The power of story: HIS story

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why God chose to reveal His love through so many stories in the Bible, His Word. Why didn’t He just send us a list of dos and don’ts? Why didn’t He just tell us what He did for us on the cross and leave it at that? As I’ve been spending my Tuesday mornings with my sweet sisters at Teen Challenge I am absorbing how powerful His Word is through story. We are practicing ‘living in the text.’ Picturing what it might have been like and whom we relate to in the story and in what way. It has been such a powerful time. We aren’t looking for lessons or applications necessarily (although those come), we are entering into the relationships we observe and we are relating more intimately with Jesus each time.

Today we lingered in Mark 8:22-26 when Jesus takes a blind man by the hand out of the village and heals him in private. You need to rest there a while with Jesus to capture the beauty of this encounter. I dare you to.

As we interacted with this story, it came alive! All of us could see ourselves as the receivers of GREAT mercy as Jesus took our hand, led us out of the village and gave us sight. We ended our time together in tears as we listened to and sang an amazing song by Brian Johnson called “Love Came Down” (google him).

God uses story, because those stories are us and we are the recipients of amazing grace that we see over and over in the stories we read. God uses the power of story because our lives are His expression of our story with Him.