The Joy Challenge: Sunday 6th April 2014.

This morning our friend Lewis stood up in church and gave testimony. That is a very hard thing to do. It is also a very beautiful thing to do, and a very powerful one. It is always a beautifully powerful thing to see how God is moving in the lives of his people, to hear snippets of our stories as they overlap and interweave into the one great story of which we are all a part. In Revelation it says that God's people will overcome not simply by the blood of the lamb, but by the word of their testimony. (12:11) This is mind-blowing. When we stand before the throne of God, he will want to hear our story. Our story, unique, fumbling, complicated, full of accidental diversions, is part of our victory. It is part of the way in which God has chosen to transform the world and bring in the new earth. We are the children of glory dragging heaven downwards as we live out a story that no one else but us can live. Our lives are extremely important. No one else can do them as God wants them to be done. Just us. And, in that moment, when our story seems to be at an end, and we are standing before Him, we will realise that all our stories lead us to the beginning of the world's greatest tale: it is what The Last Battle calls, "Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before." Amen to that Mr C.S.Lewis. Amen to that.