This book will help you Discern where you’re at, Discover that life verse, Develop the life verse, go Deeper with the verse.
This book will help you Discern where you’re at, Discover that life verse, Develop the life verse, go Deeper with the verse.
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Overview
This book will help you Discern where you’re at, Discover that life verse, Develop the life verse, go Deeper with the verse.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781612917740 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The Navigators |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
Read an Excerpt
Life verse
Discovering The Power of Scripture in Your Story
By David Edwards
Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2014 David EdwardsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61291-638-5
CHAPTER 1
Listen to Your Life
Your life is saying something to you.
Jim Gillespie's story is the perfect illustration of the way each of us can trade in an old story for a new one. A choice is set before each one of us: We can choose to live a story that, in the end, will kill us and everything else that is good about our lives. Or we can choose life.
Like Jim, you can discover within the pages of Scripture a perspective-changing, direction-focusing verse for your life. That's what happened for Rick Barry, my friend and youth pastor at Keystone Fellowship in Souderton, Pennsylvania:
When I was a senior in high school, my senior pastor challenged me to not just read my Bible, but to get to know God's heart behind each book of the Bible. He challenged me to read and study a book of the Bible each day for an entire month. I started off with the book of 2 Timothy, and then began to work my way through all of the Epistles.
During my freshman year of college at Michigan State University, I had been praying that God would give me boldness like never before. I wanted to be a light to that campus, and I wanted to make the most of every opportunity that I had to share the gospel. However, I continually found myself intimidated by my peers and (in my mind) their lack of desire to hear about the things of God. One day, I had a clear chance to bring up Christ in a conversation with my friend but completely chickened out. I let fear get the best of me, and I left feeling like a complete failure.
When I got back to my dorm room, I spent time praying. I asked Christ to forgive me and give me the strength not to miss out on any more opportunities like that again. I then opened up my Bible to read the book of Philippians for the day; I'd been reading this one book over and over for three months. Before I began reading I simply prayed, "God, show me something today to help me have boldness so that You will be glorified." As I read through chapter 1, I came across Philippians 1:21, which I had underlined. But this time as I was reading, God opened my eyes to Philippians 1:20, which is a prayer that Paul prayed for himself. For the first time, it popped out at me. The verse says:
I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. (NIV)
My eyes were opened to the vulnerability in Paul's prayer, and I began to pray that for myself. I prayed it when I was in my dorm, on the bus, in class, at parties. I prayed it everywhere. As months passed, I was still praying that for myself. I came to realize that Philippians 1:20 was not just a verse that I wanted to be true while I was in college, but I wanted it to be true for all my life. I realized that wherever I was, whatever I was doing, whenever I was doing it, I never wanted to be ashamed, but I wanted sufficient courage so that Christ would be exalted in my life, whether by life or by death.
My life verse is the prayer that God showed me, which I continually pray and want to be true for my life!
What's your story? Maybe it's one in which every day seems filled with the same struggles. Get up, get ready, go to work, go home, go to bed—only to start the cycle all over again. Feeling trapped in life, people look for distraction—something to numb the pain, a way to get away from it all. But this only creates more frustration. Avoiding life's struggles is not the answer.
Life can sometimes feel like a hamster's journey on his wheel. During these times it's quite easy to drift off into fantasy, dreaming about all the different ways we might achieve happiness, running mental video clips of better circumstances and more loving people. All those images and dreams have a way of cluttering our heads, bogging us down with so many pseudo-options that we don't know what to do next. We begin to feel like there is no way out.
We are capable of making a new choice to see life as a gift, starting a new story in which everything propels us in a positive direction. Jesus acknowledged, "In this world you will have trouble." Then He continued, "But take heart! I have overcome the world" (John 16:33, Niv). We will learn much more about this new story later in this book, but first let's muster the courage to take a close look at the old story.
Do joy and contentment seem to elude you? If you've ever felt as though life is unfair, don't blame bad karma or bad luck or even necessarily bad judgment. The real cause is something deeply embedded inside you that governs and directs everything in your life. It's your old story.
I'm not talking about random stories you might share over dinner, but rather your life story—the one you tell yourself every moment of every day. There's power in story. How? Let's take a look.
Our Stories Shape Us
John chapter 4 contains many stories, all taking place at the same time. A story of geography and the division of people. Another story encompassing history, the present, and the future. Stories both natural and supernatural, religious and theological. Stories of racism, gender, and politics. And centrally interwoven throughout all of these is a story of a conversation between a man and a woman. On the surface these two individuals are very different, but something beautiful is unfolding, involving more than can be observed by onlookers.
The story begins with Jesus sitting at Jacob's well, outside a Samaritan village. It's high, shadowless noon. Jesus is hot, road weary, and thirsty, and He has nothing with which to draw water. So He waits.
He hears footsteps, hurried and hesitant. He looks up, then down, then does a double take at the woman preparing to draw water. She is used to being stared at by men; she's beautiful—she has always looked ten years younger than her age—she knows it ... and she doesn't care. Any illusions she used to believe have now been shattered. She has enjoyed the glamorous life, been wined and dined by well-to-do men, heard her share of empty promises, and reached out to the men she thought would bring her happiness. On closer examination, Jesus sees cynicism in her eyes, along with a sadness revealing that the best of her days are now behind her. She expects nothing more from life than what it gives her now. Her stories—they are many, all marred by failure—have shaped the life she now lives.
Our stories tell us who we are. They teach us about the world in which we live and how that world works. Patterns that are repeated over and over in our young experience become the plotlines for the decades that follow. Messages that we hear—or that we interpret from what we hear—become the infallible maxims in which we place our faith. Our stories powerfully determine who we become and how we value ourselves.
We often trade away the true story for tales others have told us, stories that we believe simply because they're familiar, even if they're painful, even when they've grown stale. We easily buy the stories we grew up believing, the ones that made false promises about what would bring us love. When we live a story we were never meant to live, we find ourselves stuck emotionally, spiritually—even physically. We feel powerless to make any changes, so we cling even more to the old story as our excuse for not moving forward.
The simple truth? You are who you are because of the story you have believed about yourself. If you are tired of the way things are and you want to begin a new story, you must be willing to break out of the old one.
Our Stories Shelter Us
She has learned the hard way that everything comes with a price tag. Maybe she has given every man to whom she has joined herself the benefit of the doubt, always finding a way to blame herself. Stories have a way of helping us hide from others and from ourselves.
She shows up at the well at the time of day when no one else would be there. Maybe she doesn't want to hear the whispers of other women gossiping among themselves about her. Maybe she doesn't want to be reminded of her past behavior, of those five failed relationships. She manages life by trying not to let loneliness get the best of her. She tries not to look at the consequences of her choices. But choices have a way of catching up to us, and somebody has to pay. The mistakes of this beautiful woman by the well have accumulated. She pays the price for them every day.
We use stories to inoculate us from pain we've experienced, to create something beautiful from the difficult and traumatic events of our lives, to explain the moments when the most important people of our lives would not or could not meet our need to be loved. Whether it's a huge tragedy like losing a parent or suffering abuse, or something less significant, we just don't want to hurt, so we build a story for shelter. Some people assume that experiencing pain is a sign that something is wrong, so they do whatever they can to avoid feeling more pain—and by extension they attempt to prevent the "something wrong"—not realizing the pain is a sign that the story is breaking down. Truth is trying to invade.
There are many things people reach for: pills, makeup, shopping, booze. Our society offers a lot of creative options for hiding and anesthetizing pain, trying to convince us that these opiates will make us better and happier. But these quick fixes don't work, because they are external, temporal solutions to an internal and eternal problem. "There is a way which seems right to a man," wrote wise Solomon, "but its end is the way of death" (Proverbs 14:12).
Hiding under a story is a means of avoiding pain without confronting the problem. Although we manage to numb the ache, we also miss the opportunity to be free. As long as we sit in the shelter of our old stories, those stories will feed us a steady diet of lies about why we are or are not lovable or acceptable. They will craft false scenarios pointing the finger of blame for our pain.
Our Stories Speak to Us
Over the years, our minds have a way of condensing our stories down to pithy slogans that play over and over in our thoughts. This unnamed woman at the well has lived five stories, each with a different man, and all those stories have been reduced to one line: "Shame on you; you've failed at love." This theme has taken on its own voice, speaking constantly to her, forcing her to live and relive her loss and regret.
Jesus sees her and speaks to her. She is used to watching men nervously fumble around for the right words to gain her attention. Not so with Jesus. He's completely at ease, unfazed by her beauty. He speaks to her comfortably, as though to a friend on the same social stratum. Jesus speaks first. He doesn't try using any worn-out pickup lines, like, "I don't think I've seen you at this well before." Instead He asks her for water. By asking her for a favor, He is putting her at ease. He knows from the start that she has chosen her timing in order to avoid people. He looks past all the obstacles. Race, religion, reputation. Jesus never lets differences make a difference.
She questions how a Jewish man can risk talking to a Samaritan woman, asking her for water, putting Himself at the mercy of a foreign woman. Rather than explain to her that He doesn't care about their ethnic or religious differences, He says if only she knew who is asking her for a drink, she would ask and He would give her living water. Jesus is trying to startle her out of her trance—the mind-numbing, hope-stealing, repetitious buzzing voice of her past stories—to get beneath the surface facade by making her think.
Something inside tells her that Jesus isn't talking about water drawn with a bucket. A new voice has interrupted the old voice, and she is beginning to be stirred.
"Living water? What do you mean?"
This woman knows men and their ways; this is no pickup line. Her soul begins to open. She realizes that while she has been talking about water drawn from a well, this Jewish teacher is speaking of "water" from God.
Although our defining stories happened long ago, we still hear them in our thoughts, echoing back and forth, down through the haunted halls of our experience. We feel the shock waves of these past stories in our present relationships; we experience the plotlines in our current situations. Often today's conflicts are driven by our stories from an era long past.
If you want to become aware of the influence of your old story, here's a good place to start: Think about the last twenty-four hours. The conversation you had with your boss, your spouse, your sibling, or even yourself. Think about something you did that made you feel terrible about yourself. Was there a moment when your emotions were off the chart, when you flipped out or melted down? Have the tension and conflict inside you escalated and spilled out onto those around you? Have you heard yourself shouting, silently or aloud, "What's wrong with everybody?"
These are all indications that you were playing an old story. Whether you thought about it in that moment or not, your story was speaking to you.
It's important to remember that your story will repeat itself. It will come in different forms—through varied characters and settings—but what you feel and how you react are the same. Even after all these years, your old story is recreated, resurfaced, retold.
Our Stories Can Be Switched
The woman realizes how thirsty she has always been. She has been thirsty for something that neither men, nor money, nor sex could ever give. Jesus is way ahead of her. From the moment she walked up to the well, Jesus has known how desperately she has searched for someone or something to satisfy her. She has thirsted for a better life, for a new start, for a fuller way of living.
She has been drinking polluted water.
"Okay, I'd like some of this water you're advertising."
"WonderfUl," replies Jesus. "Bring your husband, and we'll all talk about it."
Busted. "I ... I don't have a husband." She can't look Him in the eye.
"That's right. And you're not married to the man you're living with now."
Her heart skips a beat. "How ... oh, I see, you must be a prophet!" A seer who knows her whole life history. Suddenly her secrets are exposed. This is getting too close.
But her thirst for authentic life won't let her simply walk away. She can't bear another day with an empty heart. Even though this man knows her inside out, she feels no judgment or condemnation in His presence. Maybe He could show her the way out of the maze of her old stories.
Problem: She and God have not been on speaking terms for a while. Of course, she still knows how to talk religion. Religion has had its benefits in her life, allowing her to cover her true condition with a layer of ritual, setting up buffers that have kept others at a distance. If religion is what the Jewish teacher wants, she can accommodate. She searches her memory and comes up with one of the perennial hot topics: "Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews say the Jerusalem temple is the only place of true worship."
But Jesus recognizes the ploy for what it is—her old story's last effort to maintain control by creating a smoke screen, a distraction from the woman's deepest needs. Gently He engages her, continuing to bring her back to her need for the new story that God can give her through His Spirit—the new life for which she had given up all hope.
Finally she acknowledges, "I know that Messiah is coming."
And Jesus, gaze of love unwavering, begins her new story: "I who speak to you am He."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Life verse by David Edwards. Copyright © 2014 David Edwards. Excerpted by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments, vii,Introduction: The Power of One Verse, ix,
Part I: Re-Verse: Trading Our Old Stories,
CHAPTER 1 Listen to Your Life, 7,
CHAPTER 2 Inventory Your Story, 25,
CHAPTER 3 When Stories Collide, 33,
CHAPTER 4 Outgrow Your Story, 49,
Part II: Well-Versed: The World of the Life Verse,
CHAPTER 5 What Your Life Verse Is Not, 65,
CHAPTER 6 The Power of Your Life Verse, 77,
CHAPTER 7 The Birth of a Life Verse, 91,
CHAPTER 8 The Ultimate Life Verse, 103,
Part III: Chapter and Verse: Reading for Your Life Verse,
CHAPTER 9 How Do You Read?, 123,
CHAPTER 10 The Way of the Ear, 135,
CHAPTER 11 The Pop of the Page, 157,
Part IV: Uni-Verse: Discovering Your Life Verse,
CHAPTER 12 Anatomy of a Life Verse, 179,
CHAPTER 13 Roaming the Neighborhood, 187,
CHAPTER 14 Taking the Life Verse Journey, 201,
CHAPTER 15 Living with Your Life Verse, 213,
What People are Saying About This
I wish I had read a book like this decades ago. Life Verse is a remarkable blending of biblical truth and practical counsel. Young believers and veteran Christians will both benefit from reading this book.
I wish I had read a book like this decades ago. Life Verse is a remarkable blending of biblical truth and practical counsel. Young believers and veteran Christians will both benefit from reading this book.