His Story, Not Mine

Last night was a particularly amazing night at Advance (it's always amazing, see)...students were encouraged to learn to tell their stories. Stories of God's transforming and saving power in their lives. It was a night of honesty, vulnerability, and sharing one of the deepest, most important parts of our souls...our personal testimony of our lives in Christ.

I've actually been thinking about my story over the past month. See, I had a New Year's goal to dig deeper into the woman God is transforming me into daily. I didn't like the thought of this goal initially...it seemed to egocentric. But I realized that unless I understand (as best as my human mind can) who I was, who I am now, and who I am becoming, how can I serve God? How can I pour into others?

Thinking about my story over the past month, and especially last night, has been an amazing reflection journey. I see how far God has brought me out of myself and into Him. How He totally broke a girl who was convinced she could accomplish anything and everything by her own sheer will. How He brought her into places where the only way out was turning to Him...and slowing turning everything over to Him. He transformed me, embraced me, and brought me slowly out of the pit I had dug for myself with my pride and self-aggrandizement. He saved me from myself by the blood of Christ.

My tale lacks spiritual swashbuckling pirates and ninjas yielding Biblical nun chucks, but I embrace it and claim it. God has worked undeniably, inexplicably in my life. And it's my story.

Or is it?

It's not really my story. It's the story of God working through me for my tiny supporting role in the greatest story ever told...the salvation of the world. I recently read a post on John Piper's blog that got me thinking about this...it's deep, good stuff. We were saved for ourselves, yes, but saved to continue and spread the salvation story.

It's His story, not mine.

Timothy Keller says in The Reason for God that "faith journeys are never simple intellectual exercises." We may intellectually 'work out' our faith and our testimony, but then we go and share it. We serve. We love the downtrodden. We fall down, turn to God, and get back up again. We read the Bible using our intellect to find the application to our lives. In other words, faith is a verb, not a noun.

So my encouragement to myself and the students of Advance is this: don't just think to figure out what your story is so you can talk the talk. Live out your story daily. Find the application, the action, the next step - your story is far from over. God isn't working in you just so you can have head knowledge, but heart and hand knowledge as well.

We can change the world for God...and it all can start with a simple story.