Notes of Faith November 5, 2026
I will continue to post the link to the “Go Fund Me” account for our friend, John Belle who lost his brother earlier this year and his mother last week, now alone, trying to continue to live in very expensive California. Thank you to those who have already helped and thank you to those who are going to. His current need is great, but God is helping us to help him make choices, that, although he will have to move to survive financially, he should be able to keep his job and have enough to make it from day to day. Again, I thank you and pray that your reward in heaven is multiplied greatly!
The Power of Your Story
When You Don't Like Your Story
Poor Daddy. He just couldn’t shake it. Shame weighed him down like a dead body strapped to his back. No matter how many times I told him that God loved and accepted him just the way he was, he couldn’t believe it. That kind of grace was unfathomable, unthinkable, unbelievable... especially for a man like him.
I grew up in a home that was filled with angry outbursts, violent arguments, alcohol-induced mayhem. My dad was an emotionally active volcano with occasional periods of dormancy. My mom was a bitter and wounded woman who sometimes had stretches of sweet normalcy. I was just scarred and scared.
But God. Don’t you just love those two words? When I was fourteen years old, a woman in my neighborhood took me by the hand and heart and lead me to Jesus. Three years later, my mom made a decision to follow Christ as well.
But what about my dad? He had many vices. Alcohol, pornography, gambling, and illicit relationships with other women—all common knowledge in the small town where we lived. The drinking and physical violence stopped after my mom became a Christian. And even though he agreed to go to church with us, dad was convinced he could never become a Christian.
“I’ve done too many bad things,” he explained. “God could never forgive a man like me. I could never be good enough.”
And even though we assured him that God could and would forgive him—that Jesus came because none of us could ever be good enough, dad couldn’t understand that kind of grace.
I love these words of Jesus,
My Father is always working; and so am I. — John 5:17
Our limited vision doesn’t allow us to see God’s strategic maneuvering, but we must believe that He is working still. And even though it may appear that everything is falling apart, it could be that the pieces are actually falling into place. That’s where the story picks up several years later.
Six years after I came to Christ, my dad was facing a lawsuit and ruin in our small town. On the verge of a nervous breakdown, he climbed in his car and drove from North Carolina to Pennsylvania to try and find my mom who was attending a business meeting. It was then that God dipped His pen in the inkwell of grace and continued writing one of His best stories ever.
Unable to find my mom, he stopped by a random church. “Is the preacher here?” he pled. “I need someone to pray for me!”
“I’m sorry,” the receptionist replied. “He’s not in at the moment. But I know a pastor who is out in the woods doing some construction on his new church building.” The receptionist grabbed a scrap piece of paper and drew a simple map. “Why don’t you drive on over and find him? I bet he can help.”
Dad jumped back in his car and followed the hand-drawn directions to a construction site out in the country. There he found a man with a hammer in his hand and Jesus in his heart. “Can you pray for me,” Dad begged.
“Let’s sit down on this log,” the paster began. “Now, tell me what’s going on.”
For several hours, Dad sat with this stranger and confessed all he had ever done. When he finished his long litany of offenses, the pastor placed his strong arm around my dad’s shaking shoulders. “Now, Allan,” he began, “let me tell you what I’ve done. You see, I was a man much like you.”
The pastor pulled back the curtain on his own dark past and followed with the subsequent unfolding of forgiveness, redemption, and healing from Jesus.
That day, my dad and a pastor whom I’ll never know knelt in the woods of Pennsylvania and prayed. My dad walked into those woods believing he was beyond redemption and walked out knowing he was forgiven.
What turned him around? My father had met a man just like him. His gaping wounds met the balm of grace through a man who was willing to reveal the most despicable parts of his own story, and how God forgave him and set him free.
When Dad came home, he explained it this way: “That man told me his story. He had done everything I had done. And I knew that if God could forgive him and he could be a pastor, then he could forgive me too.”
I’ve often wondered what would have happened if that pastor had read a bible verse, said a prayer, and sent him on his way? The verse would have been true. The prayer would have been powerful. But it was the pastor’s story that helped my father believe the grace of God could be true for him too. His story that made all the difference.
God comforts us to make us comfort-able… able to comfort someone else.
The Power of Your Story
Your Story Has the Potential to Open Someone’s Spiritual Eyes to See Jesus
Telling what God has done in your life makes you relatable and God visible to those who hear it. That’s what happened with the man born blind that Jesus healed recorded in John 9. When the people asked how he received his sight. The man essentially said, “I was sitting on the side of the road. A man named Jesus came by. He spit in the dirt, put mud on my eyes, and told me to wash in the pool of Siloam. I did what He said and now I can see!”
When the Pharisees later asked how he received his sight, he repeated the same story. Eventually he summed it up with these unforgettable sords:
One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see! — John 9:25
People can argue about theology, genealogy, or eschatology, but they can’t deny what God has done in someone’s life. Other’s opinions about God can’t stand up to your experience with God. Your story is evidence of God’s power of on earth. When Jesus heals our hurts, binds our brokenness, and miraculously redeems our messiness, the work of God is displayed in our lives.
With the blind man, it had nothing to do with the dirt. It had everything to do with what Jesus did with the dirt. And that’s the same for you and me. Don’t underestimate what Jesus can do with the dirt. The very place you wish you could erase may become the place where someone else see Jesus most clearly.
Your Story Has the Power to Defeat the Power of the Enemy
But there’s someone who doesn’t want you to tell your story. Revelation 12:11 says,
They triumphed over him [the devil] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.
Think about that. Your story of redemption has so much power that it is in the same sentence with “the blood of the Lamb.”
No wonder the devil wants us to keep our stories buried in shallow graves of bitterness, resentment, and shame. He knows that the moment we push back the dirt to reveal what God has done, resurrection power will be released.
Chains will fall.
Broken hearts will mend.
Shame will flee.
Bitterness will cease.
Souls will be saved.
The story the enemy wanted to use to destroy you can become the story God uses to deliver someone else. Your testimony is not simply a record of what you’ve been through. It’s a declaration of what God has brought you through. It’s a divine weapon that has the power to defeat the devil.
Your Story Has the Purpose of Giving Hope to the Hurting.
Paul wrote,
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. — 2 Corinthians 1:3–4, emphasis added
So that. Circle it. Underline it. Live it.
God doesn’t just comfort us to make us comfortable. He comforts us to make us comfort-able… able to comfort someone else. When you share how God met you in your struggle, when you courageously and appropriately tell the truth about your pain, you give someone else permission to believe there might be hope for her story too.
No one can comfort someone with cancer like someone else who has also heard the word malignant from a doctor’s diagnosis.
No one can comfort the parent of a prodigal like another parent who has also worn knees raw praying for her child to come home.
No one can comfort an abandoned wife like another woman who has also watched her husband walk out the door.
No one can comfort a woman who’s experiencing infertility or the loss of a child like someone who has also felt the pain of empty arms and knows the comfort of Jesus.
You may never know the why of a painful chapter of your story. But you can experience the how of redemption when you share how God got you through the valley, over the mountain, out of the fire. If you are willing, your wounds can become the source of your greatest strengths. Your worst chapters can become your greatest victories.
That pastor in the Pennsylvania woods probably had no idea how far the ripple of his story would travel. He simply sat on a log beside a desperate man and courageously said, “Let me tell you what God did for me.”
And because he did, my dad found Jesus.
Perhaps that is the invitation for you as well.
Written for Devotionals Daily by Sharon Jaynes, author of When You Don't Like Your Story.
God has written the story of your spiritual journey in the Book of Life. You are living it out. And He is continually working in your life even after you come to faith in Him. He is working to make you more and more like His Son, Jesus!
May we all be willing to share our journey of faith that others might see the truth and power of God to change lives, that seeks the love of God through the intimacy of prayer, our Bibles, the fellowship of other believers in Jesus and sees the world from God’s perspective and loves it as God does!
Pastor Dale