We have an opportunity to look beyond ourselves and participate on God’s story  —  if we just keep the spotlight on Him. What God produces can be nothing less than an epic adventure with plenty of twists and turns.

Rick Duncan,  founding pastor and pastor of Missional Living and Leadership Development at Cuyahoga Valley Church in Broadview Heights, Ohio, likens God’s story to a Hollywood production. Here are some key observations he shared with the congregation:

“It’s God’s story and you’re invited.

“You can trade your mourning for a beautiful headdress. You can trade your wickedness for God’s righteousness. You can trade your miserable future for God’s favor. You can trade you’re worrying for rejoicing. You can trade your shame and your dishonor for a double blessing of everlasting joy. I mean, all of those trades are amazing. Who wouldn’t want to get in on that? I want in on that.”

Rick based much of the teaching on Isaiah 61:8-9, which conveys God’s love for believers and His promises to be with them:

“For I the Lord love justice;
    I hate robbery and wrong;
I will faithfully give them their recompense,
    and I will make an everlasting covenant with them.
Their offspring shall be known among the nations,
    and their descendants in the midst of the peoples;
all who see them shall acknowledge them,
    that they are an offspring the Lord has blessed.”

“It’s like He’s bending over backwards to remind us that it’s about Him. It’s not about us. This is really not about me. I’m not the point. He’s the point. This is what gives my life significance and meaning. This is what makes my life magnificent and not forgettable because I’m part of His story.

“Do you understand that every single day you are invited to spend time with this infinitely creative writer, director, composer, producer, editor and star? Every day you can spend time with the Lord, our restorer. And how often do we run right out the door and leave Him sitting in the living room day after day after day after day after day? It’s crazy.

“If I just spend time with this amazing, creative, awesome, stupendous, magnificent, eternal, writer, director, composer, and author, then my life starts to make a lot more sense.

“And the sad thing is, there are some people … who aren’t in on it because you’ve been dabbling with Jesus, playing with church, keeping Jesus at arm’s length: ‘I don’t know. It might cramp my style.’ I’m saying, as long as you keep Jesus away, you don’t enter this story. And your life will end as a miserable, forgettable, myopic nothing. Enter His story. You say, ‘How do I do that?’ It’s through embracing Christ… Say, ‘I want Jesus to come into my heart and life and be my Lord and Savior.’

“If that’s you…then the invitation is strong and clear. It is a loving, powerful, caring, magnificent, eternal, significant invitation where you can come and be part of this grand story of God. Would you say ‘yes’ today?”