301 – Your Friends Aren’t All Worthless

In Heaven’s Kingdom, God raises up our leaders from among our brethren. David was the runt of his litter. Joseph nearly was the same. Jesus’s family thought he was mentally ill.

For decades, God prepares someone quietly, secretly. The one being prepared may have a sense that the preparation is happening, but still can’t fathom how everything will play out. Even Jesus doesn’t know the hour of his own return to Earth. If Jesus doesn’t know when he will come back to deliver us from the evils on Earth, then there is no way in Heaven or on Earth that we could ever know who is and is not in the quiet fields of preparation for the Lord’s purposes tomorrow.

Everyone looks ordinary in person. Seeing a face on a billboard or movie screen makes a celebrity easy to recognize. But, in person everyone remains human.

Say Einstein were to deliver his theory of relativity to one of his college classmates. Or, imagine if Oswald Chambers had gone off on one of his rants as a student in Sunday school. They would be brushed off as annoying and self-obsessed. But, if either man were to sit down in a television studio and show the world how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the whole world would take notes.

That’s what made Oswald Chambers special to all of us: His wife took notes while he would rant at home. That’s how his famous devotional was written. He dictated off the cuff; she actually wrote it down. We have his words to read because his own family had the insight to value his words first.

Thomas Aquinas was called the “dumb ox” by his classmates because he was fat and soft-spoken. But, his teacher told the class, “One day the ‘dumb ox’ will speak and the whole world will listen.” That teacher recognized talent without needing a movie screen to determine whether his own student had a brain worth publishing.

Don’t assume that your peers can’t include the king God will anoint—that you could never be so ‘lucky’. Your friends aren’t all worthless. Learn to spot talent among your peers before the world does.