This is the second post in a series on telling your story. If you haven’t seen the first, check out part 1 here.
How’s your headline feel? I hope you’ve been trying it on this week with your life group friends and accountability partners.
Good. I’m glad you like it. Easy part’s over. 😉
Now that you know you know the title, it’s time to write the story itself. Whoa, just calm down. Here, Google found some calming images for you:
Now that you’re done praying, time to start writing. I trust you’ve been thinking about your story this week, and I know it may have been painful to think about the part of your story before God. But I hope you’ve spent most of your time in the key moment – the moment when God wrecked your life with grace – the overwhelming feelings of guilt you had and how they were melted by the awesome, universe-forming, life-giving grace of God.
Here’s my story:
King Solomon, the wisest king of Israel, told us, “Above all else, guard your heart.” I didn’t know what this meant at age six, where my story begins. I pushed a VHS tape into the VCR and hit play. Images flashed across the screen for about ten minutes before I was discovered. It was long enough that I had been infected by sexual sin through pornography.
Slowly, without the opportunity to know what this thing was, I sought more of it. I spent my spare time thinking about it and searching for it. I didn’t know, but this perverted sexual sin had become my god. I let it teach me about people, and it taught me that people were only as valuable as what I could get from them. Through this lens, I created unrealistic expectations of everyone else, and this cost me relationships.
Nearly all of them. For two decades.
These disappointments would tip me into a vicious cycle of further disillusionment which I tried to resolve by adding alcohol to the mix. But through it all, I always knew somewhere that this path was a weak substitute for something more real. Though I was scared and scarred, I started digging. I finally found my way to the bottom of the pit, with my eyes laid bare to the chains I had attached to myself with the weak substitute I had chosen from the pitiless master.
And God was there, in the pit, with grace poured out for me. I hadn’t heard the term “wrecked by grace” then, but I can tell you what it feels like. I can tell you what it is to have a ledger of guilt you can’t wipe out, and to have it wiped away.
So I have spent the past few years in God’s repair shop, mending my heart and relearning what God intended me to understand about you, about how He values you. I know what it is to be a son of the King, to be given sandals for my feet and robes for my bare back when I deserved a fate worse than death. I understand how to guard my heart.
God gives us two tools to make Him known to those who haven’t heard the Good News: the bible and your story. You’ll never convince everyone with the bible, but once you have felt God’s grace, your story should start to form so you can use it as your primary weapon to fight His battle in your time here.
Don’t think about it any more. Just start writing.
Make sure to check back next Friday for the final post in this storytelling series. You’ll need to have your story written!
The Daily 200 