Don’t you love a good story? I sure do. I love good movies, TV shows, books, you name it. I have a mom who instilled in me the joy of reading. She also took me to movies, starting when I was around three years old, and we’ve watched TV together for as long as I can remember. I grew up loving stories.
I also love telling stories and, by now, I have lots of personal stories to tell. Maybe too many, my kids would say. I find myself asking more often, “Have I told you this before?” And the answer is too often, “Yes.”
We each have stories to tell. You can probably look at your life up to now and say, “Let me tell you a story that’s funny,” or “Let me tell you a story where I did something great,” or even, “Let me tell you a story where I did something really dumb and it cost me.” I have plenty of those.
Up to this point in your life, you’ve also written one massive story, and you get to add to it each day. You make daily decisions that will determine the rest of your story. At the end of your life, your story will have been written by the decisions you made, good or bad.
As I think back over my life, I can see how small decisions along the way greatly impacted the direction of my life.
My first job out of college was with a large company in the textile industry. About a year after I was hired, my plant manager asked me if I knew what made me stand out above other candidates when I applied. I thought, “Was it my winning personality, high intelligence, or the college I attended?” What I said to him was that I had no idea. He told me they didn’t hire me because of my major or my grades or my college or any of the things I was thinking. They hired me at this large distribution center because of a job I had the summer before — at a distribution center.
Really? That’s it? That’s all? And what if I had done something else that summer? I had other jobs to choose from. What if I’d worked at one of those? The thing is, this first job out of college is where I met my wife, Kim. My life might have gone in a completely different direction if I’d made a different decision about one summer job.
You’re writing your story, and every decision you make becomes part of your story. Maybe you have a great story. Good for you! But, maybe you’d say that your story isn’t so good. Maybe the story you’ve written is, well, a bad one.
If your story isn’t a great one, why is that? Sometimes, it all comes down to decisions, especially ones that don’t align with the will of God as revealed in his written Word.
There are lots of stories in the Bible. God put them there for a reason, and if we pay attention as we read them, God will teach us some things about writing a good story.
One such story is in 2 Kings 17. Let’s set the stage: Israel was successful under Kings David and Solomon. After Solomon died, however, the nation split into the Northern Kingdom of Israel with ten tribes and the Southern Kingdom of Judah with two tribes. Judah had some good kings and some bad kings, but in Israel, every king was ungodly. God sent prophets to warn Israel to turn back to him, but the people ignored them.
Around 732 BC, a man named Hoshea assassinated King Pekah and took the throne himself. In verses 3-6 of 2 Kings 17, we see that Hoshea had to pay tribute to the empire of Assyria. Then, Hoshea decided to ally with Egypt and stop paying Assyria. Not a smart move. Turns out that Egypt was no match for Assyria, who swooped into Israel and captured Hoshea, leaving Israel without a leader. Assyria besieged the capital city of Samaria for three years, and when the city fell in 721 BC, Assyria deported the Israelites to other parts of the Assyrian Empire, thus detroying the Northern Kingdom of Israel.
In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria, and he carried the Israelites away to Assyria and placed them in Halah, and on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes. (2 Kings 17:6)
Why would God allow this to happen to his people?
And this occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and had feared other gods and walked in the customs of the nations whom the Lord drove out before the people of Israel, and in the customs that the kings of Israel had practiced. (2 Kings 17:7)
Israel was destroyed because the people had turned away from God and his commands. Instead of worshiping the God who brought them out of Egypt and made them a great nation, they worshipped the false gods of other cultures around them.
They had been warned.
Yet the Lord warned Israel and Judah by every prophet and every seer, saying, “Turn from your evil ways and keep my commandments and my statutes, in accordance with all the Law that I commanded your fathers, and that I sent to you by my servants the prophets.” (2 Kings 17:13)
Hosea, Amos, and Isaiah are among the prophets who repeatedly called the people to turn back to the one true God. The result?
But they would not listen, but were stubborn… (2 Kings 17:14a)
The nation of Israel refused to listen to God and instead continued to worship idols that had no power at all. According to verse 17, they even offered their children as sacrifices to their false gods. It sounds impossible for child sacrifice to happen today, but how many people have sacrificed their unborn children to their idols of freedom and convenience?
Because the people of Israel walked away from God, their drop in ethical standards quickened. This is always a natural result of drifting from God. In Israel, it was greed, oppression of the weak and poor, and immorality that became common. They continued to ignore the warnings that God sent them through his prophets. All because they forgot about the God who had called them to himself.
Somewhere along the way, the people of Israel changed their story. It may have started with only a small change, but it led them to a dark place.
Maybe you see a connection here between Israel and our nation. There are lots of similarities. But I want us to focus on the connection between Israel and us as individuals.
One small change to our story can lead us to a dark place. When we stop reading our Bibles, when we get out of the habit of prayer (except in emergencies, of course), or when we slack off on church attendance and hanging out with Christians who could hold us accountable, those are small changes to the story that can lead us away from God.
When we distance ourselves from our Father, we tend to cling to our false gods or idols. What has first place in your life? What is it that you’re worshiping? What is it that’s more important to you than your God? Maybe it’s family, or happiness, or wealth, or just being liked by others. Those can be idols if they take God’s place in your life.
Once we move away from God and replace him in our lives with our idols, that’s when our standards start to fall. It may begin with little sins. Just a tiny dishonest change on our tax return, maybe a little gossip, only a small lie. But those small changes in our story can lead to big changes in our story’s ending.
If you’ve accepted Christ, God holds you in his hands. You’re his child; that’s been settled. You can still end up in a story you never thought you’d write.
If you’re heading in the wrong direction, there’s good news. You can always get back on track. It’s never too late to turn back to your Heavenly Father and ask him to help you write a better story.
What a great story I look forward to continue reading your blog.
This is great Richard! I don’t know how I have missed your blog for so many years.
You were always a great wordsmith.