Live A Good Story

Welcome… Thanksgiving/Black Friday… Make some joke here.

When we started here we started with a series called Timeless where we looked at the ways we can grow our faith. And we asked this question what you our life look like if we were rooted into Jesus. Now over a year later i think we can say we’ve grown.. Don’t you? As a church we have and I hope individually we have too.

One of the reasons we have grown in this season as a church so much is because we aren’t in a comfortable spot. And as we get closer to being back in our building my fear is we will be content with that. We will get comfortable…

And that applies for our personal lives too… Because we’ve all been there right? We settle for comfort more than growth. That’s why one of the things we value around here is that our calling > our comfort. As we as a church settle back into a building and as we personally get through the holidays and then back into a normal routine. We have to get our eyes on our calling and not our comfort. Because as things settle back it in it will be easy to drift towards comfort.

TENSION

And that’s not all bad. But it can be. It can be damaging to our faith…

Comfort is not what Christians are called to… We called called to live a life that tells a good story… A story that points others to Jesus.

A few minutes ago you all shared your favorite movies. What are some of them?

The writers/directions knew what makes a good story. They know what it would take to create a story that people wanted to hear.

You know what the one thing that every good movie has? Conflict. Every good movie has conflict that the main character has to overcome. Sometimes its self inflicted sometimes it’s circumstance. But every good story has to have conflict.

You know what doesn’t have conflict? Comfort. When our lives revolve around comfort we can’t live a good story. Those two things are at odds with each other.

I was in college when I picked up this book called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller. In this book he talks about what makes a movie good. What makes a story worth telling.

Here’s what Donald Miller Says about these stories we tell with our lives…

“If you watched a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for years to get it, you wouldn’t cry at the end when he drove off the lot, testing the windshield wipers. You wouldn’t tell your friends you saw a beautiful movie or go home and put a record on to think about the story you’d seen. The truth is, you wouldn't remember that movie a week later, except you’d feel robbed and want your money back. Nobody cries at the end of a movie about a guy who wants a Volvo.

But we spend years actually living those stories, and expect our lives to be meaningful. The truth is, if what we choose to do with our lives won't make a story meaningful, it won’t make a life meaningful either” Donald Miller

Here’s the reality… You and I. We often settle for terrible stories. We settle for comfort at the expense or our calling. And the tragedy is God has an incredible story he wants to tell with our lives. But we are too afraid of the conflict we might face, so we settle.

Around the time I read this book i was interning at a church. One day they let me sit in our funeral planning meeting with a family. They didn’t go the church just lived close by. And the pastor started asking questions about his life so that he could get an idea what to say. The only thing that the family could come up with was that he REALLY liked the Broncos. The pastor kept asking what he did, how he treated others, hobbies, anything… And his kids just kept saying he really liked the broncos… What a sad sad story.

From that point forward I wanted to live a good story. I wanted to live a story worth telling. I wanted to live in such a way that when people saw my life they would see God orchestrating an incredible story.

So that’s what I set out to do. Not perfectly, I’ve made plenty of mistakes. But my goal has been to live a good story. To not shy away from conflict.

Then I met my wife and I told her. And while we were dating I said… Are you onboard? Because I want to live a good story. And that is probably going to mean some really high highs and some really low lows. That’s going to mean we are going to have to rely on God a lot. And that means other people probably won’t get it. You onboard? And she said yes.