Letting God Rewrite the Text of Our Lives

God rewrote the text of my life
when I opened the book of my heart to his eyes

(Psalm 18:24, The Message).

I seldom use The Message for personal Bible study or quotes, but when I came across the above phrase, the writer in me responded with a hearty “Yes!”

Can anyone relate? Have you ever caught yourself bumbling along, trying to orchestrate your life, order your steps, direct your future—and then stopped and asked yourself, “What was I thinking?”

We are not the captain of our own ship or the master of our own fate, but we sure act like it sometimes, don’t we? Oh, I know, before we become Christians we actually believe that we are and live accordingly. Then we come face to face with the Savior, turn our lives over to Him, and we never make that foolish mistake again. Right?

Well, theoretically, we don’t. And most of the time, not intentionally. But unless I’m different than every other believer on planet earth, we do slip into that faulty thinking on occasion. And oh, what a mess we can make of things! Those self-written chapters of our lives are made up of text we’d like to delete, aren’t they?

Psalm 8:24 holds the secret to the edit button. Though we can’t go back and erase what we’ve already written, if we will be honest with God about the foolishness and regret in our heart, He can (and will) rewrite the text of our lives. Though the sins and mistakes of the past may still have consequences today, we can be assured that the God of the universe will somehow bring good out of even the worst pages of our past.

As a writer, I know how easy it is to go off on a self-imposed tangent, to become distracted and get off-track. The result is poorly written material and lots of wasted time. But just as God has so graciously redeemed my poor writing and wasted time, so He will redeem and rewrite the text of our lives if we will just open our hearts to him and allow Him to finish our book for us.

He is, after all, the Author and Finisher of our faith.