As a story coach, I help others tell their stories. I’ve served in this role as a professional and as a volunteer for a ministry that works with women coming out of human trafficking, as a Bible teacher helping young college-age women use their stories to reach their peers for Jesus, and as a friend, sharing coffee. All with the goal of helping women reduce their lifetime of testimonies down to a shareable size. Some stories are so hard we have to walk through them very slowly, one tearful step at a time, while others are a delight from beginning to end. However, they all need to have one thing in common when shared for God’s purposes—He needs to be the hero of every story told on His behalf. That is the only way to share a God story well.
Scripture gives us a model of how to do this with the story of the woman at the well in John 4. What did the Samaritan woman do?
1. She spent time with Jesus.
She brought her confusion, her doubt, her circumstances, and her sin to Him. This is what prayer does in our lives. It puts us in a posture of humility before we step into the spotlight and gives God the chance to do as Psalm 51:10-13 says, “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me. Then I will teach transgressors your ways and sinners will turn back to you.”
2. She let God tell her who she was.
She was someone worthy of his attention (John 4:7 & 10), whose circumstances He could use for His glory (vs. 13-14), and whose sin He could overcome (vs. 16-17). Hard circumstances and embarrassing sin are often the lens we look through when trying to tell our story, but God sees things so differently. He looks through the lens of love and loves what He sees. This should free us.
3. She left many of the details with God.
“Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, ‘Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?’” (vs. 28-29). The water jar represented her struggle and her journey to Him, but it wasn’t the most important part of her story. The details of our story are so important to us and to God and we can talk to Him about them over and over, but we need to choose how to share them carefully or they can become a distraction to the listening or reading audience.
4. She began her story with Jesus.
“He told me everything I ever did.” (vs. 39) The “I” part is the illustration; the story is about Jesus.
5. She shared what she knew.
It’s so easy to think we need perfect, practiced words or years of study and accumulated Bible knowledge, but God wants to start with the story we have right now. The woman at the well met Jesus very briefly and it changed her life, that was what she knew and it was enough.
6. She pointed the crowd to Jesus.
“We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man is the Savior of the world.” (vs. 42).
7. She left the results to Jesus.
This is often the hardest part.
At the end of every story there is a question I ask myself and those I work with, “Who will get the glory?” If it’s me, my circumstances, or my sin I need to start over, pray through Psalm 51:10-13, and rest in the confidence that God can tell His own story very well, but thank Him that He uses such ordinary broken vessels to do it—and when He does, it is well with my story!
