“Let God Write Your Story”
Sermon by Steve Saint
th October 24 , 2004
Cornerstone Church - St. Cloud, FL
Adapted by Bearing Fruit Communications
Courtesy of ITEC Ministries - www.itecusa.org
Scripture References: Proverbs 16:9; Ecclesiastes 9:11; Jeremiah 29:11-13; 2 Corinthians 5:17-20
Who’s the Author?
There are two lines that I remember from a poem that we read in high school [Invictus, by William Ernest Henley]: “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.” Those lines have stayed with me in part because, when I read them, I remember thinking, “This is the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard.” Even at that early stage of my life, I knew that God was the author of life, not me.
Nevertheless, we all love to know how our lives are going to work out, especially in North America. Our culture is addicted to making plans. It seems that the more plans we have, the more secure we feel. The truth is that there are times when we may feel that life is under control. If that’s how you feel right now, I promise you – it won’t last. Most of the time, however, we feel like we aren’t in con-trol of anything.
It’s in times like this that we find ourselves asking a very important question: is there a loving God who really cares about us? Is there really a heavenly Father who can take all of those little details of our lives and mold them into something that makes sense; something within which we can find a sense of significance that all of us are looking for? The world around us is in turmoil. And our per-sonal lives can often seem just as bad. Does God really care about those little things happening in our lives that we wish we could control but feel like we can’t? And do we believe that God will do some-thing with them?
My wife, Ginny, once heard a story on the radio that she thought I would appreciate. There once was an old man who was very poor. In an attempt to take care of his family, he pooled all of his money and bought a horse. The people in town thought that this was a foolish thing to do because “things happen to horses.” Sure enough, a few days later, the horse was missing. The town’s people came to the poor old man and said: “Oh what a tragedy!” But the old man was very wise and replied, “We don’t know yet if this is going to be a tragedy or a blessing.” A few days later, the horse returned, and trailing behind him was a herd of 15 wild mustangs. Again, the town’s people came back to the old man and said, “You were right! This was a blessing and not a tragedy.” But, again, the old man an-swered, “Well, we really don’t know yet if this is a blessing or a tragedy.” A few days later, his only son was breaking in one of the wild mustangs when he was thrown. While lying on the ground, the horse trampled him and shattered his leg. The town’s people returned, saying: “It’s true, what a trag-edy! Your only son is now crippled for life!” But this happened right before the war started and all the other young men from the town were called away to war. And none returned. When the people from the town came to speak to the old man, they said, “Now, we understand.”
Big God - Epic Story
You and I have little to do with what happens in the world around us. But we are children of the One who reigns. All the way through the Bible we discover that God is weaving the events of life into His grand design for our lives and our world. Proverbs 16:9 says, “The mind of man plans his way, but the LORD directs his steps.” In Ecclesiastes 9:11 we are taught, “The race is not to the swift and the battle is not to the warriors, and neither is bread to the wise nor wealth to the discerning nor favor to men of ability; for time and chance overtake them all.” And who is the Lord of time and chance? In one of the most well-known scriptures, God tells His people in Jeremiah 29:11-13, “‘For surely I know the plans I have for you,’ says the Lord, ‘plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart.’ ”
Isn’t it unbelievable that God cares enough for us to include us in His plans? And He not only in-cludes us in his plans for our lives, but He includes us in His plans for the world as well. What is hard to understand is how this happens when we’re faced with the events and moments in life that don’t make sense.
From the time I was young, I have had a common experience with hundreds of people. Once they find out that I am Nate Saint’s son, they will say to me, “Oh, I will never forget the day I heard the news of what happened to your father. I remember it like it was yesterday.” And I remember too.
We lived on the edge of the Amazon jungle and my dad was my hero. Instead of having a car in our garage, we had an airplane, which I thought was normal. Everyday I would watch and try to help my dad get ready for the flights he would take that day. Then, I would stand on the bank by our house and watch dad lift off in his little Piper PA14 airplane and fly off into the jungle. In the afternoon, I would return to that same bank and wait for my hero – my dad – to fly back in from his missions. And I never knew what he would bring back with him. Sometimes he would bring back other mis-sionary kids who were going to school up in the mountains. At other times, he would bring back In-dians who were sick or who had been bitten by snakes and other animals. Every afternoon was excit-ing as I waited for the plane to return because, even if he came back empty-handed, it was still my dad returning.
Then one day, I watched my dad fly off into the jungles, and he didn’t come back. After my dad was gone for several days, my mom took me into her room, and said, “Stevie-boy, Daddy isn’t coming home.” I was confused because I couldn’t imagine anything that would keep my dad away. “Why isn’t he coming home?” I asked. My mom explained, “He went to live with Jesus.” When she told me that, I was excited because I had already learned that to live with Jesus was what we all wanted to do. Looking back, I remember wondering why Dad didn’t take us with him. Though I didn’t quite under-stand God’s timing at the time, I soon began learning how God works.
A couple of years later, our little home was filled with excitement again. We learned that Dad’s sis-ter, my Aunt Rachel, along with “Aunt Betty” (Elisabeth Elliot) and a Waodani woman named, Da-yume, were making plans to move into the jungle. They were setting out to live with the very people who had killed my dad, and the four men I called “Uncle Jim (Elliot)”, “Uncle Pete (Fleming)”, “Un-cle Ed (McCully)” and “Uncle Roger (Yourderian).” As women, they were hoping to establish a con-nection with the Waodani so that they could learn about “God’s carvings.” Dayume, who as a girl had fled from killings within this same tribe, had become a “God follower” and led the way.
Then came the day when we received word that the women felt like the way was clear for my family to join them in the jungle. Since I was the son of a man who had been speared, everyone wanted to protect me. But all I knew was that I was so excited I could hardly wait. I was so anxious to meet the people my dad had loved, and for whom so many people, including my mom and I, had prayed. When I stepped out of the little bush plane on that jungle airstrip, I expected the Waodani to crowd in around me and investigate my clothes, my skin and my hair like so many other Indians had done. In-stead, they all stood back. They seemed to be concerned as they talked between themselves. Finally, one old woman separated herself from the group. She came up to me and started patting me very carefully. She still seemed to be uncertain about something. Then she opened my elastic-waist pants and began to give the tribe a running commentary of what she saw in my pants. When she was done, they all giggled and seemed to relax. I later learned that since, at the age of 10, I was almost as tall as the adults and didn’t have any obvious features, they didn’t know what I was. Since they were practi-cally naked and not hiding anything from me, they couldn’t understand what I was hiding from them.
Slowly, these same people - who had viciously attacked five men I loved and discarded their bodies into the river to be eaten by the fish – these people took me into their lives. This acceptance reached a high point one day when I was going out with other boys to shoot blow guns. I didn’t have one, so some of the other boys told me to get Mincaye’s blow gun. I thought, “Mincaye will be upset because only his own sons could use his blow gun.” But the boys were insistent. Finally, one of Mincaye’s sons took me to his longhouse, grabbed Mincaye’s blow gun and said, “Mincaye says you can use his blow gun, being like a son!” This warrior who had killed my father, having now become a God-follower, was adopting me into his own family.” I learned just a short time later that Mincaye was the one who finally killed my dad.
Something was happening to these people. They were not the same people who were notorious as the “Aucas – naked savages”. The men who were once vicious fighters became God-followers. And as they walked God’s trail, they were taking others with them. To my sister, Kathy, and me, they were like spiritual fathers. So when it came time, Kathy and I asked two men, Kimo and Dyuwi, to baptize us. We were taken to the same spot where our father had been killed and were placed under the water by two men who were there just a few years before.
God’s Story - Our Chapters
Do you know how something like this happens? This is how it happens. In 2 Corinthians 5:17-20, Paul says, “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come. Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”
How amazing that God would entrust to us the gift of telling His story! I like the way the Wycliffe organization has translated this passage in Da Jesus Book, a Hawaiian Pidgin English translation of the New Testament. It says, “Jesus make us come jalike we new inside: Dass why, whoeva stay tight wit Christ, dey one new guy. Da old tings no stay no moa! Look! Da new tings wen come. All dat stuff come from God. He wen bring us back togedda wit him cuz a wat Christ wen do. An he tell us fo work so da odda peopo can come back togedda wit him too. Wen Christ wen stay inside dis world, God wen use him fo bring da peopo inside da world back togedda wit him. So, he no make dem take da blame fo da way dey wen mess up. An he wen tell us guys all dat, so we can kokua all da odda peopo fo come back togedda wit him (Numba 2 fo da Corint Peopo 5:17-19).
Do you know what God wants to do? He wants to be reconciled to all of His children, everywhere. He has committed that to us. But, by ourselves, we won’t begin to make that happen. Unfortunately, we have a hard time remembering that.
We took our smartest people, spent a billion dollars and built a telescope that we put in space – and it wouldn’t even focus. We spent another billion dollars to fix the problem, and when it was finally able to focus, the US government and NASA wanted to prove it was money well-spent. So they focused the Hubble telescope on the emptiest place in space and took a picture. Do you know what they found? There were millions of stars we didn’t even know existed. Think about that. God created a universe that boggles our minds. And we think He needs us?
That’s why it is so amazing what God does by including us in His plans. God really is a loving heav-enly Father and, though He doesn’t need us to do His work, He wants to use us in ways that will bring meaning to our lives. So God has entrusted to us the most precious thing He has – the privilege of being His ambassadors and telling the world that He loves them and wants to be reconciled to them. This is the big story that God is writing. And God wants to include the chapters of our lives into His story.
As I was asked more and more to go out and speak on behalf of the Waodani, I realized that some-thing was missing in my heart. Though I truly believed in the truth of God’s transforming grace which our story so clearly demonstrates, I didn’t have a passion to tell the story. It was more of an intellectual process than something from the heart. I began to pray, “God, if you want me to continue doing this, please change my heart! I need to see the world the way YOU see the world. Please give me a passion for reconciling the world to You!” He made that happen in a very unusual way.
We have four children. Our first three were boys. Then we got it right and had a little girl we named Stephanie. She was the apple of my eye. I remember putting her on my knee and making her promise that she would never grow up. “I pwomise, Poppy” she would respond and my heart would melt. But she broke her promise. Before we knew it, the day came that she went away to college. Thankfully it was only a few hundred miles away. Then someone committed the unpardonable sin and recruited Stephanie for a missions team that would travel outside the US. She was born with a gift for music and was a great addition to the team. She traveled with that group for 20 years that lasted 365 days.
When the day came for her return, we wanted to make a big deal about it. So we headed to the airport with signs and banners. Grandfather Mincaye was with us and he was perhaps the most excited. He can’t read so his sign was upside down. But he didn’t care. When Stephanie walked off the plane, we yelled and shouted. She tried to ignore us. But Mincaye, who didn’t exactly blend in with his big feather hat and huge ear plugs dangling from his ears, wouldn’t let her get away with that. He ran over to her, shouting her name. When they met, he hugged her and started dancing with her saying, “You came back! You came back! I see it well that you came back to see me!”
We had a great welcome home party waiting when we got back to the house. I was so glad to have her home. Later in the evening, Ginny asked me to join her back in Stephanie’s room. It appeared that some kind of conspiracy was underway. But Steph had a headache and asked me to pray for her. So I held her in my arms and asked God to take her headache away, which He did in a very strange way. While I rocked her and prayed, she suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. We called 911 and all of the emergency equipment arrived soon. I went to the hospital with the ambulance. My son, Jessie, Ginny and Mincaye arrived a little while later.
All that Mincaye knew was that strange men had rushed into our home and had taken Stephanie away. So when Mincaye came into the emergency waiting room, he grabbed me asking, “Who is do-ing this? Who is doing this?” I saw on his face something I had never witnessed from Mincaye. It was the fiercest look I had ever seen. It was the look of a man who grew up killing and I knew that Mincaye was willing to kill again to protect his granddaughter. I responded in the only way I knew how. I whispered: “I don’t know! I don’t know what’s happening.” In a flash, the countenance of this savage Indian changed. He became excited and began repeating the words: “I see this well. God him-self is doing this!” At that point, I couldn’t imagine that to be true. I was thinking: “How could God be doing this?” But Grandfather Mincaye started reaching out to the other people in the ER, saying in his own language: “People! People! Don’t you see? God Himself – Loving Star – He’s taking her to live with Him. And since I am an old man, I’m going to die pretty soon and I too am going to God’s place. And if you people will just walk God’s trail, when you come to the end of that trail, Star and I will be there to welcome you to God’s happy place where we’ll live forever and ever with Him.”
When you think about it, it is overwhelming. There in the emergency room of Monroe Regional Hos-pital, Mincaye, for whom my dad had died in order to bring him a message of love and forgiveness, wrapped his arms of faith around me and helped me go on believing. Mincaye couldn’t even read or write, but his life had been transformed. It had been changed and he now had hope. And since he knew that some of the “foreigners” were not God-followers, he wanted to share that hope with them.
A short time later, I realized that God was changing my heart by showing me that just a glimpse of what it must be like for Him. He was allowing me to see that there is something worse than people going into a Christ-less eternity. It’s that, everyday, our loving heavenly Father is being separated from children whom He loves so much that He sent his only begotten son to die a cruel death for them. We know that we will see Stephanie again some day. But there are billions of God children with whom He will never be reunited. I understood then that God was entrusting to me – and is en-trusting to all of us – the privilege of telling the world that he loves us and wants to be reconciled to us. He wants us to be His children and joint heirs with Christ, His Son.
Who Is Writing Your Story?
If we want to find hope, the surest way - the only way – for this to happen is for us to stop writing our story and turn it over to the Master Author of the Universe. He will incorporate all of the little chap-ters of our lives – whether we see them as triumphs or tragedies - into His epic story. Not all the chapters will be easy. But God promises that the last chapter will make sense of all the others if we let Him write our story.
On April 20, 2001, Roni and Charity Bowers were shot down by a Peruvian fighter plane on the mis-taken orders of the CIA. Roni and her husband, Jim, were missionaries who had just adopted Charity. Roni was taking Charity to complete the adoption paperwork when their plane was attacked. At the memorial service, we heard a recorded message from Elisabeth Elliot. She quoted a poem from Mar-tha Snell Nicholson called, “The Thorn.” The poem reads:
I stood a mendicant of God before His royal throne
And begged him for one priceless gift, which I could call my own.
I took the gift from out His hand, but as I would depart
I cried, “But Lord this is a thorn and it has pierced my heart.
This is a strange, a hurtful gift, which Thou hast given me.”
He said, “My child, I give good gifts and gave My best to thee.”
I took it home and though at first the cruel thorn hurt sore,
As long years passed I learned at last to love it more and more.
I learned He never gives a thorn without this added grace,
He takes the thorn to pin aside the veil which hides His face.
The North American way – and maybe it’s just the human way – is that we write our story and ask God to edit it. But God does not offer to be our editor. He wants to write the story. He wants to write us into an epic story that He has been writing throughout history with the whole human race. God works in strange and mysterious ways, and do you know why? It’s these rough things in life that He uses to mold and make us into His image. And it is through these chapters of our lives that He con-tinues to write the story of His Great Commission that brings reason and hope to billions of His chil-dren who don’t know that He loves them.
Our heavenly Father longs for us to be significant parts of His story. Let God write your story.
SERMON OUTLINE
Let God Write Your Story
by Steve Saint
Scripture References: Proverbs 16:9; Ecclesiastes 9:11; Jeremiah 29:11-13; 2 Corinthians 5:17-20
Who’s the Author?
1. Poem: Invictus by William Ernest Henley – “Last two lines stay with me because they’re the most asinine thing I had ever heard. God’s the author of life, not me.”
2. We are plan-addicts though we all know that most of the time we are not in control.
3. Key Question: Is there a God who really cares about us; One who can take all of the details of our lives and mold them into something that makes sense?
4. Story: Poor Old Man and His Horse
Big God – Epic Story
1. The Bible is clear that we serve a God whose plans are far above our plans.
a. Proverbs 16:9
b. Ecclesiastes 9:11
c. Jeremiah 29:11-13
2. It’s amazing that God includes us in His story. But it is hard to understand how this is happening when we are in the middle of events that don’t make sense.
3. Story: Steve’s Hero and Becoming Waodani
4. Notorious killers become spiritual fathers.
God’s Story – Our Chapters
1. Do you know how something like this happens?
2. Scripture: 2 Corinthians 5:17-20
a. God entrusts to us the gift of telling His story.
b. Da Jesus Book translation of this passage
3. What God wants to do:
a. Be reconciled to all of His children
b. Use us to make that happen
4. It only happens through the power of God.
a. Story: Hubble Telescope and the Universe
b. God doesn’t really need us.
5. God wants to use us if we are willing.
6. Story: Steve’s Daughter, Stephanie & His Prayer for a Changed Heart
7. We will only understand God’s plans when we see through His eyes.
Who Is Writing Your Story?
1. No matter how we feel about the chapters of our lives, God can incorporate them into His story.
2. Story: Memorial Service for Roni and Charity Bowers
a. On April 20, 2001, they were mistakenly shot down over Peru.
b. At the service, they played a recorded message from Elisabeth Elliot
c. Poem: The Thorn by Martha Snell Nicholson
3. God wants to be the Author of our story, not our editor.
a. Some of His best material is written through the difficult chapters of our lives.
b. Through every chapter, He continues to write the story of His Great Commission.
4. Our heavenly Father longs for us to be significant parts of His story. Let God write your story.
