By: Pastor Jarren Rogers

“We face death, but thanks to Jesus, we only face its shadow.” – Max Lucado

I love movies. If you came to my wife and my apartment, your eye would quickly be drawn to two large bookshelves that are weighed down with tons of movies. They are sorted alphabetically, but there are so many DVD’s that they no longer fit on the shelves. There are movies stacked on top and others crammed to capacity. Soon we might have to invest in another bookshelf.

That may give you some indication of how much I love movies. I love the creativity and originality that fills each one. In every movie, there are different characters, different situations, harrowing feats, impossible circumstances, and amazing comebacks.

One of my favorite things about movies is the twist. It’s that part of the movie where everything changes for the better or for the worst. Up until the twist, the plot was carrying you on lazily forward in a predictable way. But then, all of the sudden, everything takes a sharp right turn – the death of a character, the revealing of a secret, the sudden realization – after the twist, nothing can be the same.

If you look at the story of the Bible (our Story), everything in the Old Testament is telling a certain story. Here are the People of God, called to be His reflection on earth, and they are awaiting a messiah. They are waiting on someone who will save them from their life of pain and sorry and reconcile them back to God. They are waiting on a messiah who will bring justice – a messiah who will slay their enemies and release them from their captors.

But then come the Gospels. If the Bible was a movie, I feel like the Gospels are the twist. The Gospels are the point in which questions are answered, secrets are revealed, realizations are embodied, and reality is forever changed. After the twist, nothing can be the same.

Here is the twist:

“You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end” (Luke 1:31-33).

Finally, our Messiah has come. But He isn’t a great warrior, He is a baby. He isn’t here to slay our enemies, He is here to spread love and to serve. He isn’t here to release us from our captors, but to die for our sins.

Jesus is the twist in our story. Not only was He the twist in our Biblical story, the perfect sacrifice for our sin, and our Messiah who rescued us into eternal life. But He is also the twist in our personal stories. Each of us was headed towards death, but because Jesus called us out by name, showed us grace and forgiveness, showed us what love truly means, showed us His face; because we found Jesus, we can spend our eternal life with Him.

Jesus is the twist in our story, praise God.