frame of reference, the objection appears entirely reasonable. If human reason and moral intuition are the highest court of appeal, then God inevitably stands accused. But that is precisely the question that must be challenged.

Does my inability to conceive of a good reason mean that no such reason exists? Or have I simply mistaken the limits of my understanding for the limits of God’s wisdom?

There is a reason why Scripture uses the particular word — higher.

It is one thing to say that God’s thoughts are different from ours. It is another to ask in what sense they are different — and the answer of course is that they are higher.

It is not simply a matter of quantity or degree. God thinks more truthfully, more righteously, more patiently, more graciously, and more lovingly than we do. His judgments are perfect because He sees the end from the beginning. His wisdom is flawless because nothing surprises Him. But Isaiah is saying something even more practical than that.

God’s thoughts are higher in that they are substantively superior, consistently overturning what fallen man assumes to be obvious.

The natural man looks at Saul of Tarsus and sees an enemy to be destroyed. God sees the Apostle to the Gentiles. Jesse looks at David and sees the youngest son who should remain with the sheep. God sees a king. The disciples see five loaves and two fish and prepare themselves for a fast. Christ sees a feast. The world looks upon fishermen and sees ordinary labourers. Christ sees men who will turn the world upside down. Society looks at a Samaritan woman and sees scandal, shame, and wasted potential. Christ sees the first evangelist to an entire village. The rulers of Jerusalem looked upon three crosses and saw the shameful end of another failed Messiah. God looked upon the same cross and saw the salvation of the world.

Again and again, Scripture confronts us with the same pattern. Fallen man assesses people, circumstances, and history according to what appears immediately useful, impressive, powerful, or successful. God delights in working by entirely different calculations. He chooses the weak to shame the strong, the foolish to shame the wise, the things that are not to nullify the things that are (1 Corinthians 1:27–29). He habitually builds His kingdom from directions no strategist would recommend.

So, you see, God’s “higher” thoughts are not simply bigger versions of our own. That is what we subtly assume when we say things like, “God didn’t give me this job because He has a better-paying one waiting.” Or, “He closed this ministry because He intends to give me a larger ministry.” Or, “He denied me this opportunity because something even greater is around the corner.”

Perhaps. But perhaps not.

What if God’s higher thought is not a larger platform but a larger heart? What if He is less interested in increasing your influence than decreasing your pride? What if the promotion you desperately wanted would have ruined you, while the unnoticed faithfulness you presently despise is accomplishing eternal glory?

We are remarkably skilled at imagining that God’s greatest ambition is to fulfil ours. Isaiah suggests something altogether different. What if His higher thoughts require us to forsake the very ambitions we have been asking Him to bless? What if I dream of prominence while He intends to teach contentment? What if I long to change thousands while He calls me to disciple my own children? What if I pray for extraordinary influence while He quietly commands me to be extraordinarily faithful?

God repeatedly reveals His glory through what appears painfully ordinary. Bread. Wine. Water. Marriage. Children. Honest work. The gathered church. The Lord’s Day. These are not distractions from God’s higher purposes. They are among His higher purposes.

God’s thoughts are not merely higher because they are beyond our comprehension. They are higher because they teach us to value what we would otherwise overlook. They train us to love what the world despises and to seek greatness where fallen men would never think to look.

The first ever command given to mankind was wonderfully ordinary. Be fruitful. Multiply. Fill the earth. Cultivate the garden. Exercise dominion. Build households. Raise children. Love your wife. Teach your sons and daughters when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up (Deut. 6:7). Solomon tells a husband to enjoy life with the wife whom he loves. Micah reduces true religion to doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God. Paul has the astonishing audacity to command Christians to “make it your ambition to lead a quiet life” (1 Thessalonians 4:11). Imagine putting that one on a conference banner.

The modern world pities the ordinary man, while Scripture honours him. The world celebrates the entrepreneur who builds an empire while quietly ignoring the father who builds a household. It applauds the influencer with millions of followers while overlooking the woman who has spent thirty years faithfully discipling her children. We admire the celebrity, the visionary, and the revolutionary, but Scripture repeatedly directs our attention toward husbands who love their wives as Christ loved the church, wives who adorn the gospel through faithful service, parents who raise their children in the nurture of the Lord, labourers who work heartily unto Christ, saints who gather every Lord’s Day around Word and Sacrament, neighbours who quietly love one another, and Christians who open their homes without complaint.

None of those things will trend online, yet, all of them advance the kingdom of God. Perhaps that is because God’s thoughts really are higher than ours?

He has always delighted to build His kingdom through what the world calls unimpressive. Bread and wine. Water. A family table. An open Bible. Ordinary work. A local congregation. Quiet prayers. Patient hospitality. Weekly worship. We are forever searching for extraordinary strategies while God steadily transforms the world through ordinary obedience.

And nowhere is this reversal more gloriously displayed than at the cross.

The Apostle Paul tells us that God has shone into our hearts “to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). But what kind of face is that? Isaiah tells us He had “no stately form or majesty” that we should desire Him (Isaiah 53:2). There was nothing outwardly impressive about the carpenter from Nazareth. The highest thought God has ever thought was not displayed in a palace but on a cross.

There Christ bore all our lower thoughts and lower ways — our pride, our restless ambition, our endless dissatisfaction, our contempt for ordinary faithfulness, and our persistent attempt to make God serve our dreams instead of surrendering ourselves to His will. He bore them all, and He put them to death.

The Christian life, then, is not an invitation to become extraordinary. It is an invitation to learn what God has always considered glorious.

Love your wife.

Raise your children.

Honour your work.

Cherish your church.

Welcome strangers.

Love your neighbour.

Keep the Lord’s Day.

Receive the ordinary means of grace with extraordinary gratitude.

For the ordinary Christian life is not ordinary at all. It is the very life through which God has always built His kingdom, preserved His truth, blessed the nations, and glorified His Son.

And thanks be to God, the One whose thoughts are higher than the heavens has not merely commanded us to admire them from afar. In Christ, He has brought us near, taught us His ways, and invited us to walk in them.

You can listen to the full sermon here