title: "Stop Making Yourself the Main Character" date: "2026-06-17" slug: "stop-making-yourself-the-main-character" category: "Teaching" categories: ["Teaching"] excerpt: "American Christianity has a habit of asking what God is doing in our story rather than where we fit in His." We have a main character problem. It is not new, and it is not unique to any one of us, but it is pervasive enough and consequential enough that it is worth naming directly. We have organized our entire relationship with God around a story in which we are the protagonist and He is the supporting cast. We ask what God is doing in our lives, what He has planned for our futures, what He wants for our success and our comfort and our flourishing — and all of those questions, while not entirely wrong, are built on an assumption that puts us at the center of the narrative. The story, in our telling of it, is fundamentally about us. But the cosmos already has a King, and the position is not open for applications. Moses standing before Israel in Deuteronomy 31 is a portrait of exactly this reorientation. He is 120 years old, handing off leadership to Joshua, and the frame he puts around the entire transition is not personal at all. It is covenantal. Everything he says — God goes before you, God will destroy these nations, Joshua will lead you, you will take possession of the land — is anchored not in what any of these individuals want or deserve but in what God promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob centuries before any of them were born. The story Israel was living was not their story. It was God's story, and they were the characters He had placed in it for this particular season. That framing changes everything. When Joshua receives the commission to lead the people into Canaan, he is not being handed the starring role in his own drama. He is being handed a responsibility within a story that was already well underway when he arrived and would continue long after he was gone. The promise he was tasked with fulfilling was not made to him. The land he was leading people into had been covenanted to someone four centuries earlier. Joshua was a supporting character in a story that God had been writing since Genesis, and his faithfulness — his actual historical significance — depended entirely on understanding that. This is the part of biblical faith that sits most uncomfortably with the way we have been shaped to think. We live in a culture that is relentlessly focused on the individual — on personal narrative, personal achievement, personal fulfillment. Even our language of calling and purpose has been infected by this. We speak of finding our purpose as though purpose is something hidden inside us waiting to be discovered, rather than something extended to us from outside by the One who made us and owns us and has a mission that was running long before we took our first breath. The result is a Christianity that is more therapeutic than theological. We come to God primarily for what He can do for our story — healing our wounds, improving our circumstances, blessing our plans, resolving our conflicts. And when He does not perform those functions on our timeline, we experience it as abandonment or indifference, because in our version of the story, His role is to serve our narrative. We have not rejected God so much as we have domesticated Him, reduced Him to a cosmic resource whose primary purpose is to help us become the best version of ourselves. Moses was not operating in that framework. When he told the Israelites that the Lord their God Himself would go before them, he was not offering them a personal growth opportunity. He was announcing the movement of a sovereign God fulfilling a covenant He had made centuries ago with people who were long dead, on behalf of a people who were about to inherit something they had not earned. The blessing was real. But the story was His. What would it change if we actually believed that? If we woke up in the morning not asking what God had for us today but asking where we fit in what God was already doing? If we read Scripture not primarily as a collection of principles for our personal improvement but as the unfolding story of a God who is redeeming a broken creation and inviting human beings to participate in that work? If we evaluated our decisions not only by what they produce for us but by what they contribute to a kingdom that will outlast every one of our individual lifespans? The invitation Moses extended to Joshua was not to a starring role. It was to faithful participation. Go with these people. Lead them into the land. Divide the inheritance. Do what was commanded. Be strong and courageous not because you are exceptional but because the God who goes before you is faithful and His promises are true. Joshua's greatness, to whatever extent we can speak of it, was not self-generated. It was derivative. It flowed from his willingness to be an instrument of a plan that was bigger than him in every direction. We are no different. Every one of us has been placed in a specific moment in a specific community in a specific chapter of the story God has been telling since the beginning. The generation before us was faithful in their season. The generation after us will need us to be faithful in ours. The baton is in our hands not because we are the most important runners in the race but because it is our turn, and the race was already underway when we arrived. You are not the main character. That is not an insult — it is a liberation. It means the weight of the whole story does not rest on your shoulders. It means your failures do not derail God's purposes and your successes do not secure them. It means you are free to play your part well without needing the whole narrative to be about you. The cosmos has a King. He has been writing this story from before the foundations of the world, and He will finish it. Our calling is not to take the throne — it is to be faithful in the scene we have been given, to carry forward what we have received, and to trust that the Author knows exactly what He is doing. Get in the story. Play your part. And let Him be the main character He has always been. Dr. William C.K. Yomes is the founding apologist of Faith Makes Sense and the Senior Pastor of Catalyst Community Church in Wilmington, Delaware. This article is part of his ongoing teaching ministry at Catalyst Community Church.