WHY IS IT HIS STORY?

Minister from your heart. This is one of those beautiful lines I gleaned from the preacher, a Gospel Adventist preacher who came to visit our school. She visited our school to do some lectures on preaching.

Along with the Biblical and practical principles of preaching what touched my heart most is this line… MINISTER FROM YOUR HEART!

Please allow me to bring you to the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. This is an encounter wherein Jesus violated two general social taboos. Talking to a Samaritan and talking to a woman. Jesus could have taken another route because there was, but that day just that day Jesus decided to meet this woman at the well. The woman was set for a mission. Yes, her story has a big part but it will not be about her story. It was SOMEONE ELSE’S STORY.

It was the story that made her confess her faith that Jesus is the Messiah. And Jesus indeed confessed to her “I who speak to you am He.”

And the best ending of this story found in John 4:1-26 is in verses 39-42, “Then many in the village of Samaria believed in Him because of the testimony of the Samaritan woman at the well.

Exactly this is the point, MINISTER FROM YOUR HEART! However, it was not the woman’s awful past that made the people convinced, it was not how lost she was and how she was found. It was not about the woman’s story, but rather, it was CHRIST’S STORY.

The story of the Messiah who would come that will break all the cultural barriers and they will have their rights to the kingdom too. They were convicted of the words of Christ spoken through the woman that all will worship in Spirit and in Truth not just in Jerusalem where they can never go.

It was Jesus’ words of hope, acceptance, inclusion, validation, and affirmation.

Yes, friends when we minister from our hearts not with our life but with the life of Jesus and the hope of Jesus, it will be a different story. It will be His story.

The woman needed no theological training. She needed not any training. It was only an encounter with Jesus because she only needed to know what her world needed and that is HOPE IN THE MESSIAH. THAT IS MAYBE YOU HAVE IN HAND TOO.

As hopeless and as rejected as she is, is the nation she represents—Samaria. She knows the feeling of an outcast, she knows the feeling very well that people look at you like a dirty sloth, she knows the feeling so well. Yes, the Jews looks at them just exactly as her own people look at her. And when she finally found that hope of acceptance and inclusion, she was immediately healed and she could not just keep the story of the hope in Christ to herself. It didn’t matter what people will say about her talking this meeting with the Messiah. She didn’t care about rejection and seclusion because the one who owns her soul has accepted her with all HIS heart.

Friends, like this woman, God can use you and what you have been through to be the channel of hope for those people darkened by the same cloud covering your life. He can use your prison to be the channel to give hope to other prisoners. He can exactly use who you are now and where you are to PROCLAIM not your story but HIS STORY.

MINISTER FROM YOUR HEART! PASS ON THE LIGHT OF CHRIST’S SALVATION STORY!