Put Yourself in the Story

By Ann Miller Wolski

God can provide us with everything we need. If we are discouraged, God can give us motivation; when we are hurting, suffering, or lost, he can offer us comfort, healing, and guidance. But God does not always work the way we think he should, and sometimes he reveals his plans in the most unusual ways. If we are not careful, we will miss a miracle.

In Put Yourself in the Story, author Ann Miller Wolski uses scripture, personal experiences, and faith-based solutions to provide practical applications of Gods Word to everyday life. Whether you need simple daily encouragement or a big hand from God to face lifes most serious heartaches, frustrations, and trials, Put Yourself in the Story shows you how to see yourself living out the stories of the faithful and feel the truth of the scriptures as if you were there too.

By putting yourself in the story of Gods Word, you will not only find personal inspiration, daily encouragement, and a new perspectiveyou will find God as well. Just as God chose to love us, we too must make the choice to love him, discovering in his eternal love the awesome plans he has for our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Nov 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781973611134

Ann Miller Wolski

Ann Miller Wolski is a highly motivated woman of God who writes from the depths of her failures to the mountaintops of her victories. She has a comprehensive knowledge of the Word and shares it in a way that connects scripture to everyday life circumstances, showing that God has already provided a way of escape through Christ. Ann holds a doctorate degree in management, and she works as a human resources professional.

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I Stand in Awe

God knows I am a captive audience while driving and many times,

inspiration strikes without warning. I have learned to capture thoughts as soon as I can record them safely. A few days ago, I was thinking about being in awe. Even after I got home, I kept thinking about how people no longer seem to be in awe of God. As a child, I truly believed if you were rude to God and did not revere His Word, God would toss down a lightning bolt, and you’d be toast. Seriously, I was really, really in awe, wonder, and fear when it came to God. I was trying to put my finger on how people could stray so far from the deeply ingrained biblical foundations this country was built on—and then, it struck me.

People are no longer amazed by anything; we take heart transplants in stride, doctors bring people back from the dead every day, we watch video footage from a land rover on Mars, and we explore the deepest parts of the ocean via submarines equipped with onboard cameras. Television shows bring vampires and demonic forces into the home while our favorite crime-solving heroes bring murderers and serial killers to justice. Movies introduce us to alien life-forms from galaxies light-years away, and video games allow our children and many adults to participate in virtual battles for life—to kill or be killed without eternal consequence, with no real harm nor foul.

We watch documentaries showing us the deep, mysterious wonders of galaxies hundreds of thousands of light-years away. We are now beginning to comprehend how God can be everywhere all at once because we know about the space-time continuum. When you couple this with our busy, on-the-go, drive-through-for-dinner lifestyles, it is no wonder we do not have a sense of awe. I fully expect some day to find the word awe deemed obsolete and no longer in the dictionary.

There is nothing new under the sun, but there are still some things we cannot explain, and these things should bring us to our knees in awe. All scriptural references below were taken from the King James Version.

1. God’s unsearchable wisdom and knowledge—so vast we have never been able to comprehend all that is, let alone all that was or all that will be. For example,

a. I would seek unto God, and unto God would I commit my cause: Which doeth great things and unsearchable; marvelous things without number (Job 5:8–9 KJV).

b. Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; and his greatness is unsearchable (Psalm 145:3 KJV).

c. O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! (Romans 11:33 KJV).

d. Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ (Ephesians 3:8 KJV).

2. The mystery of how a human being can love another human being with a never-ending, unflinching love despite the normal struggles and temptations of life.

3. The fact God loved us before we were born and that Christ chose to be our sacrifice so we could be with Him and the Father forever.

4. That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love,May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height;And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:17–19 KJV).

5. Perhaps the most effective way to resurrect our sense of awe is to read the Bible as a literal record of actual events. I believe if we could put ourselves in the passages we read, we would be overcome with deepest sorrow concurrently with indescribable joy. If we felt the scriptures, put ourselves into the story, we could not help but be in awe that God chose to love us and that Jesus chose to be our Savior.

May I suggest, if you are reading a passage, to read it out loud—faith comes by hearing and being heard by the Word of God. Ask yourself how you feel. Once I tried to understand how God must have felt at the very moment Jesus died. God had never been separated from Jesus; God is light, and so is Jesus—not bound by time or under the rules of gravity, never aging, never worried about gaining weight, and together in the was, in the is, and in the always will be. How did God feel when all of the sin in the world from creation to crucifixion and subsequent sin for all time forward was laid on our Savior to bring redemption? Jesus had not passed from life unto death when the totality of sin was laid upon Him—the sacrifice had to have its blood shed on the altar to remove sin. How did God feel when He, for the first time, could not look upon His Son?

If people would put themselves in the story, I do not see how anyone could not be in awe of God and grateful for every moment of life.

Prince of the Air

As you will notice, many of my inspirations and epiphanies come when I am driving. I spend many hours behind the wheel of a car, and God knows I am a captive audience during the drive. The story below was born in a shorter drive, but it was liberating even in its brevity.

Listening to Christian radio is both refreshing and informative, and lessons learned from short messages interspersed between praise and worship songs should never be taken lightly. One such message was about the devil—the foul enemy of our souls—and how he is referred to as the prince of the air. Frankly, I had never given the prince of the air title much thought, but as I was meditating on it, the title began to take on a new and ominous meaning.

We talk about people having an air about them, or statements like there’s something in the air! Add these two statements to our avenues of music, talk radio, and television being on the airwaves and live streaming on the internet, and the notion of the prince of the air takes on a vastly bigger meaning. The enemy of our souls is a master at propaganda, and his messages come from every direction in unceasing waves.

The sound waves, airwaves, and streaming messages have become a way of life for us, and we have become accustomed to vitriol, violence, disrespect, and hatred being in our ears. You may say the noise goes in one ear and out the other, but the problem lies in between—our brain registers everything we see and every sound we hear! Once something is seen or heard, it never leaves the brain and can be recalled at the most inopportune times.

I leave you with these last musings. We probably heard our grandmothers, aunts, and mothers warn us to be careful what we listen to, whom we hang around with, and what we watch or read—because we could become like those people we are closest to, or we could lose ourselves in those things we spend the most time doing. As God’s clock ticks down, turn away from the noise the prince of the air sends your way, pray without ceasing, hide the Word in your heart, and listen for the assuring, still, small voice of the heavenly Father to guide you into all truth.

Prayer Goes Hand in Hand with Praise

When I was a child, I attended a small country church in rural Indiana where many of the parishioners were also family members. I have fond memories of the carefree time I spent there. The yard was huge, the church sat between corn fields, large trees provided a place to hide when playing hide-and-go-seek, and baby bunnies abounded. We arrived early and lingered after the service as the adults caught up on the week’s events and the children played. The internet was unknown, cell phones had not been invented, and news was shared through conversation.

As I grew up and my life took a different direction, I left my little church for one even smaller but much livelier. Sermons were fiery, and prayer at the altar was intense. When people were desperate for God, they would kneel and cry out to the Lord for answers, for mercy, and for forgiveness. Sometimes people agonized in prayer, and the prayer warriors would gather around. I learned praying through meant you stayed on your knees until you knew you had reached the throne of grace and God was listening. I do not hear the expression praying through much anymore, but I believe we still need to be determined in our prayers; I also believe we need to couple prayer with praise. Praying through sometimes requires praising through!

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were no strangers to prayer. The Hebrew traditions meant praying three times a day, and the young men honored God in all their ways. When they were thrown into the furnace as punishment for their actions, a fourth man appeared in the furnace, and all were praising God, and neither fire nor smoke touched them.

Joshua prayed before going into battle at Jericho. God told him He had already delivered Jericho into Joshua’s hand before the first step toward the fray had been taken. Instead of a battle cry, the Israelite army praised the Lord God, the massive walls fell flat, and victory was theirs.

Jehoshaphat was facing a vast enemy army and was quite worried about whether he could defeat them. He began to seek the Lord through prayer and declared a fast throughout all Judah. God assured him the battle was His. Jehoshaphat’s story is told in 2 Chronicles, but relevant verses are found in the following passage:

Ye shall not need to fight in this battle: set yourselves, stand ye still, and see the salvation of the Lord with you, O Judah and Jerusalem: fear not, nor be dismayed; tomorrow go out against them: for the Lord will be with you. And Jehoshaphat bowed his head with his face to the ground: and all Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem fell before the Lord, worshipping the Lord. (2 Chronicles 20:17–18 KJV)

The story is a familiar one and one of my favorites because the whole of Israel fell on their faces and prayed in unity for God to protect them. God answered with the promise He would go before them and He would deliver the people. The battle itself was not really a battle but more of a fiasco.

And the Levites, of the children of the Kohathites, and of the children of the Korhites, stood up to praise the Lord God of Israel with a loud voice on high. And they rose early in the morning, and went forth into the wilderness of Tekoa: and as they went forth, Jehoshaphat stood and said, Hear me, O Judah, and ye inhabitants of Jerusalem; Believe in the Lord your God, so shall ye be established; believe his prophets, so shall ye prosper. And when he had consulted with the people, he appointed singers unto the Lord, and that should praise the beauty of holiness, as they went out before the army, and to say, Praise the Lord; for his mercy endureth forever. And when they began to sing and to praise, the Lord set ambushments against the children of Ammon, Moab, and mount Seir, which were come