Powerpoint Pictures: Cleaning Equipment; Feet; Childcare

Here are some different jobs, and I want you to think about whether these jobs are ordinary or extraordinary.

First job: Cleaning and housework.

Is that ordinary or extraordinary?

Second job: Looking at feet.

Is that ordinary or extraordinary?

Third job: Looking after children.

Is that ordinary or extraordinary?

These are all pretty ordinary jobs that lots of people do each day.

Well, this morning I want to tell you about a woman who did all these ordinary jobs, but made each of them extraordinary.

The woman’s name was Gladys Aylward.

Gladys Aylward was an ordinary woman.  She was not very clever.  She was not very rich.  She was like most of us, just ordinary.

Although she went to Sunday school when she was a child, she stopped going during her teenage years, and spent the next 12 years working as a maid and enjoying everything that the world had to offer.

But one night she went along with some of her friends to a religious meeting and there she was reminded of all things she learnt at Sunday School.  How Jesus loved her.  How Jesus died for her.  That Jesus wanted to forgive all her sins.  Gladys Aylward realised that she had done many wrong things and asked Jesus to forgive her and be her Saviour.

Some time later she picked up a magazine which said that missionaries were needed in China.  Gladys Aylward really wanted to go there and tell people about Jesus.  But because she was ordinary, she found it difficult to learn Chinese, and the mission agency said she couldn’t go.

That didn’t put her off.  She thought to herself, “If God wants me in China, then I’ll have to save up and go!”  And that is what she did.  She saved up £47.50 to go by train through Europe, Russia and Siberia to China to help an elderly missionary called Miss Lawson.

In China, she helped to run a hotel for travellers, which had a brilliant name – The Inn of Eight Happinnesses.  For a time she worked for the government inspecting people’s feet to make sure they weren’t being binded up to make them tiny.  She also looked after more than 100 children in an orphanage, and when war came kept them safe by walking with them across mountains.

However, each of these ordinary things Gladys Aylward did, she made extraordinary.  How?

Because whether it was the guests in the hotel, the girls whose feet she looked at, or the children she looked after, she told them about Jesus.

God used ordinary Gladys Aylward to do wonderful things for her Saviour and He can use ordinary you and me to do wonderful things for Jesus too.  “For” as God’s Word reminds us, “nothing will be impossible with God.” (Luke 1:37)