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CHAPTER 1
From time to time the Word of God has inspired my heart with fresh expressions through a poem or vignette. This tender place offers a priceless gift, a moment to stop and feel humanity to our bones, to let ourselves have the moment to feel what we feel, to express it in words and realize the wonder that weaves through it all.
My thoughts had pondered here and there about a longer story. Dare I say, a novel? While I grinned at the wildness of that idea, I didn't foresee the now reality of The Undoing of Saint Silvanus. But over time, a story began to take life in my thoughts. These people had real lives, and their hurts entered my hurts, along with their stories, their histories, their challenges, and their victories still to come. They became more than a book, more than a story to me.
Until one day, a few years ago, I just kind of got in a spot. Something had happened that I could not tell. You see, that's the thing. Some of our stories involve other people who really don't want their laundry hung out in front of the church.
If we really knew one another's full stories, we would be slack jawed.
It was one of those times when some things revved up, and when I was muted for a while in one way, good stories start coming out all over the place. Because sometimes you really can't tell your story; you need to make one up!
The made-up stories may not be real, but they can still be true. They can sometimes give us a picture of our own lives in ways that a journal entry or a blog post just can't. And so The Undoing of Saint Silvanus is my made-up story that explains some very real things that we all deal with every day. It was an outlet for me to try to express something that I want to share with you from the Word. In this novel, a family has been blown apart; Satan wants to dismantle their lives and keep them constantly off balance. And I want you to see this principle in Scripture. I'm very, very committed to my calling to teach, and as long as God will let me, I will write Bible studies and teach Bible studies for the rest of my life. But this story was a grace gift from God, a tremendous journey for me to see this story and this idea set free and to see where it would go. And that is the idea that we're going to study together — the undoing.
WHAT THE ENEMY HAS DONE
I don't know what your family was like. I don't know what you come from. I probably come from something a lot like you do, and that is a mixture of the good, the bad, and the ugly. And a lot of those things balanced out. There was a lot of good ... but sometimes the ugly is just so ugly. And if you'll let me push a little bit further, it's not only so ugly, but the ugly happened so early that your whole personality began to develop around all of that ugliness. There's a lot of good going on, but it can't seem to undo the ugly.
Here's what I think. I think there's this thing that goes on among us — a kind of big Christian bluff that everything's just fine, going well, and there are no real problems. But deep down we know there's a disconnect. And we know something has to change.
For many, many years of my young life the whole routine was that we went to church in a mess, in a frenzy of conflict, in all manner of chaos and all sorts of insecurity, and then when we got there we became totally different people when we walked in the door. We played church. We got back in the car and in a moment we switched back into those people.
My freshman year of high school I lived directly across the street from our school. My front door faced the front door of the high school. I would literally open up the door, walk down the front steps to the sidewalk, walk straight across and up the stairs and into that school, and as I did it, I would become with every step a different person. And I always wondered to myself, If the person you're faking that you are is who you really wish you were, is it still hypocrisy? I know the answer. But there is the wish list: This is who I wish I was.
What do you do with that? I'll tell you it is a train wreck.
* In your life, are there places where, or people with whom, you're tempted to put on an act?
Undoing. You may have heard the word especially in the King James Version of Isaiah 6, where Isaiah looks upon the glory of the Lord and says, "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the KING, the Lord of hosts." Undone. Undone. Undone.
It's a word that means to feel cut off, to feel like something — if not your very person — has ceased, perished. It's a word that means to feel destroyed.
To feel destroyed. I love that wording. I think it gets to the meat of it. To feel cut down.
When things happen, like the things that happened to me, or maybe like the things that happened to you, very often it doesn't just stop with victimization. But then we go on and do all manner of ridiculous things and make all sorts of disastrous relational decisions. And that was me ... until there began to be through the power of the Word of God this gradual undoing of what the enemy had done.
Scripture is clear that, since the Garden of Eden, Satan, who appeared as the serpent in Genesis chapter three, has been attempting to undo what the Lord has done. Now since he cannot undo the Lord, he goes for the dearest things to your heart. If you're a parent, he would go for your children; or he'd attack your marriage; or your mental well-being; your hope. The enemy would go for anything that was not fixed, anything in flux. Everything — everything — is game if it's not in a fixed order that cannot be changed. And that means us.
Genesis 2:1-3 says, "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation." That only gets us as far as Genesis 2:3.
Genesis 3:1, just a few verses later, tells us, "Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made." And there he was right in the Garden attempting to undo what God had done in the prize creation of the Creator.
That is the reality. And it isn't good news. But there is good news to be found.
No matter how undone you have been, you are not nearly as undone as the enemy meant you to be. Otherwise, the truth is you would not be sitting here reading this with your remotely sane mind. That's what I hope to prove to you. So as much as the enemy has gotten away with in your life, I want to promise you this: He has not taken that nearly as far as he planned to. Not nearly as far.
That is some good news. That is some very good news.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Undoing What Has You Undone"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Beth Moore.
Excerpted by permission of Tyndale House Publishers.
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