I have the unique privilege to serve on the teaching team at Skyline Church (
http://www.skylineokc.com/). This mean I get the share with a wonderful new downtown community once a month. This Sunday I was with them and the notes and thoughts from the talk are included below. Help came from Robert Webber, NT Wright, Donald Miller and John Eldridge. We explored God's word, as much more than a guide book for Christians but as the reality and story of the world.
We are in the midst of an incredible story.
In a world of competing stories, we need to recover the truth of God’s word as the story of the world, and to make it the centerpiece of life.
Our story is ANCIENT and it is FUTURE. We REMEMBER where we came from and ANTICIPATE where we are going. To know where this journey will take us we must know where it has been. We have roots that take us back to the BEGINNING OF TIME, to the beginning of God creating and entering into relationship with HIS people.
Principles are used for a story to make sense –
Lead Character or Protagonist: All good stories have a good lead character. You evaluate a good lead character by asking, “What would happen to the story if we removed the character from it?”
25 year old Jenna Lee leads an organization called Blood Water Mission, an effort to drill 1,000 clean water wells. What would happen if you removed Jenna Lee from the story? One person is seven (around 1 billion people) has no access to clean water.
As we approach the story of God through the scriptures, we must fundamentally believe and experience God as good and merciful and just and loving and true.
Ambition or what the character wants: Most good stories are not centered on a man longing to acquire a Volvo and when he gets his Volvo and drives it off the lot the credits role.
Conflict or hard times: lead to change with negative and positive turns. There has to be conflict in a story. We hate conflict but we must learn to love it (James 1).
If I were to tell you that I woke up and walked up and down a set of stairs twice OR if I told you that last year I climbed Everest twice. Same story, one is just more interesting than the other. One has more conflict.
Resolution or how the story comes to a close.
The most powerful way to teach and educate is with story. We talked about how to become a disciple is to not simply know what the rabbit knows, but to be like the rabbit, to do what the rabbit does. Now it was said of rabbis that they would learn the text, live the text, teach the and die the text. Our western world is a world of analysis and logic, whereas the eastern world of Jesus and the scripture was a world of mystery and imagination. A world of story.
Neuroscience tells us that the brain reconceives reality in the shape of story and that we tell ourselves these stories. There were tourists in Indonesia who were laughing and videoing the tsunami wave because they could not reconceive another story than the one they were living in, which was fun, vacation, etc.
The scripture from beginning to end, keeps telling stories: Adam & Eve, Cain & Able, Noah’s Ark, Abraham & Isaac, Jacob & Esau, Exodus, Moses, Joshua & Jericho, David & Goliath, David & Bathsheba, Job, Solomon, Nehemiah, Daniel & The Lion’s Den, Hosea, Mary & Joseph, Elizabeth & Zachariah, John the Baptist, JESUS, birth, temptation, baptism, parables and stories and examples and displays, a bunch of letters to a bunch of people and churches, etc.
The bible is narrative after narrative, story after story and nowhere does the bible stop and say, “This is what the story is about or this is what the story means or this is what so and so is really saying”. The point of the story is the story itself. The story drives us back to and deeper into the story. And stories transform and change us.
The story is powerful enough. We tell and hear stories and it’s like adjusting a compass. We hear and engage the story and we find true north.
Maybe the narrative is enough. When we hear or see a great story we don’t stop and talk about what we can learn from a story, we relive it and retell it and allow ourselves to be shaped by it. It’s not about extrapolating the 5 steps to a great this or 3 steps to the best that.
How do we approach and read the Bible? Most of the Bible does not consist of rules and regulations, lists of commands to be obeyed. Nor does it consist of creeds, lists of things to be believed.
Much of what we call the Bible is not a rule book; it is a narrative. And how we approach the Bible is of utmost importance. If you don’t understand or know the purpose of a thing all you can do is abuse that thing.
It’s one thing to go to your commanding officer first thing in the morning and have a string of commands barked at you. But what would you do if, instead, he began “Once Upon A time…” or in our case, “In the Beginning…God”. And what if Genesis was more about story than it was about science.
The authority which God has invested in this book is an authority that is wielded and exercised through the people of God telling and retelling their story.
The story is told in 5 Acts:
Creation – Many stories begins “Once Upon a Time” but our story begins “In the Beginning God”. Our story, our journey, our view of the world begins with a creation poem. Can you feel the beat, the rhythm? And God saw that it was good…6x…and God saw that it was very good. Here we find a vision of how the world once was and what the world will once again become.
Psalm 8:3 When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what are mere mortals that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet: all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild, the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas. LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
Fall - The enemy tempted the first humans, and darkness and evil entered the story through human sin and are now a part of the world. This devastating event resulted in our relationships with God, others, ourselves, and creation being fractured and in desperate need of redeeming.
Israel – the clan of Abraham and later the nation of Israel (and later the church), which develops out of this clan, will be an instrument of blessing to the surrounding tribes and nations.
Jesus - Isaiah 7:14 says, “See, a young maiden will conceive. She will give birth to a son and name Him Immanuel, that is, “God with us.”
John 1:1 – In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God…John 1:14, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us…God took on flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood…
Church - We believe that we live in the age of the church and that God continues to take on flesh and blood and move into our neighborhoods and that he does so through you and me, his people.
Acts 2:42-47 says, “They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
The New Testament would form the first scene of the 5th Act, giving hints of how the play is supposed to end.
God wants to catch human beings up in the work that he is doing. He doesn’t want to do it by-passing us. He wants us to be involved in his work. And as we are involved, so we ourselves are being remade.
Story is the authority that really works. Throw a rule book at people’s heads, or offer them a list of doctrines and they can duck or avoid it or simply disagree and go away. Tell them a story, though, and you invite them to come into a different world (a kingdom reality).
Great revolutionary movements have told stories about the past and present and future. This past Friday, April 4th was the anniversary of the death and assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. They are still telling his story. They are still going back to an old motel. They are still remembering and recalling. Quoting and reciting.
And that is exactly what the Bible is: the story of the greatest revolutionary movement the world has known.
How can we handle this extraordinary treasure, responsibly? How then shall the bible be read? We have to let the Bible be the Bible in all its oddness and otherness. We have taken the Bible and made it ordinary.
A dominant error of some Christians is to say, “I must bring God into my story. The ancient understanding is that God joins the story of humanity to take us into his story. There is a world of difference. One is narcissistic; the other is God-oriented. It will change your enter spiritual life when you realize that your life is joined to God’s story.
I once understood the gospel as God asking me to let him into my narrative, to find room for him in my heart and life. But now I realize that God bids me to find my place in his narrative.
One crisis of Scripture is that we stand over the Bible and read God’s narrative from the outside instead of standing within the narrative and reading Scripture as an insider.
The original meaning of the biblical narrative became lost as conservatives rushed to verify the Bible as a historical and scientific document.
In our reading of the Bible we have been stuck between extreme objectivism and extreme subjectivism. The overly objective approach would work to uncover the one single meaning the author intended to convey. The subjective approach would disregard the author’s intent and argues that the meaning of the text is the meaning the reader takes away from it.
We must read the bible as true, as God’s true story.
Scripture is the book that assures us that we are the people of God when, again and again, we are tempted to doubt.
Scripture is the covenant book through which the spirit assures us that we are his people and through which he sends us out into the world to tell the Jesus story.
The purpose of the Church’s life is to be the people of God for the world. The church can only be this if she is constantly being recalled to the story and message of scripture.
Listen to the words of Tim Keel, “NT Wright describes the story of God in time happening over five acts: creation, fall, Israel, Jesus, and the church. The church is the human society that bears the image of Christ and participates alongside God in the redemption of all things. While each of the previous acts come to an end somewhere in our distant past, we still live in the age of the church. It is our vocation to continue what we see happening in the pages of the New Testament – the whole bible actually – not exactly in the same ways as those who have come before, but postured in similar ways as those who have come before, but postured in similar ways in the power and under the inspiration of the same spirit. To do so requires us to live deeply in the story of God, not in the collected facts about God.
In the book Colossians Remixed, authors Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat describe this story as an unfinished drama. They add a sixth act to Wright’s five: the consummation of all things in God. “We are now living in Act V and are on the stage as actors in this divine love story that seeks to restore the covenantal bond between the Creator and his beloved creation. Our task is to keep the drama alive and move it toward Act VI, recognizing that in this final Act God becomes the central actor again and finishes the play. But how do we move the drama forward? We turn to the Author and ask for more script. And the Author says, “Sorry, but that’s all that’s written – you have to finish Act V. But I have given you a very good Director who will comfort and lead you.” So here we are with an unfinished script, at least some indication of the final Act and a promise that we have the Holy Spirit as our Director and we have to improvise. If we are to faithfully live out the biblical drama, then we will need to develop the imaginative skills necessary to improvise on this cosmic stage of creational redemption. Indeed it would be the height of infidelity and interpretive cowardice to simply repeat verbatim, over and over again, the earlier passages of the play.”
Revelation 12:11 says, “They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony;
Many Stories end with “And they lived happily ever after”, and as we see in Revelation 21 our stories ends like this,
“Then I saw "a new heaven and a new earth," for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Look! God's dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 'He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death' or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." He who was seated on the throne said, "I am making everything new!" Then he said, "Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true." He said to me: "It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children.
And we are giving our lives to living out that future reality now.
