What is Your Story? How Will it End?

Verse 3:15 [ESV] - “You killed the author of life, whom God raised from the dead… (3:26) God, having raised up his servant, sent [Jesus] to you first, to bless you by turning every one of you from your wickedness.”

What causes us to neglect and reject the author of our story? Perhaps it is the understanding that I AM the author of my life, the captain of my soul. So Peter suggests, The best, FIRST way to bless you is for us to turn to Christ, the author, who turns us from our wickedness, from our rejection of the author, and from trying to author our life story in our own power.  One might think, “Why would I want to cede the control of writing my story to another? It’s so limiting.”  But is it? Not only do we get freedom from not carrying the sole weight of the grand scheme of all things, but we still get the freedom to act out whatever is on the page for the day and still live with anticipation of the mysteries the author still has in store as we continue to play our part day-to-day.  That means we can have less anxiety over the direction, yet more hope and anticipation for how our story unfolds. 

When we try to write our own stories, they tend to be filled with tragedy. Or at the very least, the stories we write are filled with far less intrigue than the story God has planned for us.  Our stories may sound like this… “Bob went to work for 10 hours and talked about his investment portfolio during his lunch break. Bob played golf afterward. Bob made a good income this year”. Slow, plodding, monotonous. Sometimes the great tragedy is simply reading this long book, that has nothing deep, nothing especially important happening and then, all of sudden, you encounter a page that says “the End”. That’s certainly not a best-seller. 

When God writes our stories, he writes novels filled with redemption. They sometimes are dark, and suspenseful or filled with people on a mission of some sort. Sometimes they are humorous with many twists and turns. But, in God’s story, we can count on the author weaving it all together toward a redemptive end.  

• How do you understand your life? Are you the main author or do you see yourself as an important actor in a grand unfolding story?  
• How would you describe the type of story you are living in? A monotonous biography, a tragedy, a lifestyle magazine (‘Better Homes and Gardens’), or a grand mission, with great challenges, and powerful encounters always moving toward a redemptive end goal?
• Have you ignored the author of life? Ask God how he might have you begin acting out His story, on today’s page, starting now.