“King Asa did what was good and right in the eyes of the Lord his God... (2 Chronicles 14:2)  In the thirty-ninth year of his reign Asa was afflicted with a disease in his feet. Though his disease was severe, even in his illness he did not seek help from the Lord, but only from the physicians. Then in the forty-first year of his reign Asa died and rested with his ancestors. (2 Chronicles 16:12-13)

I read these words the other week and was struck by just how vastly different the start of Asa’s life was compared to the ending. 

Asa lived most of his life as a faithful, God-honoring king.  He tore down idols, brought much needed religious reform, and again, and again, we’re told how he sought after the Lord.  However, after one little mishap towards the end of the life, we read of that in his last days, the King was crippled by a foot disease, unwilling to call out to God. 

Out of nowhere, Asa’s life comes to a tragic, uneventful end.

There is no shortage of these kinds of stories in the scriptures.

David defeats Goliath, restores the kingdom of Israel, is described as a man after His own heart only to see his leadership derailed by an affair.  By the end of his life however, he’s a fraction of the man he once was, his family torn apart from within by his own children.

Moses frees the people of Israel from Egypt, leads them through the waters, brings them before the Lord, mediates God’s covenant them with them, and then in a fit of anger, breaks God’s command and dies on the edge of the promise land, never entering the land of promise after 40 years of wandering.

Not every story ends this way, but so many of them do. 

Underwhelming

Unsatisfying

Unfinished

It makes me wonder, “Is that it?  Did I miss something?  Is that how the story really ends?”

Most of us have been conditioned to expect the happy ending.  The girl gets the boy, the bad guy is defeated, good triumphs over evil, and “they all lived happily ever after.”

As much as we enjoy the climactic, commercial endings of favorite movies and films, we’d do well to remember those stories are fiction – that’s not how life often ends.  Rather than giving us some manufactured version of ‘happy ever after’, the Bible invites us into the lives of real people who really lived in this real world – not some made up one. 

But these open-ended, somewhat disappointing stories point to an even more important reality.  These stories end, unsatisfyingly and seemingly incomplete, because these men and women were never the heroes of their own stories.  Their works, their efforts, their accomplishments were never meant to be the climax.  These stories feel unfinished because there was still One yet to come, who from a Roman cross would cry out, “It is finished.” 

In the book of Hebrews, we read story after story of Biblical powerhouses, men and women whose stories have captured generations of imaginations only to read that all these people, “were commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.” (Hebrews 11:39-40)

Did you catch that middle part?

“…God had planned something better….”

Jesus is the better plan.  Jesus is the better story. 

When we realize that we are not the heroes of our own stories, but are instead, men and women caught up in a story bigger and more beautiful than anything we could come up with on our own, we are free to live freely in fellowship with the God who is a better author than we could ever hope to be. 

Look, I have no idea where you’re at in your story as you read this. 

I have no idea as to whether everything is coming together or falling apart.

But I do know this, whenever we confuse our story for the Story, we’re prone to become one of three things: 

·       Anxious for what will be 

·       Angry at how things are or have unfolded

·       Arrogantly thinking we alone are the source of our successes 

I’m not sure if any of these words – anxious, angry, arrogant – describe your present emotional state, but if they do, there’s a good chance you have overemphasized your story, your work, your efforts, your role, over and above the ‘better’ God has planned for you and for me. 

The bottom line is that if you’re reading this, clearly, your story isn’t over yet.  So, you have a decision to make.  You can choose to see yourself as the author of your own story, one that literally and figuratively ends with you.  Or you can allow yourself to get caught up in a story so big and a God so good, that even death can’t bring that story to end. 

Right after the author of Hebrews spoke of the “better plan”, they followed it up with these words from Hebrews 12:1-3:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles.  And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.  For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.

Now that is a story worth telling.  Even more so, that is a story worth living for. 

So, may we set our eyes on Jesus and go live the better story.