[Pastor Robbie Schmidtberger, our Church Planting Resident, is teaching our current School of Discipleship course, “Good News People: Speaking About Jesus While Becoming Like Him.” This class explores what it looks like to speak about Jesus naturally, while admitting that the most compelling aspect of Christian evangelism is when Jesus’ followers are becoming more and more like him. This post comes a week late. So this week there will be two recaps.]
What are a few of your favorite things?
Is a good story one of those things? It could be a poem, a novel or book, a movie or song.
Stories have power. We’re able to express our uniqueness via a story, but at the same time a story transcends ourselves and unites us with other people—often people who are different from ourselves. We always appreciate a good story and a good storyteller.
But do we know the story of our lives? Do we know where we came from? Do we know why things are truly broken in our lives? What corrects or heals that brokenness? How are we able to participate in renewing our lives, becoming more human?
Our culture proves that we do not know our own stories. Stanford University says so. As a university, Stanford found that their students had great ambitions but had no way to even begin to make sense of their life. So they put together a class called “Design Your Life.” This is why the entire profession of life coach came about.
One of the basic Christian premises is this: if you are going to know yourself, then you must know God. Or, if you are going to know God then you must first know yourself.
Our ignorant self-knowledge means that we need a life-audit from God. Consider a few verses:
“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Elsewhere the Apostle Paul wrote: “you were [once] dead in sin… but God, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in sin, made us alive together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:1, 4-5).
Talk about rich language! The old has passed away. Dead in Sin. Made alive. Together with Christ. New Creation.
All of this goes to say that God is working in your life.
This can be hard to discern. And Pastor Jason preached a good sermon on how we can discern God’s work in our lives this past Sunday (give it a listen). Pastor Jason encouraged us to incorporate spiritual practices into our lives to enable us to discern our past, like journaling, by sitting in solitude and praying to God. These introspective practices help us see what God is doing.
This reality was pressed home for me a few weeks ago. A few weeks ago I shared that God answered my prayers in a great way. After worship, a friend, who writes prayer items on a 3x5 card and prays through them, came up to me and shared that he’s been praying for that specific prayer request over the past year. And that very morning my card came up so he prayed for me. He told me that now he was able to put my prayer request in the pile of prayers answered. Talk about an awesome record and way to remember God’s active, intervening love within our lives.
Lastly, our stories have evangelistic power as we share our weaknesses and celebrate what God can do despite our broken lives. We’re not the heroes of our story; Jesus is. But if my Christian experienced is divided up into two parts—before I knew Jesus and now I know Jesus—then the interpretation of my story is unhelpful to pretty much everybody. My nonChristian friends need to know why I love Jesus more than I did a week ago. My nonChristian friends need to know why following Jesus is exciting and compelling. My nonChristian friends need to know why I look forward to a full, rich life time where I am always walking with God.
So tell your story, but to do that well you need to know how God is working in your life.
Pastor Robbie