I love listening to Erwin McManus preach. If you don’t know who he is, he’s a pastor, preacher and author, who serves Mosaic, a church in LA. Mosaic has actually expanded to have campuses in a number of different locations – some in California, and some international.

Erwin always has a way of making me see things in a new light. Recently, I was listening to a sermon in which he spoke about how God transforms the ordinary. 

You see, before Jesus was born, a manger was just a box or trough that the livestock fed from. But because Jesus was laid in the manger after his birth, it has become the focal point of nativity scenes. It has become something we look at as holy. Erwin spoke  about the worship space he preaches in as being just an ordinary room, except that because people have had an encounter with God there, it has become holy.

God takes what is ordinary, and transforms it. 

 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. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. Romans 12:1,2 MSG

Do you see – whatever you are doing, you can be holy in doing it. God can transform your ordinary life, into a holy life. And he wants to! Because this will draw you ever closer to God himself, your faith will grow stronger and deeper. And all the ordinary things in your day, will suddenly shine with God-light.

This Advent, may you see God at work – transforming the ordinary into the holy and the extraordinary.