490 Your Rescue Story

You have a rescue story. A story of what could have been, but you were miraculously rescued from it. A story of a path you were on, then an intersection that changed everything. A story of despair, now exchanged for a story of hope. This is your rescue story. Some mornings I wake up with a song stuck in my head, singing it over and over again. Typically that’s how I know the direction for the devotional. And it’s funny, I typically don’t get it for the first 30 minutes of the morning while the same lyrics run through my head. Then it’s like a lightbulb moment …. Oh, that’s what you want me to talk about today … I gotcha God! So, what did I wake up singing this morning? Zach William’s ‘Rescue Story’. You were the voice in the desert Calling me out in the dead of night Fighting my battles for me You are my rescue story Lifted me up from the ashes Carried my soul from death to life Bringing me from glory to glory You are my rescue story We all have a rescue story. A story of what God saved us from. Some of us know the story because we came dangerously close to the other side of it. We danced with the devil. We battled in the darkness. We hid in shame. We watched life crumble and we stood in the wreckage. Today when we look back, we have no doubt God swooped in and straight up rescued us. Those are the people I like to stand next to in Church. You know why? Because they KNOW they owe everything to Jesus, and they hold nothing back. They have a full surrender to God because they remember that stripped down place where they were nothing without him. Their rescue story is written all over them! And when someone knows they have been rescued, they live with a gratitude for freedom like none other. And then there’s people like me. People who have no tattoos to tell the story. No apparent scars from the struggle. No poignant moment where Jesus and his angels held back the demons of hell in the battle over me. There’s no clearly marked path of destruction I’ve ever wandered my way down, in desperate need of a rescue or I would never come back. So, what’s my rescue story? Is that you too? The girl without a real rescue story? We tread dangerous ground … the ground where our track record may make us feel puffed up and self-righteous … the ground where we may forget our inherent need of a savior. Let me speak to the fairly successful, pretty well put together, 90% of the time goody goody. (Hey, I can say that because that’s the class I would typically fit in, so hold the hate mail.) Are you listening my fellow goody goody? YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT GOD HAS SAVED YOU FROM! Romans 3:10-12 puts us back in our rightful place “None is righteous, no, not one. No one understands, no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless and no one does good.” Your wayward path may look like more like mine … the path that says “hey I’ve got this, I can do it on my own.” The path that tells us we’ve got what it takes and we forget that actually, NO YOU DON’T GIRL … YOU ARE NOTHING WITHOUT GOD. The path with countless accolades that tells you you’ve earned this with your hard work, good looks and raw talent. Girl, sit down! It could all be stripped away today, then what? You’re entitled to nothing. Everything you have came first through the hands of God. Remember that time when you stumbled and you struggled? Remember when your path to success had a roadblock and you got all frustrated in your delay, blaming people for holding you back and being all jealous of you? Ahhhhhh, want to know what REALLY may have been happening? Your rescue story. You may have been going 100 miles per hour on a collision course with disaster,