New Morning Mercies #104

God’s story has a beginning and an end that never ends, and if you’re God’s child, his story is now your biography. Wow!

You’re probably like me—you like a good story. Whether it’s a TV drama, a box-office hit movie, or a million-seller novel, we tend to line up for the good story. Or maybe you’re sitting in a restaurant or around a campfire, and your friends begin to tell stories. Each one seems better than the one before. It begins to feel a bit like a contest. It seems as if people are trying to “outstory” one another. So you begin to thumb through your mental catalog of personal stories to see if you are carrying one that may just win the day. Or maybe someone tells you a fantastic story and you can’t wait for the opportunity to retell it to someone else. Yep, we all love a good story.

Now, most great stories are great because, through myriad characters, relationships, situations, and locations, they march you to an incredible ending. When someone is talking to you about a great movie he just saw or a great book he just read, he often says, “And you will just not believe the ending!” But the best story ever conceived, written, and acted out in real life is the best story precisely because it has no ending. The one story you need to know, understand, and give your heart to is hopeful, encouraging, and life-transforming because it offers you the two wonderful things that no other story can offer you. First, it offers you a place in the story, a place that was planned for you long before the story was written. But it also offers you something that is hard for the human brain to grasp and the human imagination to envision. It offers you life that never, ever ends.

We are all so used to death that we sadly think of it as a normal part of life. Things die, people die, end of story. But that’s not the end of this story. God’s amazing story of redemption, which is written for you on the pages of your Bible, is radically different because in this story, death dies. Yes, you read it right. The main character of God’s story (which is your story if you’re his child) comes to earth and defeats sin and death, and because he does, he offers us the one thing that no other character in no other story can offer us—real life now and eternal life to come.

Quite apart from anything you have ever achieved, earned, or deserved as God’s child, you have been welcomed into the best story ever by grace and grace alone. And thankfully, this story that is your story has an end that never ends.

For further study and encouragement: John 5:19–24