Re-scripting Your Life, Part 1
Welcome!
If you have ever struggled with nagging thoughts of negativity or have suffered through agonizing anxiety, we invite you to take a journey into the process of rewiring your brain and re-scripting your life. In this series of posts you will get a wide angle view of how humanity got into this mental mess and a more detailed look at what the process of re-scripting your life looks like. Some of the information will be thought provoking, some will be a review of things you already know, but hopefully you will be equipped and inspired to live the life that God designed for you from before the beginning of time!
That’s The Story of My Life…
How many of us have said this in a moment of frustration or disappointment when we experienced a repeated failure or setback in some area of our lives? This statement points to a deep seated belief that there are just some hopes and dreams that won’t ever be realized because, try as we might, we are just damaged goods who won’t ever experience wholeness on this side of eternity. There is some truth in this thought process - we are defective, but not beyond repair. If we are doomed to live life short-changed it is not because it’s just the story of our lives. It is because we don’t really know the true story of our lives and we are working off of a version of that story that has been edited by the fall of humanity, trauma, and painful events.
The goal of these blog posts is to get us back on the right page in the right book. In order to do this, we must first believe that there is an original copy that can be accessed and used as our guide for a rewrite. Psalms 139 is an amazing revelation from God to humanity regarding the unimaginable pre-planning that went into the creation of each and every individual. One verse in particular speaks to the heart of the subject at hand:
“You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed”. [Psa 139:16 NLT emphasis added]
Can you allow yourself to believe that there is recorded history of your life that was written by God before you were even a physical being? Your history is actually His Story of you before you were you. Think of it in terms of how a movie is made. First, there is an idea in the mind of the creator of the story. These ideas are then formed into thoughts that are translated and transferred into written form so other people can understand them. These words are put into action and come to life through the actor who is actually embodying the ideas that were originally in the mind of the creator.
This is exactly what we see happened the moment Jesus appeared on this planet. John opens his gospel account of Jesus with these words: “In the beginning the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God.” [John 1:1 NLT] Jesus in the flesh was first Jesus as the thoughts and words of God. “Logos” is the Greek word chosen to convey the concept of what took place at the incarnation (God coming in the form of human flesh). This word can be understood to mean the sum and total of all that God thinks and says. So when Jesus is manifested in human form, all of God’s thoughts and words are animated and take physical form in the life of Jesus. Jesus is one with the Word and therefore, is one with the One who has and is the Word, God.
If Jesus is the Word that became flesh, and we are born-again to be transformed into the image of Jesus, then our flesh must now become the Word. How does this happen? That is the focus and purpose of these posts. In the posts that follow, we will dig deep into the inner world of the transformation of our entire being. Salvation is not only given to save our spirits from eternal damnation (eternity separated from God), but is also given to restore us and to rewrite the story of our lives so that God’s Word over us becomes God’s Word made flesh within us.
As we begin this quest, take a moment to read and meditate on the three truisms listed below:
What We See As Our Source Will Determine Our Course
What We Say Everyday Will Become Our Way
The Choices We Make Determine The Pathways We Take
Everything we are presently experiencing is the result of engaging these three faculties of human existence: see, say, and do. What we see (our perceptions of what truth is), what we say (our declarations of what truth is), and what we choose (our actions that are determined by our thoughts and words about what we believe to be true) are writing the script of our lives on a daily basis. This quest, at its core, is a search and destroy mission. We will be searching for any thoughts, words, and actions that are not part of the original story of us. When we find them, we must destroy them by editing the text of the story with God’s truth from His original story. We are not looking to change what the past had done to us, rather we are seeking to change what the past has done within us.
The Story of Us - The Unauthorized Biography
In the creation account recorded in the first two chapters of Genesis, we learn that when God created mankind He formed and fashioned a physical body to house the soul and spirit that He was going to animate with His “breath of life.” This breath of life is more than just the ability to breathe oxygen- it also indicates that God breathed the likeness of His Spirit and nature into man. The shell was complete with all the physical organs and biological necessities for this human form to become a human being. The breath of life filled this vessel with the image of God to enable mankind to not only live a physical existence but to also enable an emotional (soul) and spiritual (spirit) relationship with God. This soul-spirit was created to live eternally in fellowship with God.
When the breath of life was given, a symbiotic relationship was born between God and man. God exhaled His breath into man and man inhaled as his first act as a living being. In other words, God’s first act was to give, man’s first act was to receive - the source of all life is anchored on this understanding. Even the revelation of the Gospel is founded on this eternal truth: We know love in that God first loved us, not that we first loved God (1 John 4:19).
Once man had inhaled the breath of life, his next act was to exhale. This act built a bonding trust that man must now give back to God his first breath in order to inhale his next breath. God must be trusted as the source of every next breath in order for human beings to live in peace. If man had held onto his first breath, he would have died physically. If man had anxiety, fearing that God would suddenly take away the breath of life at any time, he would die emotionally - or die a soul death. In order for life to work the way God designed it, we must have basic trust of God as THE source for everything that pertains to life- physical and emotional.
The next act of man must have been to open his eyes just as we do every time we wake from sleep. I believe that the first thing man saw was God staring back at him. Imagine that moment! Adam now had an awareness that he was a living being (his mind was working in all of the glory that God intended) and his first questions could have been: “who am I and what am I doing here?” These are the two basic questions every living soul asks, which represent the two basic soul needs of every human: security and significance. Security can be defined as the foundational core belief that one is unconditionally loved, wanted, & accepted as they are, and significance can be defined as the foundational core belief that one is unqualifiedly needed, gifted, and valuable just as they are to the people and world around them.
For Adam, looking into God’s eyes must have answered those two questions and set up the bond of trust and peace between God and humanity. We were created in love (we are wanted and will be cared for- security) to work with God in bringing His glory to the earth (we have a purpose for being created- significance). That initial eye contact was to be the point of orientation for all that Adam would do from that moment. This is the reason why the Holy Scriptures remind us to keep our eyes FIXED on Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith! (Heb 12:1). We can see this plan expounded in the first 2 chapters of Genesis as God is establishing His partnership with man on the earth.
We’ll pick up on this in the next post - stayed tuned, and tune in!
by Pastor Jim Anan
Elevate Church