Wednesday, March 9, 2016
Download MP3 (right click to save)
I was expecting a great story in that record-crushing "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" blockbuster. I wasn't expecting to find a mirror reflecting the lives of so many people I've known. In the story, it's Rey's story. She's a young woman on a desolate planet, surviving by scavenging parts from a space junkyard. When she's asked, "Who are you?" she just zero-sums her life this way: "I am no one" until she discovers the truth that changes her life forever.
She's made for more. She finds that she's here for something much greater than just scavenging. She's destined for greatness as a warrior for a better world. And that's the image in the mirror of so many of us who've settled for just surviving, for just doing life, one predictable, one purposeless day at a time. Not a bad life, just an insignificant, too-small life – scavenging.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Seeing Ourselves in the Star Wars Mirror."
You know, maybe that's why a light has gone on inside millions of people when they've met a man named Jesus. He said in John 10:10 in the Bible, "I have come that they may have life and have it to the full." To the full, implying that we've been settling for less than full. Maybe we've been settling for empty; for less than we were created for.
I think we know that something or someone is missing. No matter how far, or not far, we may have climbed up Mount Happiness. No friendship, no scholarship, no championship, no relationship has filled the hole in our heart. They can't, because we're made for more. The "more" the Bible reveals in this statement about Jesus Christ - our word for today from the Word of God from Colossians 1:16. "All things were created by Him and for Him."
So, I am created by Jesus, for a relationship with Jesus, just as the earth is created to revolve around the sun – its source of life. Anything less is, in reality, spiritual scavenging. It's not God's fault I've lived beneath my destiny. I, along with all my fellow humans, decided to live for me with God on the margins at best; maybe a compartment, but not my reason to live.
God had every right to let us have the life without Him that we seem to want. But He loves us too much for that. He proved it by sending His one and only Son not from "a galaxy far, far away," but from heaven to become one of us. And this takes my breath away – to die for us; absorbing on a cross all the pain, all the penalty for all our hijacking of our life from Him.
I still can't get over it. From the day I trusted this Jesus to forgive my sin and pilot my life I've been discovering the "more" I was searching for, and I want you to. If you never have, you know all that you've experienced and all the relationships and all the things you've been and done haven't filled the hole in your heart.
Well, with the love of Jesus and His grave-conquering power that He proved when He walked out of his grave, I've graduated from scavenging to being a warrior. He wants that for you; unleashing the force of His love in your family, and your work, and your personal world.
It doesn't have to be the way it's always been because of Jesus. But you take the initiative to begin that relationship with Him. He describes it as knocking on the door of your heart. I believe He is, perhaps today. And if you feel that tug in your heart, would you take an action step and say, "Jesus, I am yours from this day on."
Go to our website and make sure from what you'll find from God's Word there, you have this relationship with Him, that you have begun it. Go to ANewStory.com.
Finding Jesus. Finding your destiny. Never "settling" again.