Testify

Read Deuteronomy 7:6-19

God is a storyteller at heart. He has to be or he wouldn’t have spent so many years using regular people to record the sweeping epic we call the Bible. He gave each of us a story of our own as well. He gave us the stage for this piece of lifetime, but he’d like for us to let him be the star.

I recently attended a women’s retreat for our church. When you get a bunch of women together, the stories will start flying eventually. We’ll start telling labor and delivery stories, the exploits of our children, and once we all get settled in and comfy, we might share our own stories.

We heard some moving stuff from these women. Drug addictions, sexual and physical abuse, promiscuity, dysfunction, depression… The things Jesus saw when he took on all our sin and shame on the cross. These same stories were about deliverance, healing, and new life. God took messes and hurt and baggage and turned every single one of these women into shining stars in the universe. He is glorified through their stories, and their lives bear out the same.

As I sat and heard those stories, I couldn’t help but compare my innocent life story to their dramatic ones. I thought of the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet and how he said “She loves much because she has been forgiven much,” and I wondered how much I actually love.

My life hasn’t been perfect, of course. I have dealt with my own stuff and struggle with my own baggage, but it seems so much smaller compared to others. That is when I realized I was falling for a lie.

There, in the company of Christian women seeking the Lord with all their hearts, I was starting believe the lie that my story was boring. That I had been saved from little compared to these women, so I must love little. I have no platform for ministry because I have led a relatively tranquil life.

The irony is that the women whose stories I was so moved by had believed the opposite lie in the quiet of the night. That because of their pasts, God could not use them in the future. That their lives were marred by terrible circumstances and bad choices and there is no place for that in the kingdom of God.

Both scenarios are such outright lies, its amazing we fall for them at all. The thoughts that start them are so subtle and insidious; we can believe them for years before we detect the falsehood.

“The thief comes to steal, kill and destroy” (John 10:10).

Satan is the antagonist in God’s great story. He is out to steal, kill and destroy everything that means anything to God. Satan covets a person’s story--their identity. If he can make us feel like our story is not worth sharing because it is too horrible or too boring, he can render us useless. He can cripple us with self-loathing and depression. He can stop a ministry before it even starts.

God created a plan for us as unique to each of us as our own fingerprints. His fingerprints are all over our lives—the good parts and the bad parts. And while our stories may be unique to each of us, we were all brought from death to life through our hero, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Your story does not disqualify you for service to the King, it entitles you to his service.

Know therefore that the Lord your God is God: his a faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commands.

Posted by Andrea