What Story Are You Telling? - Thomas Barr

I got hit by a car on a bicycle. That's the text I received from my friend Jerry as we were about to have our book club that's been kind of going through the classics of literature. And as we're about to meet Jerry Texas, he can't make it because he got hit by a bicycle. And I remember, and I think this is just a guy thing, we were all so shocked that we all forgot to respond. So we just went on about discussing Charles Dickens' perception of the French Revolution and not thinking about our friend that just got hit by a car. And so the next day I'm going to work and I see a cyclist pass me and I'm like, "Oh, man, I just had a friend get hit by a car on a bike. I should reach out to Jerry." So I reach out to my friend Jerry and have lunch with him and I'm like, "Hey, man, are you okay? How are you doing? Tell me what happened." And then he told me the story. He said, "He worked up the courage one day to ride his bike to work. Most of us have had that moment. He was going to ride from Capitol Hill to Arlington without a helmet. That's bold." And I don't advise it. And it's on that route that he's riding in the bike lane. And a woman takes a ride on red when she's not supposed to. And the bike goes under her car and Jerry goes across the street. And Jerry realizes he can stand up. He's like, "Whoa, I'm good." It's a big cut on his leg, but he walks over to the car and he sees the woman. And I said, "What did you say to her? Did you go Facebook live? Did you just release your fury on her?"

And he said, "No, I walked up to the car and she was just shaking because she realized the bicycle went under her and he could have to." He said, "I walked up to her and she just kept saying, 'I don't know what I would have done. I don't know what I would have done.'" And I said, "Well, would you tell her?" And he said, "I kind of just told her about myself." I said, "Hey, I know this sounds weird, but I believe in Jesus and he's completely changed my life and I know what I would have done in this moment. I would have gone to him and have an incredible church and I would have gone to them." And if you want that, I'm actually the guy who like waves at people in the door when you come in. So that's the invitation. That's my story. And I'm sitting across the table from him at Sweet Green with like lettuce falling out of my mouth. That is not the story that would have come out of my mouth. Why mention that? Well, two things. First, if you hit a cyclist five months ago driving a car and you're here, I am so glad you took up Jerry's invitation. Shout out, Jerry. I hope you're here. Second, it made me realize it made me think when life hits me, what story comes out of me? Like life is full of pain and so something is destined to hit me and when it does, what story comes off of my lips to the person I'm standing right in front of? And even bigger question, what is my story? Because the reality is life will hit you and I hate to be a downer this morning, but it will hit you.

If you get a breakup or a betrayal, a death or a diagnosis, a mean boss or a miscarriage, unemployment or entrenchment, it will hit you. And when it does, what story comes off your lips? What is your story? As I've thought about this over the past few weeks since talking with Jerry, I realize there really are only three stories that we can all tell. There's kind of three options when you sum it down. Option one, I'm the victim. Option two, I'm the hero. Everybody look at me. Or option three, there is a hero and I'm not him, but he did something for me, so I'm a witness to him. Why mention that? Because that is Acts 22. Life smokes Paul. He hits him literally and his story comes off his lips. And I hope, I want you to think, while we're going through this passage, don't just look into his story. It's in seeing someone else's story that you see your own. And so as we're talking about it, I want you to think what story would come off my lips, to catch you up to speed, the apostle... about him. So the person who used to persecute and kill Christians is now the perclaimer of Christians. The people who hated Jesus people is now the lead Jesus person. And Paul is heading back into Jerusalem where he has been preaching the gospel to anyone and everyone, not just his Jewish buddies, but Gentiles at the ends of the earth, and he's coming back to Jerusalem. Which if you know anything about Jerusalem, it's the epicenter of Judaism. And so these people are excited about their Judaism, and they hear a rumor. And in a place where religious zeal is at its height, a rumor about a person that doesn't

care about your religion is like a match over a bunch of dry grass. And the rumor about Paul is this, he doesn't care about Judaism. He tells people to forsake Moses. And so Paul, when he gets to Jerusalem, he partakes in a purification ritual not to make himself clean before God, but just to prove to everyone around him, "Hey, I'm not anti Jewish. I'm one of you guys." And it's in that, in his act of trying to be sensitive, he gets canceled. Does that sound familiar? And this passage unfolds, and we're going to look at it through four characters. Sometimes when you watch a Netflix season, each episode will zoom in on a different character, and that's what this sermon's going to do. It's going to look at four characters. The mob, the officer, the storyteller, and the hero. The mob, the officer, the storyteller, and the hero. First, let's start with the mob. You probably remember in middle school learning about something in English class called irony. Do you remember this? Irony is when an event turns out to be the exact opposite of what you'd expect. Examples, a fire station catching on fire, a lifeguard drowning, a dentist looking into your mouth with very bad breath and cavities, Batman being chased by the cops of Gotham, Spider-Man being falsely accused by the Daily Bugle that he can no longer be trusted in New York City. Irony, when an event turns out to be the opposite of what you expected in this passage that we just read is ironic, because Paul is trying to be sensitive to his people by partaking in this purification ritual. He's like, he's trying to say, hey, hey, hey, hey, it's great. We don't need to freak out. I'm one of you, and it's in that moment that he's like, that's guy. Some Jews from Asia who know that Paul preaches to the Gentiles, grab him, stir up the crowd,

and cry out this in verse 28. Men of Israel, help. This is the man who is teaching everyone everywhere against the people in the law in this place, moreover, he even brought Greeks into the temple and has defiled this place. It's the bullies holding up the nerd on the recess playground. Everybody see this guy? We need to do something about him. And they make two accusations. They say first, he teaches everyone everywhere against our law in our temple, which was just not fully true. Paul did teach that the law can't save you, but he said all of these things, the law, the temple, Judaism, was ultimately supposed to lead you to the Christ, to Jesus. Christianity isn't anti-Judaism, it's the fulfillment of it. That's what Paul's saying. And then the second accusation is they're saying, oh, he's bringing dirty people, he's bringing Greeks into the temple, he's not supposed to do that, which was flat out thoughts. The next verse, verse 29 says, "They had previously seen Trophamis the Ephesian with him in the city, and they supposed that Paul had brought him in. They supposed. They assumed. They spun their own narrative. And we all know lies spread like wildfires when you're in a crowd, and look what happens." Verse 30, "Then all the city was stirred up, and the people ran together, and they seized Paul and dragged him out of the temple, and at once the gates were shut, and as they were seeking to kill him," it later says, "all of Jerusalem was in confusion." I want you to be a sociologist with me for a second, and look at how a mob forms. A false assumption about a true situation that is spoken loudly as if it's a fact, that emotionally stirs up the masses and leads people to violence, canceling, and confusion. Does that sound familiar? emotionally stir up parties and sides and masses, and ultimately leads to violence,

canceling, and confusion. I know that's 2,000 years ago and hard to imagine, but just imagine. A false assumption about a true situation, I was in a mob last week. I went to my alma mater's football game. I went to the University of Mississippi, and we played LSU. If you know anything about football, you know it was the most dramatic game of the year, and my wife and I are sitting in the top row, like by the toilet, because that's what we could afford. When the play happens, our team was doing so good the whole game, but then in the third quarter, we just kind of start to nosedive, and you know, I'm losing all hope, I'm moping, I'm not cheering, and then something happens, but we're so far from the field. I'm having to look at the screen every time something happens, and our quarterback gets sacked on a third down and my heart sinks, and I just hear, I didn't even see it. I heard someone from the crowd say, "Face my ass penalty!" And something just came in to me. I said, "Face mask! Are you serious ref? Do you need to go to lens crafters? What are you doing?" And all of a sudden, I realize I'm screaming to a man I don't know about a play that I did not see, because the crowds told me I should. And the funniest part is, we get home that night, and I go watch the instant replay, and there was no face mask. But I was certain I was right, because it's easy to cancel someone when you're in a crowd, especially online. Jonathan Hight, you probably know this, has written extensively about how social media platforms are essentially outrage machines, engineered to make mobs, because what algorithms do, they don't reward truth in context and nuance, they reward outrage. Think about it. The Weather Channel, if the Weather Channel put a post this morning about the DC weather

and said it's raining, that thing's not going viral. I just hate to say it, but a post about a politician having lunch with the wrong person, ooh, that is spicy. That'll get some traction. And he goes on this ride in one of his most famous pieces in the Atlantic from 2022. He says shortly after the like button began to produce data about what best engaged users. Facebook then developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a like or some other interaction, but then later research showed that post that trigger emotions, especially anger at outgroups, are the most likely to be shared. By 2013, social media had become a new game. If you were skill floor lucky, you might create a post that would go viral or make you internet famous. But if you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. This new game here this encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics. Interesting choice of word. He goes on to write about one of the engineers of the retweet button on Twitter, who later went on to regret that he helped make that think. Because of the mob dynamics it was creating, and that engineer said this, "It feels like we just handed a four-year-old a loaded weapon." The site goes on to say, "As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and politics, I saw this happening too, the newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring about our most moralistic and least reflective selves." And the volume of outrage was shocking. Hear that. The platforms were designed, the algorithms, to make our most moralistic and least reflective, our most righteous anger without reflection. It's exactly what Paul writes about these kind of people who are in this kind of mob. He says, "They have zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. They have a lot of anger, and it feels righteous and a lot of emotion, but it's not informed." How about you?

How about me? [BLANK_AUDIO] Who would I be quick to cancel if they could not see my face in the crowd? If I could hide behind some username? What am I being loud about that I actually know little about? Am I letting my media take emotionally stir me up to anger? Where am I moving with the mob? To be very frank with you, one of the most sobering moments I've had in my life came about five years when I kind of would just drown to myself in social media. There are people who can use it really well, but I just realized everything it's feeding me is just making me hum at about a seven anger level, and then the second someone did something that irritated me, I bit, and I realized the way of Jesus swims against the stream of uninformed anger, of zeal without knowledge, and when the crowd is loud, you need somebody with power to come bring it to a stop. So that brings us to the second character, the officer, the first character, the mob, now we're at the officer. In the next few verses we meet a Roman tribune named Claudius Lysius. A tribune was in charge of about a thousand men, so he's a government military worker in charge of about a thousand guards, and he gets word that Jerusalem is an uproar. There's a mob, we need to go do something about it. So they run down the mob stops because the cops are here. When they arrest and detain Paul, not because they're on the Jewish side, simply because it's like showing up to a football fighter at a tailgate party, and if there's 12 guys in purple and one guy in red, you just detain the guy in red to bring peace to the situation. So they arrest Paul, and then verse 33, then the tribune, Lysius, inquired who he was and what he had done, verse 34, some in the crowd were shouting one thing, some another, and they get this, he could not learn the facts because of the uproar. He ordered him to be brought into the barracks, Lysius inquired about Paul, he's trying to figure out who are you, what are you about, and he just can't get to the bottom of the truth because of the noise.

He's curious, but distracted, he's trying to find truth, but there's a bunch of noise, which incidentally, a lot of you relate to this on a career level because you work in the government and you're trying to bring peace to a people and it feels like when you're trying to make informed decisions, you're trying to figure out what is true and it just feels like when you step into the scenario, everything's loud, something's loud over there, something's out over there and you're just like, I just want to know it's true because I want to bring peace to these people, but also some of you relate to this on a heart level. You just want to know what's true in life. You want to know who am I? Why do I exist? Why am I here? Where am I going? Who is God? Does he even care about me? And you kind of just show up to the game and you just feel like everyone's loud and noisy and you just want to know what's true. You search something like, who is God on YouTube and chaos comes up? A bunch of thumbnails of videos that you shouldn't click on and you're just like, there's so much noise but I want to know it's true. Maybe you feel like that. Back to the story, verse 37, as Paul was about to be brought into the barracks, Paul said to the Tribune, may I say something to you? The Tribune's like, you know Greek? He spoke Greek, he thought Paul was an uneducated, rough and tough dude. He's like, are you not the Egyptian then who recently served up a revolt and led 4000 men and the assassins out in the wilderness? Paul's like, huh? He's like, are you the insurrectionist? Are you the political troublemaker? Are you the leader of the assassins?

Paul's like, no, it's not me. He said, I'm a Jew from Tarsus and Silesia, a citizen of no obscure. He's like, I'm not a fighter. I'm from DC, not Philly. We think we don't fight. He's like, I'm not that guy. I beg you, permit me to speak to the people. Will sometimes people assume the worst about the best of Christians? Yes. Will sometimes people assume the worst about your faith in Jesus? Yeah. And the mob's doing it with ill intentions and this guy's just trying to do his job. and think that is arrogant and anti-science. That is brainwashed and bigoted. That is a crutch or a consequence of colonialism. Will people say that to you? Yes. But take wisdom from Paul in this moment in the face of false assumption. When a false narrative is spun about him, he doesn't freak out, he doesn't punch back. He's steady. And that brings us to the third part of the story, the storyteller. When Paul finally gets permission to speak, he gets to speak to the mob. And you know what he doesn't do? He doesn't lash out in anger. He doesn't pull up the PowerPoint with the red laser and give three points on why they should believe

in Christianity. He doesn't give a philosophical debate. He becomes a storyteller. He tells his story. The human heart is story hungry. One of my favorite quotes in all of books is in East of Eden. John Steinbeck writes about the best character in the book. The character says, I eat stories like grapes. And the reality is we all do. My wife and I talk about this all the time. She writes speeches for the government. I write speeches for the church, church and state. Here we are. And, but we say in communicating, the best way to communicate, by far. There's no close second is telling stories. You begin to perk up when you hear someone tell a story because what stories do is they're like flight simulators. You get to enter them and see if it makes true of your own story. They allow you to try on someone else's story to see if it makes sense of your own. We begin to make sense of ourselves. We begin to find ourselves when we listen to someone else's story. It's why in Alcoholics Anonymous, they're so big on storytelling. Because the sponsor tells the person that's going through recovery,

hey, this is my story. I was right where you were. And I saw the light of the, at the end of the tunnel and I made it through. And it allows the addict to see themselves in someone else's story and see where they could perhaps go. Stories, grab the human heart. It's interesting, C.S. Lewis, the famous atheist from Oxford, when he became a Christian, his first book was not an autobiography. It was a story. It was a narrative. St. Augustine, his most famous work, the 4th century African Christian, was not one of his commentaries or philosophy books. It was his story, the confessions. And here Paul tells his story, and let's get into it. Verse one, he says, "Brothers and fathers, "hear the defense." If you have a pen, circle the defense that I now make before you. The word defense is apologia. It's where we get the word apologetics from. It's a defense. He's trying to prove Christianity is true and real. And notice he doesn't do it with a sermon. He does it with his story. Sometimes the best way you can defend Christianity isn't by giving him five points that all rhyme.

That's by telling him your story. Verse two, and when they heard that he was addressing them in the Hebrew language, they became even more quiet. He starts talking in their lingua franca and they're like, oh, he's one of us. Let's listen. Verse three, "I'm a Jew, born in Tarsus of Stylicia, "but brought up in the city and educated "at the feet of Gamalayo," which is exactly how you tell your story. I was born here, grew up here, and went to school there. And he says, being brought up in the city, educated at the feet of Gamalayo, according to the strict manner of the law of our fathers, being zealous for God as all of you are this day. He puts himself right by them. He's like, I was exactly where you were. You feel passionate about your religion. You feel zealous about your religion. That was me, right there. I was right in your seat. But then he says, I was even more than you. You feel righteous anger right now. I had more of it. You feel zeal? I had more of it than you. Verse four, "I persecuted this way to the death. "I had people killed because of my anger." Verse five, "As the high priest and the whole council "the elders can bear witness about me."

He's like, you want proof? Go ask that guy right there. He gave me the letter to do it. And if you're standing in the crowd, listening, you're thinking, well, what on earth happened to you, brother? You're on the other side. This is like, one time a few years ago, a girl ran into me at church from my high school and she said, Thomas, church, what are you doing here? And I said, I work here. She said, you work at a church? And I had to share the story. And so Paul tells the story of what changed. Verse six, "As I was on my way in June near to Damascus "to punish Christians, about noon a great light "from heaven suddenly shone around me, "and I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" And I answered, "Who are you, Lord?" And he said to me, "I'm Jesus of Nazareth, "whom you are persecuting." Notice when Paul tells his conversion story, his testimony, he's not the hero. He was like, "I was actually on the way "to persecute Christians. "I was going completely against Christianity "when Christ came to me." That means the hero of his conversion is not him because he got smart enough or became good enough person or starting to go to church enough.

He was like, "I was completely against it "and Jesus rescued me." Jesus was the hero of his conversion and that means salvation is by grace alone. Do you see that? In 1959, a 17-year-old Australian gang leader, George Palmer, had the idea of assassinating Billy Graham at one of his crusades and they were gonna go down at the moment of the altar call and perform the act and it was while he was listening to the sermon, while he had come to destroy Christians. That he heard the gospel and it utterly changed his heart and he went down and gave his life to Jesus. It's almost like the gospel is for sinners and enemies and people like Paul. But you know what this also means? As he's speaking to the mob crowd, he's saying it's possible to be very religious and very emotional about your religion and be against Jesus. It's possible to look very religious and very moral in Jesus be utterly against you. But he won't come to crush you. He'll come to save you. Then Paul adds a fascinating detail in verse nine. This is cool. Now those who are with me saw the light but did not understand the voice of the one who was speaking to me. He adds this detail because he's trying to add credibility

to his conversion. It wasn't an inner psychic experience where he took some mushrooms and went into a cave and he's like Jesus is Lord. He's like people were there. People saw the same things I saw. They heard the same things I heard. Is it possible for two people to sit in the exact same church seat and hear the exact same sermon about the exact same verses and sing the exact same songs and one person go home radically changed while another doesn't. Yes? It's why Jesus, it always cracks me up when Jesus would say something and says ends it with saying who has ears? Let him hear. And I'm like they all had ears Jesus. Because there's a kind of hearing that's beneath the hearing. There's a kind of seeing that's beneath the seeing. Does it just move through your brain or does it seep down into your heart? And for Paul when Jesus came on onto the road he didn't just see a light. He saw the revelation of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Then he continues verse 11 and it was blind. I could not see because of the brightness of that light.

I was led by the hand by those who were with me and came into Damascus and one man in an eye, as a devout man. According to the law well spoken of by the Jews who lived there. I met a guy when I got there who was one of you. He's speaking to the mob. He's like one of your Jewish men. I met him and three things happened. A, he healed me. So are you gonna say I'm against the God of your fathers? If the God of your fathers through one of your people healed me? And then two, God called Paul through Ananias. Verse 14, Ananias said the God of our fathers has appointed you Paul to know his will to see the righteous one and to hear a voice from his mouth. For you will be a witness for him to everyone of what you have seen and heard. And then third, Ananias says to him, I love this verse 16. Why are you wait? Why do you wait? Get up and get baptized brother. Wash away your sins and call on the name of Jesus. The dominant term there is calling on the name of Jesus which that's just an expression for turning to Jesus and trusting him. And when you do that, your sins will be washed away. And you can't help but think about

what Paul's thinking about in this moment. This is a guy who is responsible for men dying. He's got that sin on his shoulders. He's got that kind of guilt. What kind of guilt do you have? Maybe you've done some things that have hurt some people and you're just like he wouldn't wash that clean. Here, Ananias stands in front of him and says, "Brother, call on his name. You'll be washed clean and get baptized." Not because baptism saves you, but because it's a picture of water washing off what is dirty. Then in verse 17, Paul tells how he returned to Jerusalem and prayed and then Jesus appeared to him in a vision and says, "Paul, you've got to get out of Jerusalem." And then I love this every time Jesus calls someone to do something or God calls someone to do something. There's always a protest. Paul's like, "But this would be such a good idea. If I stayed here and I preached here, it would be so believable, Jesus. I have so much credibility here. I should stay here." And just like, "No, we're going this way." And sometimes it's like that in life. When you're like, "God, it makes so much sense for me to go over here. We're rent is so much cheaper, but you're going here. I'm going to make you the guy who, 2,000 years later, people are still studying your word on a Sunday in 2026, a way to the Gentiles is where you'll go." That's Paul's story, who he was before Jesus, his conversion, who he was after Jesus and where he was going. Popcorn you. What's your story?

Where were you before Jesus? When did you meet him? Where's he got you going now? What's your story? It's worth thinking about. Because one day you'll have an Uber driver turn around and they'll say, "Tell me about yourself." And you'll want to tell him a story. One day you'll have kids and they'll get to 10 years old and they'll say, "Dad, tell me about your story. Who are you?" And you'll want to know your story. You'll want to know your testimony because there are only three stories you can tell. I'm the victim, I'm the hero, or I've witnessed the hero and that's the Christian story. If I could just give you four applications when you tell your story, four things that will help you. This is what Paul does and I promise I did not use Jim and I or Claude or anything, but all the words start with C, I just came up with it. First, connect on common ground. Speak their language. Don't make yourself be on this high horse and them down there. Connect with them. That's what Paul does. He speaks their language. He talks about how he's been where they've been. This is what Alcoholics Anonymous teaches, sponsors, when they're sharing their story is don't look down on the addict that you're talking to. Get right there with them. Share their desires. Tell them how you've been right where they've been.

You've felt their zeal. You've felt their pain. You've felt their hope. That's one. Connect on common ground. Two is credit Christ. If salvation is by grace alone, don't say, "You know, I finally got smart enough and just decided to become a Christian or decided to be a good person and then Jesus gave me a little golf clap and here I am." That's the opposite of Christianity. Credit Christ for your conversion. If I could just add, a lot of people will say, "I don't have a story to tell because I grew up in a Christian home and I can't remember a time when I was not Christian." What I say to you is credit Christ. Credit Christ that he put you in a family where every day someone was laying the gospel before you so you could believe in it. Credit Christ. Three, contain credibility. Contain credibility. Pause transformation wasn't just a private psychological moment. He grounds his story in objective facts. Others saw the light. Ananias was there. When you tell your story, maybe you had a moment during a song of a service years ago. Maybe you heard something in a sermon that clicked with you and you're just describing your subjective experience which is helpful but if it's not grounded in objective truth, it can be hard for the person to see themselves in. Does that make sense? So say when you tell them your experience but also tell them Jesus actually existed and Jesus actually claimed to be God and he actually died on a cross claiming that it was for sins

and he actually according to people rose from the dead. And then tell your subjective story with that objective truth. Does that make sense? That helps people when you're sharing your story. Fourth is clarify calling. And why you are where you are. That's what Paul does. This is why I do X and why I don't do Y because Jesus has utterly changed my life. So four things, connect on common ground, credit Christ, contain credibility, and clarify calling. Too many C's, I'm sorry. The last character, the hero, the mob, the officer, the storyteller, and the hero. Verse 22, up to this word, they listened to him and they raised their voices and said, "Away, it was such a fella from the earth, "for you should not be allowed to live." And then they shouted and threw off their cloaks and flinging up dust in the air. And up to this word, what was the word? Gentiles. Paul said, "God's grace goes to the outsider, "to the person you don't like, "to the person who you don't think should be included." Sometimes when you tell your story of how big the grace of God is, it'll be offensive. If you have a prejudice against a kind of person or a kind of group, then the idea that a God would come and die for them is offensive.

So you don't want them all, but you tell your story. And the officer sees that the mob's going on, so he orders Paul to go back into the barracks to be flogged, which was a whip with metal and bones in the end of it, and they'd hit you with it and it'd rip off your skin. They're doing that to try to get the truth out of them, because this is just a crazy situation. And so they stretch Paul out to be whipped. And in verse 25, he turns around and says, "Is it lawful for you to flog a man "who's a Roman citizen and uncondemned?" And they go, "Hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up." You're a Roman citizen? At that time, it was a legal, almost illegal and punishable by death. If you were caught flogging a Roman citizen for no reason, and Paul just pulls out the ultimate Trump card passport and it's like, "Tada, you can't do this to me." Tribune runs over, realizes and they put a pause, stop. Everybody stop, make sure this guy's safe. Who's the hero? Is it Paul who had the wisdom just at the right time to pull out his passport and say, "Hey, hey." Is it the Roman officers who used the legal system to help an innocent guy out of a hard situation? Who's the hero? What if the hero is beneath it all? What if the hero was the same God that rescued Paul on the road to Damascus? What if the hero was the God who decided

that Paul would be born right here decades ago so that he would have a Roman citizenship so that just the right time he would be preserved? What if the hero of every page of the Bible isn't this character, that character, but is God? And what if the hero of your story isn't you or isn't the mentor or isn't the preacher but is God underneath it all? What if the hero underneath every story is him? What if he's playing chess while we're all just playing checkers? What if God's the hero you've been looking for your whole life? And some of you hear that and you think God hasn't showed up in my life, he's not my hero, I haven't seen one bit of it. And if you listen to anything, hear this. There's a parallel to this passage. Paul was falsely accused by some zealous religious men. There was another guy decades earlier who was falsely accused by some zealous religious men. Paul was shouted at by an angry mob away with him. He doesn't deserve to exist decades earlier. There was a guy named Jesus who a mob looked at and says away with him, crucify him. Paul was stretched out for whips but at just the right time he turned around and he claimed his rights and he escaped the flogging. But decades earlier, there was a guy named Jesus who claimed to be your hero. And when he was stretched out for whips, he didn't claim his rights.

He could have, he was the king of heaven, he could have called down a bunch of angels to wreck havoc. He could have demanded his rights before the universe and walked away clean but he didn't. He stayed, he didn't open his mouth, he took the whips, he took the cross, he took the nails, he took it all. When he could have left, why? Because by giving up his life, he might save yours. What if that's the hero of your story? And that's the pivot point of your story. So when a woman hits you on a ride on red on traffic, that's what comes out of your mouth. Because there's only three stories to tell. I'm the victim. I'm the hero. Or I've met the hero. I'll end with this story. In 1850, a 30-year-old walked and stood at the back of a church in New York City. She was blind since nearly birth because of an infection she got in her eye as a child. She grew up around church, but she was in this one gathering, and she couldn't see, so she couldn't take in the visuals, but she could take in the sounds, and there was something about a hymn that spoke of the grace of God coming for someone like her. And you just have to think of all the bitterness and all the frustration and all the anger that she carried for her whole story. And here she was at 30 sitting in the back of the room, and the gospel landed on her. And she went down and turned and trusted Jesus and said it was as if I saw light for the first time. Her name was Fanny Crosby, and she went on to use her poetry and songwriting,

and she would influence even us today. And maybe you know this one. Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine. Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine, air of salvation, purchase of God, born of His Spirit, and washed in His blood. This is my story. This is my song. Praising my Savior all the day long. This is my story, and this is my song. Praising my Savior all the day long. What's your story? What is it? Praising my Savior all the day long. You