God’s Story

God has a story. It is redemptive and it’s about a new beginning, a new creation, a new world. It is revealed in Scripture and we are in that story. People read the word of God and hear the Gospel and realize Jesus died for them and loves them, finding the personal in the theological. And this is incredible. But the limited concern for our own destiny does not reach to the core of biblical mission. There is a bigger story. It’s about God and the world and how He has come into creation to restore it, to reconcile it and renew it, “undoing” Adam; “thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. And the story continues; we saw it with Abraham (through his seed, all families of the earth shall be blessed) and then Israel (a light to the nations) and in Christ (“…God so loved the world…”). And now God’s story finds its way into our present and into our lives, His church, the body of Christ. Placed in the setting of present darkness, a new community of believers shines forth as light, models the future, engendering change in the present.

This community is extraordinary. It is joined together by God and ”finds” itself during the week  in various ways, often culminating on Sundays in an event-style worship service where the entire fellowship gathers around Jesus, receiving the preached word, celebrating His love. This helps prevent the story God has given and the perspective it supplies from getting lost. And this happens all too frequently because we are living in a society that is screaming another story. 

We know that cultures within societies have what may loosely be called a “worldview”; a set of assumptions about the way things are. They can be understood in terms of four essential elements: symbols, praxis, stories, and assumed questions and answers (Who are we? Where are we? What’s wrong? What’s the solution?). These form the grid or “story” through which reality is perceived and experienced; but they themselves, like the foundations of a house, normally remain unexamined. That is “until”; until it is all brought into the light of another story; God’s story. And one way that happens is gathering intentionally in community to “remember”. God’s story actually presupposes a community of “memory”, keeping His narrative alive, which helps to shape every meaningful thing we do. If we forget the story, we also lose context, our point of reference, including God’s perspective of the place in creation that we’ve been given to live His story out. We end up outside the story in another story, creating our own place. 

All of us are living out some sort of story for our lives. Too often people do so apart from God’s story of meaning and grace. That’s why God’s story, lived in the world, is done so via community. There is connection, pace and rhythm inherent in our work in creation and the Spirit working in the context of the ekklesia. The story, in part, is about bearing His image out of community into creation. II Cor.3:2,3 says, “Your very lives are a letter…others can read it by just looking at you. Christ himself wrote it”. (Msg bible). See, His story is our story and the story of our present experience no longer has to be lived apart from it. I mean, what would it be like to live life viewed through the lens of His story and not our own stories?

If we come out of the story, the pace slows down, the place suddenly looks bleak, the purpose fades. Then, as another story attempts to shape our understanding, our perspective changes and we eventually look for a gate in our particular “garden” to escape. It takes us out of the game, alienating us from others, from God, even despising our place. People, including Christians, can actually spend years living those other stories and then somehow expect their lives to be meaningful. This instead of seeing that place in creation and the work they’ve been given to do as being the context in which they live out their lives in relationship with God. I think that some of us are living great stories, unaware of how great they are.

The moral of the story? Don’t submit your life to another story, it’s the wrong story. God says we were put here in the context of His creation. We were created to co-labor with Him as new creation in creation, His agents of restoration in the midst of broken humanity. God’s story causes us to remember Jesus, to remember who made us and why we exist. Not to just “keep on keeping on” but to be called back into something that’s bigger than the reduced existence we otherwise might be brought down into by that other story. Instead, we live in the reality and context of  God’s story, free, connected to community, working the garden, participating in His creation.