Our lives are a poem, our sorrow half the lines,
there will come a day when the good Lord makes it rhyme.
– Tragedy is not the End, Joel Ansett
I couldn’t see Marcus’ face, but I could feel his passion through the phone speaker.
“Never stop sharing that part of your story! Please don’t!” he begged.
Part of my role at Burke Community Church is to engage individuals struggling in the community who call our church and request help. He was calling because he was facing a rough patch, to say the least. He shared about a debilitating disease, a divorce, homelessness, and his current financial dilemma.
I had just given him more details about the divorce I had been through. It was a divorce I didn’t choose, but it has proven to be a part of my story that God has used and redeemed in my life again and again.
Marcus was a Christian but had not been to church in years. He carried a lot of shame. He had made some assumptions about the person on the other side of the line. He knew early on that I was kind-hearted but had assumed I had my proverbial Christian “ducks-in-a-row.” When I shared that I had also been through a divorce, it disarmed him in a way that neither of us anticipated.
This dramatic shift provides the prompt for some important questions for you to ponder. It may be a chapter or the whole biography, but:
“What is your story?”
“Why is it so powerful?”
“Why should it be shared?”
Our stories are so powerful and important because they showcase how our lives collide with the Gospel. The Gospel, by its very nature, synergistically links with our lives when we are quickened by the Holy Spirit to receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. All of a sudden, as the moon reflects the sun, we see the Gospel reflected in our lives all the time.
My encouragement to you is that your testimony is a critical way of sharing about the Gospel and how you have been healed from the debilitating disease of sin and death.
A cure for a debilitating disease is amazing, and it’s true, and it’s good news, but if all that happened was people shared about it instead of using it, it wouldn’t accomplish what all that it was made for.
Let’s look at John’s letter to the churches in the book of Revelation :
“And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, “Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.” – Revelation 12:10-11 (ESV)
Satan, sin, and death have been conquered because of the Gospel! What are the mechanisms? The blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony . The Good News of the Gospel actually works! We’re healed! We’re being sanctified! We’re becoming more like Christ, and our testimonies are not the atonement happening again, rather they demonstrate the transformative impact of the atonement.
In Philippians 3, Paul does an excellent job of describing the symbiosis between his own story and the Gospel message. He mentions his story when he writes, “I have suffered the loss of all things…in order to gain Christ” (v. 8) and anchors it directly in the Gospel as he strives to “share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” (v. 11)
While the Gospel is the ultimate cure, explaining how it works through step-by-step instructions rarely moves the human heart. Stories carry a far greater power to transform. As Christian philosopher James K.A. Smith notes in You Are What You Love, our hearts are shaped less by formulas and more by imagination. He explains,
“Our imaginations are aesthetic organs. Our hearts are like stringed instruments that are plucked by story, poetry, metaphor, images. We tap our existential feet to the story of imaginative drums… Stories capture our imagination and teach us to long for the endless immensity of God.”
Some of you may have begun wearing the “Ask me about my story” shirt from the Go Conference. I have gotten more used to strangers, friends and family alike asking me, out of the blue, “So what is your story?”.
Most recently, I share about how dark my depression was during my divorce and how much my heart ached to the point of being numb. After that, I talk about the way Jesus relates to me in that very dark place. Jesus’ death on the cross was the most horrible thing that ever happened. He was a man of sorrow, acquainted with grief. He not only gets me, but He also loved me while I was his enemy and died for me. Then I share about the breathtaking hope of His resurrection. It changed everything! It started a movement that emerged from the shadows and now spans this globe. It literally conquered death. His nail-pierced hands grip me and pull me up to the highest heights of hope and eternal life.
Whether your struggle is divorce, addiction, chronic illness, grief, or something nobody else sees — someone needs to hear your story and how it reflects the hope of the Gospel. Your story is being written by the steadiest hand, and because of that, it is powerful, and no chapter needs to be hidden.
