What if the miracle you have been waiting for already happened, and you slept right through it? In this episode, I want to invite you to slow down and look at your everyday life through the lens of Scripture. We explore what I call miracle blindness, the quiet spiritual nearsightedness that causes so many of us to miss God's constant presence in ordinary moments. From Elijah's still small voice in 1 Kings 19 to Jeremiah's stunning declaration of new mercy in Lamentations 3, the Bible consistently shows us a God who loves to show up in the small and the simple.

We also dig into Romans 1:20, Matthew 6:26, and the surprising story of the ten lepers to uncover how gratitude is not just a feeling but a spiritual discipline that trains your eyes to recognize what God is already doing around you. If your faith has felt more transactional than relational lately, this episode is for you. Join me and let's go find God in the ordinary together.

References to Bible Verses:

Psalm 19:1; Psalm 30:5; Psalm 118:24; Lamentations 3:22–23; Exodus 3:2; Exodus 16:21; 1 Kings 19:11–12; John 1:14; Romans 1:20; Matthew 6:26; Luke 17:17–19; 1 Thessalonians 5:18; Colossians 3:17; Philippians 4:6–7

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Jason: Thank you for listening and welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jason McConnell.

When was the last time you woke up and thought today could be the day I witnessed a miracle.

Many of us would say we are still waiting on that one. We picture miracles as the big dramatic stuff. Parted seas, fire from heaven, someone walking out of a hospital when doctors had given up and we think, God, if you could just do something like that, I would never doubt again.

But here's the question I want you to sit with today. What if the miracle already happened? What if we slept right through it?

What if the problem is not that God stopped to show up? That we stopped noticing?

Because here's what I keep finding in scripture from the Psalms to the Sermon on the Mount. God has never been shy about working in the ordinary. He spoke to Elijah not in earthquakes or fire. But in a gentle whisper, he kept an entire nation alive in the wilderness with something that looked like bread on the ground. Every morning, he built the greatest story of redemption into the quiet rhythms of a woman named Mary. Living in a town no one put on a map.

Today we're gonna slow down together and look at the world the way scripture trains us to look at it. We're gonna talk about how to recognize God's provision, his presence, and his fingerprints in the everyday moments. Most of us rush past without a second thought.

Psalm 118 says, this is the day the Lord has made not just the miracle days every day. And I think by the time we're done today, you're gonna see yours a little differently. So let's get into it.

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Jason: Let me ask you something. Honestly, when you scroll through your phone in the morning, and let's be honest, most of us do it, what are you looking for? News updates, something that happened overnight. We've been trained, all of us to expect that the important stuff will be loud. It will trend, it will show up in our feed because an algorithm decided it was significant enough to surface and without even realizing it.

A lot of us have started applying that same filter to our faith. We are waiting for the trending moments, the dramatic answer to prayer, the unmistakable sign, the Red Sea experience. That leaves absolutely no room for doubt. And when life keeps moving in ordinary rhythms, alarm clock, coffee, commute inbox, dinner bed, we quietly conclude that God must be somewhere else working on something bigger.

Coming soon. I wanna give a name to what that is. I call it miracle blindness. And I wanna be clear, it's not unbelief. Most people struggling with this genuinely love God and they trust scripture. It is more like a, a supernatural nearsightedness. We can see what is right in front of us, but we have lost the ability to recognize what it actually is.

So here's what I keep coming back to and I want us to build on together today. The ordinary has always been one of God's preferred addresses.

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Jason: Think about the story of scripture and how it actually unfolds in Genesis one. God does not just create a dramatic moment. The sun, the stars, the seas. He speaks ordinary things into existence and calls them good.

A garden. Trees, birds, animals, afternoon light. God looks at the texture of everyday life and says, this is good. From the very beginning, the ordinary was not a placeholder for something better. It was the whole point. Then you get to Exodus and Moses is out doing his regular job, keeping his father-in-law's flock a task he had done for 40 years, and then God shows up in a bush.

Not a temple, not a vision, a bush, an ordinary one on the hillside, on an ordinary Tuesday or whatever and and God was already there before Moses noticed the bush had been burning. Moses just finally turned to look, and this is the pattern. God presents people distracted and then sometimes by grace we turn.

Elijah saw fire coming down from Heaven on Mount Carmel, and he watched God move in one of the most dramatic demonstrations of power in the entire Old Testament. And then just days later, he was hiding in a cave exhausted and afraid, and God came to him again. Not in another earthquake, not in another fire, but in what the text calls a gentle whisper.

The Hebrew word used here is Dam Mama. Uh, a sound of sheer silence.

God met his burned out prophet. Not with some big spectacle, but with a presence. So quiet that Elijah had to stand at the entrance of the cave just to hear it. And then there's the manna. 40 years, not 40 days, 40 years. God fed an entire nation by causing bread to appear on the ground every single morning.

It happens so regularly that eventually the people called it ordinary. I mean, the word manna actually comes from the Hebrew phrase that means roughly what is it? Because when they first saw it, they had no category for it. But by the time they got to Canaan, they were sick of it. The miraculous had become routine and the routine had become invisible.

And that's us. That is all of us at some point.

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Jason: Now here is where the history gets really interesting because I want you to understand what Psalm one 18 verse 24 meant to the people who first sang it. This song was almost certainly a processional, a song sung by worshipers as they made their way into the temple. Likely during one of Israel's great festivals, possibly the Feast of Tabernacles, they were walking through the gates of the temple together, declaring.

This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. But you have to understand the world they were living in, the ancient near East was saturated with Gods dozens of them and different gods were believed to rule different things. There were harvest Gods war, gods gods of specific rivers, gods of the underworld.

And importantly, different days were thought to belong to different deities. Certain days were lucky, others were cursed. Certain festivals belonged to one God, certain seasons to another. So when Israel walked into the temple singing, this is the day the Lord has made, they were not offering a warm devotional thought they were making a defiant theological claim this day.

Not just the feast, not just the miracle day, not just the day when something dramatic happens this day belongs to Yahweh. He made it. It is his, and that means his presence, his provision and his authority are already here right now in this ordinary moment. Every day is that day. That is what the Psalm is saying.

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Jason: And then consider where Lamentations three was written. If you have never read limitations all the way through, I want to warn you, it's one of the more gut wrenching books of all of scripture. The city of Jerusalem had fallen to Babylon. The temple was destroyed. The people were in exile. Jeremiah who wrote this book, was sitting in the rubble of everything that he had known and loved.

And from that place, from the ruins, he writes these words because of the lord's great love. We are not consumed for as compassions never fail. They are new every morning. Great. Is your faithfulness. New every morning, not new when the city is restored, not new, when the exile ends. New this morning in the rubble with nothing rebuilt yet.

Timothy Keller reflects on this passage. He, he made an observation that has kinda stayed with me. He wrote that the dis discipline of mourning recognition, returning again and again to what God has provided, even when the circumstances have not changed, is itself a form of worship. The mercy was not the absence of suffering.

The mercy was God's presence within it.

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Jason: And that should reframe everything for you because here is where we land today in our world, in our moment. The American Psychological Association has been tracking stress levels in this country for years, and the data is consistent. A majority of Americans describe feeling overwhelmed by daily pressures.

And believers are not immune. In fact, I would argue that one of the most spiritually painful experiences a Christian can have is feeling anxious while also believing that they should not be. It is if anxiety is evidence of insufficient faith, but I do not think the problem is insufficient. Faith, I think the problem is insufficient.

Attentiveness. We have faith. We just have not been trained to see where faith is already being answered. We have not built the practice of looking for God in the whisper in the morning, mercy in the ordinary bread of a day that he has made and called his own. And here is the thing I want you to hold onto as we go deeper into this today.

Attentiveness is not a personality type. It is not something you either have or don't have. It is a spiritual discipline. It's a practice and like every other spiritual discipline, it can be learned, it can be built. And it changes everything about how you experience the life you're already living. That is what today's about.

That is what this episode is about. Let's go find God in the ordinary because he has been there the whole time.

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Jason: So let's talk about something that I think quietly shapes the way a lot of us experience our faith. Even if we have never put it to words, there is an unspoken assumption that many believers carry around that if God is really moving, it should be obvious, it should be visible, it should feel like something.

And if life just feels like a random Tuesday that maybe God is somewhere else working on something more important. We do not say that out loud, but a lot of us live that way. And I wanna gently push back on that today because when you actually trace the pattern of how God has moved through scripture, something kind of surprising emerges.

God does not just occasionally show up in the ordinary. The ordinary is again and again, his preferred address. This is not an exception to the pattern. It is the pattern. Lemme show you what I mean. Let's go back to Exodus three. Moses is in the wilderness doing a job, like I said, he's been doing for 40 years.

He's watching sheep. It's dusty, it's ordinary, and there is nothing on that day's agenda to suggest anything unusual is about to happen. And then he notices a bush that is burning but not burning up. The angel of the Lord appears to him and says in, in the text, says in flames of fire from within a bush.

And that's, it's not a temple, it's not a mountaintop, it's a shrub on a hillside.

And God's first words are not. Look at this amazing spectacle moment I have arranged. They're simply Moses, his name, it's personal and it's quiet. The burning bush was not a special bush. It was an ordinary thing. God chose to speak through, and Moses almost missed it. The scripture says he had to turn aside to look.

He could have kept walking. The sheep were not going to hurt themselves, but he turned and everything changed. That is the first piece of the pattern. God is present in what looks ordinary. The question is whether or not we are willing to turn and look.

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Jason: Now, let's skip forward to One Kings 19. This is probably one of my favorite moments, uh, of the Old Testament, partly because of how counterintuitive it is.

Elijah has just come off of one of the most extraordinary spiritual experiences any prophet could ever have. In, in the previous chapter, he had called down Fire from Heaven on Mount Carmel in front of hundreds of people in public, in, in a public showdown with the prophets of ball. There was no ambiguity, no room for naturalistic explanation.

The fire fell, the people fell on their faces, and Elijah had seen God move in a way that should have set his faith on an unshakable foundation for life. And then. Just a short while later, he's hiding in a cave, exhausted, afraid telling God he is the only one left who cares and he wants to die. This is not the respons of a man who just saw fire from heaven.

This is the response of a man who has learned to require the spectacular in order to feel God's presence. And when the spectacular passed, so did his sense that God was near. I don't know that for certain, but that's kinda what it feels like. But God comes to him and this is the part I want you to sit with.

The text tells us a powerful wind comes and tears the mountain apart, but the Lord was not in the wind and an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake and then a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after of the fire, a gentle whisper in one Kings 19 verses 11 through 12. The text put it, puts it this way.

The Lord said, go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord. For the Lord is about to pass by then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord. But the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.

After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire, and after the fire came a gentle whisper, God was in the whisper. Charles Spurgeon, one of the greatest preachers who ever lived, I think, preached on this passage and said something that I think cuts right to the heart of it. He observed that God often withdraws from the spectacular precisely to teach his servants that he cannot be boxed in by our expectations of how she, he should move.

The wind, the earthquake, the fire. Those were things Elijah was conditioned to recognize as divine, but God stepped past all of them. Because the point was not the power of the whisper. The point was that Elijah had to become still enough to hear it. Think about that for a moment. Elijah could hear an earthquake.

He didn't need quiet for that. But a whisper, a whisper requires you to stop, to lean in, to choose to listen over every competing sound, and that's the posture God was calling him into. NT Wright in his book, simply Christian, makes an observation that I, I think might be helpful here. He writes that one of the core marks of genuine Christian spirituality is the ability to recognize as sacred within the created order.

He describes it as hearing the echo of a voice, something we were made to hear, but have largely learned to tune out. The ordinary right says is not a distraction from God. It is one of his primary languages. We were made to hear it. We've just gotten too loud. And then there's the incarnation. This, this might be the most powerful example of all.

John one 14 says, the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, God, the, the external word, through whom all things were created, entered into this world. Not as a conquering king with a military escort, but as a baby. Born to a teenage girl in a town so small, it barely made the maps laid in a feeding schroth, visiting first, not by heads of state, but by shepherds workers doing the night shift.

If God wanted to announce his arrival with maximum drama and spectacle, the incarnation was the wrong way, right? But God was not trying to impress the powerful He was trying to be found by the ordinary. And here's what that means for you and me. On an average day, your spirituality does not require extraordinary experience to be valid.

The fact that your prayer time this morning felt quiet, that no lights came on, that you did not hear an audible voice, that doesn't mean God was absent.

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Jason: It means he was in the whisper, and the question is whether you are still enough to hear it, here's a practice. A practical thought I wanna leave you with in this section.

Research tells us that the average American spends more than seven hours a day in front of a screen, seven hours. And, and I'm not saying that to make anyone feel guilty. I I have a phone in my pocket too, but the noise level of modern life is not neutral. It is the primary competition to spiritual attentiveness.

We cannot hear a whisper over that kind of volume. So here's the invitation. I call it the whisper minute. Tomorrow morning before you reach for your phone, before news, before notifications, before inbox, give God 60 seconds of silence. Not a structured prayer, not Bible reading plans, just 60 seconds where you intentionally posture yourself towards him and just listen.

You are not waiting for a burning bush or a fire from heaven. You are just practicing the posture that makes you available. To hear what he is already saying. Elijah did not go looking for the whisper. He just got quiet enough that when it came, he heard it, and that's where we wanna live.

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Jason: Let me ask you something that hopefully will reframe the way you look out your window tomorrow morning. When you see a sunrise, what do you see? Most of us, if we're honest, see a nice view. It's pretty. We might take a picture. We maybe think that's neat, and then we move on because the coffee is ready in the day, is already pulling us forward.

But what if a sunrise is not just a meteorological event? What if it's a message we've been talking about, how God shows up in the ordinary in burning bushes and whispers and manna on the ground. I wanna zoom in and look at something even bigger. The idea that all of creation every single day is an act, is actively speaking about God, not just once at the beginning.

Yeah. But right now, this morning in what you can see from wherever you're sitting, uh, start with Psalm 19 verse one. Uh, this is one of those verses that sounds familiar, but it carries more weight than we give it credit for. The psalmist writes, the heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Notice the tense there. It's not past tense. It's not declared or proclaimed. It's declare, proclaim, it's present tense, ongoing. The Heavens are not a museum exhibit about something God used to do. They're an active continuous announcement about who he is and what he's doing. Every morning the sky opens with another edition of the same sermon preached without words to anyone who will look up.

Now take that idea and carry it into the New Testament, and you get one of the most theologically loaded passages. I think in all of Paul's letters, Roman one verse 20 says, for since the creation of the world's God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made so that people are not, are without excuse.

I wanna unpack that carefully because there is a lot to unpack in that one sentence. Paul is saying that the things about God that cannot be seen directly, his power, his nature, his character. Have been made visible through the things he created. The invisible becomes readable through the visible. Now, most of us have heard this verse used in Apologetics context as an argument for the existence of God, and it absolutely works that way.

But I think we stop short when that's all we do with it, because Paul is not just making an argument, he's extending an invitation. He's saying that every piece of creation is a window into the character of the creator. And if that is true, then looking at the world around you is not just some passive experience, it, it's a theological experience.

RC Sprout in his commentaries on Romans digs into the Greek word Paul used for clearly seen catho. Catty not great with the words. It is a compound word. And what's interesting about it's that it carries the idea of seeing through something. Not just seeing the surface, but perceiving what is behind it.

Sprouse says that creation is not just proof of God. It's a lens through which his character becomes readable. And the reason Paul says humanity is without excuse, is not because God buried the evidence poorly. It's because he put it everywhere. There's, there is no corner of creation in the entire world.

That is not in some way a testimony to him. Think about what that means in practical terms. The world around you is not spiritually neutral. It is loaded with disclosures. Every time you step outside, you're walking into an ongoing sermon.

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Jason: Now, let's bring Jesus into this because he takes it even further and gets kind of beautifully specific.

In Matthew six, verse 26, right in the middle of the Sermon on the Mountain, Jesus says, look at the birds in the air. They do not sow or reap or store away in barns, yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they are. And here's what I love about this. Jesus does not say, think about the birds.

He says, look at the birds. It's a directive, it's an instruction. He's telling his followers to use their eyes and observe something that is happening right in front of them and to draw a theological conclusion from it. And the conclusion is not abstract, it's personal and present tense. Your heavenly father feeds them not fed once at the beginning of time, maybe feeds them right now today, this morning.

Your in your backyard. God is actively, presently involved in the provision of creatures that most of us never think about, and Jesus uses that as evidence not for God's general kindness. But for his specific care for you, this is not a nature lesson. It's Jesus saying, look around you. The world is full of evidence that your father is paying attention.

If he's providing for the sparrows this morning, what does that tell you about how he views your situation?

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Jason: Now, here's where the cultural background becomes important, because it helps us understand just how subversive Paul's words in Romans one were to his original audience. So Rome in the first century was one of the most religiously saturated CI cities in the ancient world.

There were temples everywhere, so Jupiter to Mars, to Neptune, a dozen other deities. And each one of those gods had a domain. Neptune ruled the sea. C'S ruled the harvest. Different corners of the natural world were believed to belong to different divine powers. A Roman standing on the shoreline watching the waves might say a prayer to Neptune.

A farmer watching the rain come in would have appealed to the appropriate deity in that case, in that world. Paul writes that the entire creation, every wave, every harvest, every sunrise, belongs to and testifies about one God. There are no corners of nature or the natural world under rival management.

Every storm is his storm. Every season is his season. Every bird Jesus pointed to in Matthew six was being fed by the same father who made the sky. It flew through for a 21st century listener. The challenge is different because, but just as real we, we have largely absorbed a scientific framework that explains the natural world in mechanical terms.

A sun rise is the result of the earth rotation and atmospheric light diffraction. A bird finds food because of instinct and ecological systems and none of that is wrong.

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Jason: God works through natural processes, but the scientific explanation and the theological one are not competitors. They don't have to be.

One. Tells you how the other tells you who, and scripture is clear that the who is not an optional background piece of information. It is the whole point.

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Jason: So here's the practical invitation I wanna leave you with. In this section.

I wanna challenge you to shift from consuming creation to reading it. Most of us consume it. We look at it, we appreciate it. We photograph it maybe, and then we move on. Reading it is different. Reading it means pausing, observing, and asking a question. Try this once a day for the next week or so. Step outside.

It doesn't have to be for long. It doesn't have to be like a nature hike. Just go outside, find one thing in the natural world, and ask yourself, what does this tell me about God? A sunrise will tell you that he's faithful and consistent. It came again this morning same as it did yesterday, same as, as you know, hundred thousands of years ago.

His faithfulness does not take a day off. A tree that is covered in new growth after hard winter tells you that he sustains through difficulty what looked dead was not done. A bird singing before the sun is even fully up tells you he will provide for those who cannot provide for themselves. That bird did not earn its breakfast.

It just showed up and the father took care of it.

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Jason: This is not poetry, though. It is beautiful. This is theology in motion. This is Romans one, verse 20. Lived out the invisible qualities of God. His faithfulness, his sustaining power, his provisions, his care becoming clearly seen through what he has made. The world has been preaching this sermon for since the beginning every day.

The question is simply whether we are listening.

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Jason: I wanna take you somewhere uncomfortable for a few minutes, and I promise there is hope on the other side of it, but I, I'd like you to sit with me in the discomfort first because the hope only lands if you understand where it is coming from. Now the Book of Lamentations is not a book most people spend a lot of time in.

It does not show up on many devotional reading plans. It's not the kind of text you embroider on a throw pillow, and honestly, that is part of the problem. Because Lamentations contains one of the most profound declarations of God's, God's mercy in all of scripture. We just tend to skip over the rubble to get to it.

Here is the context. The year is approximately 5 86 bc. The Babylonian army under King Nebuchadnezzar has just done unthinkable things. They have broken through the walls of Jerusalem, burned the temple to the ground, killed thousands of people, and marched the survivors into exile. The city that God had promised to dwell in the city of David.

The place where the presence of God had rested in the Holy of Holies is now Ash and broken stone and Jeremiah's sitting in those ruins. Writing.

Lamentations is five poems. Chapter one begins How Deserted lies the City. Once So Full of People, there is no spiritual bypass here. No quick pivot to silver linings. Jeremiah describes what he sees honestly and in full and in a culture where poetry was the primary vehicle for theological reflection.

What he writes carries enormous weight. Importantly, the poems are structured as acrostics. Uh, each one built around Hebrew alphabet. From AL or A to Z. That structure was not decorative, it was theological. It was a way of saying, we are bringing the full weight of human experience before God. Every letter, nothing held back, the grief is complete and the praise when it comes will be complete too.

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Jason: And then you get to chapter three, verses 22 and 23, right in the middle of the rooms. Jeremiah Pens, pen writes this, because of the Lord's great love, we are not consumed. For as compassion never fail. They're new every morning. Great. Is your faithfulness new every morning? I want you to feel the weight of where that statement is being made because I think we have domesticated this verse.

We put it on mugs in coffee cups and morning devotionals, and there is nothing wrong with that, but we can lose the sharpness of it. This is not a comfortable declaration made from a comfortable place. This is a man who has watched everything fall apart, reaching down into the ruins of his theology and pulling out the one thing that has not moved.

God's mercy is still new. Still here, still sufficient. The miracle in Lamentations three is not that the city was spared because it wasn't. The miracle was that the mercy did not run out. Now here, here's what makes this significant for us. The word translation, uh, of compassions in verse 22 comes from the Hebrew root of the word raham.

And again, forgive my pronunciations, it's, it's a word related to the word womb. It carries the idea of a deeper tender, ma maternal love, the kind that does not abandon the kind that simply, you know, it can't just simply switch off. And Jeremiah is staying here, even here, even now, even in all of this. That love is still present and it is not leftover Love scrapped from the bottom of nearly empty jar.

It is new replenished fresh this morning. Timothy Keller in his book, walking with God Through the Pain and Suffering talks about what he calls the lament that praises. This pattern runs through scripture of genuine grief, held alongside genuine trust. He says, authentic biblical faith does not require you to bypass your sorrow.

It does not demand that you pretend things are fine. What it does is it asks you to move through the sorrow with the memory of God's past faithfulness as your compass. Lamentations three is. His central example for this, the phrase new every morning Keller argues is not a denial of what was lost. It's a declaration that God's resources towards us have not been depleted by our circumstances.

What we have been through has not used up what God is available for us today. I find that extraordinarily freeing. Have you ever felt like you have asked God for too much? Like maybe your prayers have been a little too heavy, your needs' too consistent, and at some point he must. Be growing weary of it.

Well, Lamentations three answers that directly. The compassions never fail. They are new every morning no matter what the previous morning held.

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Jason: Let me add another layer from this, uh, from Exodus 16. You may remember the story. Um, Israel is in the wilderness and God begins providing manna. We talked about this already bred from heaven every morning.

Three. God does not simply give you tomorrow's graces today. He gives you today's graces today. The manner was not a pantry you fill up and withdrew from for weeks. It was a daily act of trust, a daily act of provision, a daily reliance on the God who showed up again and again every morning. The Israelites who tried to hoard it, found it rotted, and God was teaching them something about the nature of his provisions.

It is fresh, it is present. It is enough for today and tomorrow it will be new again. And that's the pattern. That's what Jeremiah was holding onto in the ruins. There is also a beautiful echo in Psalms 30 verse five that I, I want us to hear weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.

Now, this isn't a promise that your situation will be resolved by morning. Jeremiah's. Walls were still down when the sun rose on. Jeremiah. What the psalm is pointing to is something more foundational that every morning carries within it. The renewed presence of mercy of God the morning of the previous day does not have the final word mourning does because mercy is new there.

So let's go back to Psalm one 18, verse 24. This kind of ties it all together. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. As we talked about earlier, that was the liturgical declaration that every day belongs to God. Even this one, even the hard one. Even the one where you woke up and the things you were hoping would be resolved, still are unresolved.

This day was made by him. His mercy is fresh in it, and that's enough to stand on.

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Jason: Now, here's where I want this to land for you personally. Specifically, if you are in a hard season right now, I'm not gonna tell you to pretend like things are fine. Jeremiah didn't pretend he wrote five chapters of gut wrenching honesty in his grief.

If your city is in ruins right now, if the relationship is broken, if the diagnosis is real, if the thing you were trusting God for did not come through the way you hoped. I'm not asking you to minimize that. Lamentations does not minimize it, but I'm inviting you to try a simple practice that I think can help begin to shift your perspective even in the middle of difficulty.

I want to call it the Morning Mercy inventory. Yeah. Before your day begins, before your feet hit the floor, before your phone comes out, take 60 seconds and ask yourself one question, not what good things happened yesterday, but what? But this, what did God not allow to happen to me overnight? Frame it in the negative.

What was withheld? What was held back? You woke up. Your heart kept beating while you slept without doing a single thing to make it happen. Your roof held up. The people you love are still here. The things that you were most afraid of yesterday did not destroy you. You're still standing, and that's not nothing.

That's mercy. Quiet mercy, the kind that does not announce itself, but that is absolutely present. Jeremiah's city was in rubble. The walls were down, the temple was gone. The future was deeply uncertain, and the mercy was still new that morning, which means it is new for you this morning. And it will be new for you the next morning too.

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Jason: I wanna close out our conversation with something that I think ties everything we have covered into one practical, livable thread, because we've talked about the whisper, we've talked about creation speaking, we've sat in the ruin with Jeremiah and watched Mercy show up Anyway, and all of that is true and good and worth holding onto.

But there is a question underneath all of that that I think we need to answer honestly. Why do so many believers know these things intellectually? And still miss God in their daily lives. I think a big part of the answer comes down to this, the way we have been taught to relate to God. I want you to imagine a vending machine.

You walk up, you put in what is required. You press the buttons for what you want, and you expect it to come out. And if it does, great, if it does not, you shake the machine, maybe kick it a little bit and walk away frustrated, right? A lot of us, without realizing it, have built a vending machine of faith. We bring our prayers, we follow the steps, and we expect a specific outcome.

And when that outcome does not arrive, when the healing doesn't come, when the relationship is not fixed, when the door we were sure God was gonna open stays firmly shut our faith shakes because the machine didn't work the way we expected. That is transactional faith. And the problem with it is not that it asked God for things.

Scripture absolutely invites us to bring our needs to him. The problem is that it defines a relationship entirely by what we receive, and a relationship defined only by what you receive is not really a relationship at all. It is a transaction. Relational faith looks completely different. Relational faith is anchored, not in what God does for us, but in who God is.

It's rooted in knowing him, his character, his faithfulness, his presence, and knowing it so deeply that even without the answer we hoped for, the relationship remains intact. The trust holds, not because the machine worked, but because we know the one who is in it with us, and here's where gratitude enters that picture, because gratitude is the bridge between those two ways of living.

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Jason: Gratitude is not just a feeling. I wanna be clear about that because I think we often reduce it to an emotion we either have or we don't have in scripture. Gratitude is a discipline. It is something we practice, something we build something that will over time, fundamentally reshapes the way you see the world and the God who made it.

Listen to Paul and how he puts it in First Thessalonians five verse 18. Give thanks in all circumstances for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. Notice he does not say, give thanks for all circumstances. He says, give thanks in all circumstances. That's a significant distinction. Paul was not asking you to pretend that hard things are good.

He's inviting you into a posture of thinking. He giving thanks alongside the difficulties, not in denial of it, and he frames it as God's will. Not a suggestion, not a nice habit to cultivate if you're. You know the journaling type, it's God's will for you, which means the practice of gratitude is not optional or for spiritual health.

It is central to it. Colossians three verse 17 adds another dimension to this. And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it in all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father, through him. Paul is describing a life where gratitude is not a moment. It is a mode. It. It's the atmosphere in which everything happens.

Work, conversation, decisions, relationships. All of it is done in a posture of ongoing thankfulness. That's that's not a personality type, that is a practice, and it is available to every believer who chooses to build it.

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Jason: Let me show you what happens when gratitude is absent, because Jesus makes this remarkably clear.

In one of his most striking moments in Luke 17, 10 minute approach, Jesus, they are lepers. And, and that culture that meant they were completely cut off from society. They could not enter towns, they could not be near their families. They couldn't participate in worship. Leprosy was not just a disease, it was a social and spiritual exile.

These 10 men called out from a distance, Jesus master have pity on us, and he heals all 10 of them. All 10 are cleansed and all 10 receive what they came for. And then one comes back, just one. And here's the detail that makes this scene culturally important. The one who returned was a Samaritan by the social standards of first century Judaism.

He was the least likely person in that group to show up at a Jewish rabbi's feet and worship, and yet he was the only one who did. Jesus looks around and asks the question that I think should stop all of us in our tracks. We're not all 10 cleans. Where are the other nine has no one returned to give praise to God except for this foreigner.

Luke 17 verses 17 and 18, nine people walked away with the miracle and never looked back. They got what they came for. Transaction complete. And Jesus marks their absence, not just as a breach of etiquette, but as a spiritual failure. They had received the gift and walked away without the giver. But look at what the Samaritan receives that the others miss.

Jesus says to him in verse 19, rise and go. Your faith has made you well. Now the word used here for well goes beyond physical healing. It carries the idea of wholeness, of salvation, of complete restoration. The nine got their skin healed. The one who came back got something far deeper, he encountered Jesus.

The gratitude led him into a relationship, and the relationship produced something the transaction never could. That's the pattern John Piper unpacks In desiring God, he argues that gratitude and joy are inseparable in the Christian life. You cannot sustain genuine delight in God without regular practice of Thanksgiving because Thanksgiving is what keeps the memory of God's goodness alive and active.

And here's the part that lands really hard. Piper says that in gratitude is not just a social failing, it is a theological one because when we fail to give things, we are implicitly denying that God was present and did any work at all. We are living as though the good things in our lives arrived on our own.

And that slow denial practice day after day quietly starves our awareness of God's presence down to almost nothing. Yeah. Conversely, a grateful heart is one that has accepted the reality that God is constantly involved. Every good thing becomes evidence. Every ordinary moment becomes potential testimony.

Gratitude opens your eyes, and once your eyes are open, you start seeing God everywhere you had previously seen nothing.

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Jason: There's one more verse that I wanna land on because I, I think this gives us the most practical picture of what this all looks like in real life. Philippians four verses six and seven.

Do not be anxious in anything, but in every situation by prayer and petition. With Thanksgiving. Present your request to God and the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Did you catch that? Paul does not say pray instead of being anxious, he says, pray with thanksgiving.

Bring your needs and bring your gratitude at the same time. Hold them together, come to God with an honest request and a grateful posture simultaneously. And the result, I mean not, maybe not sometimes, but as a consistent promise, is a peace that does not make rational sense, a piece that guards the world.

Uh, sorry. The word Paul used for guard is a military term. God's presence stands Watch over your heart and your mind, but it is activated. Paul seems to suggest in the context of thankful prayer. Gratitude is not just the warm feeling at the end of the good day. It is a practice that positions you to receive what God has been offering you all along.

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Jason: So here's the challenge I want to close with, and I want you to take it seriously for the next seven days. I want you to keep what I'm calling an ordinary miracles journal, not a list of big answer prayers, though those do matter. Specifically a list of things in your daily life that could only be explained by a God who's quietly present in provision.

The conversation that that went better than it had any right to the moment of patience. You found when you were certain you had run out the phone call that came exactly at the right moment. The way something small worked out when something big was falling apart. Write these things down one or two per day.

That's all. They don't need to be dramatic. In fact, they shouldn't be. They're not supposed to be. At the end of seven days, read your list back and then ask yourself one honest question, was God present this week? I think the answer will be undeniable. Because a disciple, the, sorry, the discipline is not about manufacturing gratitude.

It's about uncovering what was already there. God has been at work in your ordinary life every single day. The journal doesn't create that reality. It just teaches your eyes to see it. And once you start seeing it, you can't unsee it. That is the gift of, of a grateful heart, and that is available to you starting today.

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So let me finally bring all of this in for a landing today. We've covered a lot of ground together. We talked about how God speaks and whispers how Elijah had to get still enough to hear one. We walked through the creation and discovered that the world around us is not spiritually silent. It's preaching every single day to anyone who's willing to stop and listen.

We sat in the ruin of Jerusalem with Jeremiah and watched him find mercy, not because. His circumstances change, but because God's compassions simply do not run out, and we talked about gratitude, not as a feeling to chase, but as a discipline to build one that trains your eyes to see what God has been doing all along.

None of this is a call to pretend life is easy. Jeremiah didn't pretend. Elijah didn't pretend. Honest faith holds the hard things and the holy things at the same time. So here's my question for you as we head into your week. Or weekend whenever you listen to this. When is the last time you witnessed a miracle?

If today looked like anything normal like yesterday, you woke up, mercy showed up. That's not, that's not nothing. That is God in the ordinary for you. Pick one practice this week. The whisper minute, the creation moment, the Morning Mercy inventory, the seven day journal. Just one start tomorrow, not as a spiritual productivity goal.

But as a posture to shift, begin looking for God in the ordinary, and you will find he was never hard to find. Psalm 1 18 24 simply tells us, this is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. This is his day. He is already in it, so go find him. Until next time, keep loving your neighbors.

Dive into God's word daily. May the Lord bless you and keep you and fill you with his peace. Take care of God bless, and I'll see you in the next episode.