Real-life Action Heroes

   Tom Cruise didn’t invent the dazzling smile in defiance of hopeless circumstances. God did. Arnold Schwarzenegger was not the first to exude confidence in a life-and-death conflict. That was God. Russell Crowe’s indomitable spirit in the face of extreme danger? Mel Gibson’s fearlessness in battle? Yep. God’s too! Our God invented the super conquering life. He raised up the original bigger-than-life action heroes.
   Throughout the centuries, God has been in the business of building astonishing lives, lives that “by faith conquered kingdoms, performed acts of righteousness, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, from weakness were made strong, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight.”
   But somehow, we Christians lost our once-great passion for the impossible. And in so doing we stopped expecting our God to be the God of the impossible.
   But what is a movie without a conflict? Where’s the drama without a mountain of impossibility to climb? For life to be fully lived, it must wrestle the impossible and win. For life to be fully lived, the God of the impossible must be fully trusted with the writing of the script.
   God wants to blow our minds with His crazy plot turns and last-minute heroics. Instead, we have settled for ordinary lives written by ordinary human hands—life as a cheap and boring counterfeit of what we could be.
   As little kids we didn’t aspire to be a business executive, we wanted to be CIA operatives, Jedi masters, samurai warriors, and the list will go on and on. And deep down we still do! We want to be someone who makes the difference.
   I believe God wants our lives to display a little more cinematic magic and a little less mediocrity. I don’t mean lives without problems but, lives overcoming problems.
   God designed us to become true modern-day heroes—men and women who are devoted, courageous, fearless, immovable, and marked with uncompromised integrity. God is in the business of making heroes: heroes that Hollywood is incapable of imagining. He is in the business of writing amazing scripts for our lives. Not Hollywood scripts but heavenly scripts that shape us into His real-life action heroes.