Can God Use Someone Who Feels Completely Ordinary?

By Pastor John Erickson

If you had been asked to identify the person God would choose to confront the powerful leaders of Israel, I'm guessing Amos wouldn't have been at the top of your list.

He wasn't a royal adviser. He wasn't some famous religious personality. He was a shepherd from a little place called Tekoa.

It's worth thinking about, because we have a tendency to believe that God does his best work through especially impressive people.

But Scripture keeps telling a different story.

An ordinary man in an extraordinary moment

Amos prophesied during the reign of Jeroboam II, a period in which Israel enjoyed relative stability and prosperity. The economy was growing. The borders were expanding. For those with wealth and influence, things were looking good.

But underneath the prosperity was something rotten.

The poor were being pushed aside. People with resources could manipulate the courts. Those without influence found themselves trapped by systems that were supposed to protect them.

Meanwhile, religious life was thriving. People attended festivals, brought sacrifices, and participated in worship.

Does anybody else see the problem?

They had become very good at looking religious while living in ways that contradicted the character of God.

The Lord roars

Amos begins with a startling image: the Lord roaring from Zion.

This isn't a gentle background noise. It is a warning that something is terribly wrong. A roar gets your attention. It tells you that the situation isn't nearly as safe as you imagined.

God's concern wasn't simply that individuals occasionally broke a rule. The nation had developed habits and systems that allowed the strong to exploit the vulnerable while claiming God's blessing.

We often prefer to keep our spiritual life private and manageable. Don't lie. Be nice. Attend church. Those things matter, but Amos pushes us to ask bigger questions.

Do the people with the least power receive justice? Are we using our influence to protect ourselves or to serve others? Can a community say it loves God while ignoring people made in his image?

The prophets refuse to let us separate our worship from the way we treat our neighbors.

Why would God choose Amos?

The surprising thing about Amos isn't that he had an impressive résumé. It's that he didn't.

Later in the book, when his legitimacy is challenged, Amos explains that he wasn't a professional prophet from a family of prophets. He was a shepherd, and the Lord took him from following the flock.

God gave an ordinary person a hard message.

We sometimes assume our limitations automatically disqualify us. I'm not educated enough. I'm not a strong public speaker. I don't know the right people. I haven't been doing this very long.

Perhaps those things are genuine challenges. But none of them is proof that God cannot use you.

Amos wasn't called because Israel needed a celebrity. Israel needed someone willing to speak the truth.

The God who sees what we overlook

We are drawn to appearances. We notice the big buildings, full calendars, impressive ministries, and polished personalities. We can confuse visible success with health.

The people in Amos's day could have pointed to all sorts of evidence that things were going well.

But God saw the poor person being cheated. He saw the family struggling under a burden that shouldn't have been theirs to carry. He saw the hypocrisy of a people who offered sacrifices while exploiting their neighbors.

That should encourage us and unsettle us.

It is encouraging because God does not overlook the suffering of people the world has learned to ignore. It is unsettling because our spiritual blind spots are not hidden from him, either.

I once watched a video in which someone asked what you feel when you are wrong. The answers were familiar: embarrassment, shame, maybe anger. Then came the uncomfortable clarification: those are the feelings you have when you discover you are wrong. Before that discovery, being wrong can feel perfectly comfortable.

That stuck with me. I can be certain, comfortable, and mistaken all at the same time. Amos makes me ask whether I have confused my comfort with evidence that everything is healthy.

What do we fail to see because things are working out for us?

Your faith is meant to bless somebody else

God called Israel to be a people through whom his goodness would become visible in the world. Being chosen was never meant to be an excuse for superiority. It was a calling to embody justice, mercy, and faithfulness.

The church has a similar calling. We are saved by grace, and that grace reshapes how we live with other people.

Maybe you're not going to deliver a prophetic message to a king. Most of us aren't. But you can notice the person everyone else overlooks. You can speak truth when an easy silence would protect you. You can be generous with what you have. You can refuse to participate in something that degrades another person.

Those are not small things.

The book of Amos begins with a man from nowhere, standing before people who thought they had everything figured out.

Don't let an ordinary life convince you God has nothing meaningful for you to do.