Great salvation he brings to his king and shows steadfast love to his anointed, to David and his offspring forever. Ps 18:50 (NLT)
His Story – The Storyteller Series – Part 7
Go to PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5 | PART 6 | PART 7
At the end of his life, David had lived through so much of everything. Perhaps out of all the men and women featured in the Bible, he lived the most varied life. He was a shepherd and a king, a rebel and a general, a soldier and usurper, a lover and an adulterer, a sinner and a saint, the glory of an empire and the stain of it also… Within the span of his life, he experienced the highest highs and the lowest lows.
He decided that his story would not exclude the bad and only highlight the good. No; his story tells of the great and redemptive power of God in and through all that he suffered, perpetrated and achieved. David’s final song ended with, “Great salvation he brings to his king and shows steadfast love to his anointed, to David and his offspring forever.” (Ps 18:50).
What story is your life telling? What story, about you, are you listening to?
I was listening to a podcast this week whose guest was Alexander Shaia. His work is amazing. The Hebrew word for peace is “Shalom,” I bet you’ve seen that in the biblical text and heard people speak of it before. Alexander said this about peace and I wanted to share it with you:
“Shalom is a verb about tension. It’s the peace that comes when we enter into a mutual respect with diversity. And every time you have diversity, you’re going to have tension… Tension is the energy that brings forth expansion, and we need expansion to get into wider awareness and greater harmony.“
Peace isn’t the absence of darkness or disruption or fear… it’s the embrace of the entirety of life with the confidence of grace, the understanding that this current tension, within the darkness and pain and fear and sin, lives a hope that is resurrected through redemption by Christ. And this current tension that you're feeling will bring forth growth, expansion, new life, resurrection.
“We have become his poetry,” Paul wrote to the Ephesians. The most beautiful poetry embraces tension. It doesn’t hide it.
What is more beautiful, having a perfect life or living a redeemed one?
I said this back in part one of this little series:
Jesus is bringing EVERYTHING back together, reconnecting it and summing it all up in him. He is retelling our stories in such a way that everything within them is drawn back into himself. Through his retelling, we can see that there is grace (and more grace) for us all, and God’s love – the signature of all things – is indeed written across every page of life. Darkness and all.
He is redeeming us, everything, one by one, heaven and earth, back to himself. He is our common denominator, the glue, the author, the essence of life that is in us all. And through us, his story is being retold to a world that has been left wanting.
Jesus is the truth about hope, faith and love, written with grace, inked with blood. Permanent and fixed.
“My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours… it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us more powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.” Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets.
Much love,
Lizzy (and Jesse).
PS: “The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in.” Harold Goddard.
Over to you! Why do you think mistakes are important to include in the story? Leave us a comment below.
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