I love this song by Francesca Battistelli, “Write Your Story“.

I love that the story of salvation, of redemption, is the story of God’s amazing and superlative love story of His absolutely perfection desiring to shares Himself – in all His resplendent and majestic SELF – with the “crown of His creation”, man. And yet, the history of God’s self-revelation through the Judean-Christian scriptures, reveal that the crown of His creation could not get Him.

He then chose to enter our story on earth. He chose in His grace to enter our messed-up lives with His love. The gospel of John, all 21 chapters of this self-revelation of God, reaches its apex in the person of Jesus Christ. As the first chapter of John’s gospel reveals, God was in Christ, the Divine Logos existing in eternity with God, and entering into history, to give a lost race a gracious opportunity to be reclaimed by His grace, and experience again the Paradise Lost in the garden story of Genesis chapter 3, with the Paradise Regained in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

God reveals Himself through the person of the carpenter from Galilee who goes on from His divine conception and birth, to reveal through His words and works, the unmistakable characteristics and attributes of divinity.

His person and works of grace then inexorably draws so many into His story. God in the person and work of Christ on the cross, resurrection, and ascension to the right hand of glory, now invites His creation to participate in a personal way to make His story theirs too. Martin Luther, the Reformer from Saxony, Germany, understood this participation so well. His life consisted of him partaking of Christ in “theosis”, the “cementing” of the new creation self with Christ. And by faith, Luther, in his living relationship with the Living Logos, changed the course of history by surrendering his own story of monkishness to the story of matchless grace of Christ.

Like Luther, a new narrative awaits all who hears His gospel call of grace to let Him write His story upon their hearts with a new story of hope arising out of the messed-up vignettes of our lives.

In the place of shame, regret and fear, Jesus shares God’s acceptance, acknowledgement, affirmation and affection with us. In the place of the countless counterfeits of “godness” we heap to ourselves, which lets us down repeatedly, Jesus offers the sweetness of a genuine and authentic relationship with Him by faith through His word of the truth of the gospel of grace.