God=Story teller

It is widely accepted that Jesus was a master storyteller. Madeleine L'Engle writes in Walking on Water, “A friend of mine, a fine story-teller, remarked to me, ‘Jesus was not a theologian. He was God who told stories.’ Yes. God who told stories” (page 54).

But Jesus isn’t the only story-teller. In fact, the entire Bible is properly seen as story. Jim Bowman, Director of “Scriptures in Use” states, “Over 75% of the Bible consists of stories. Adding poetry and proverbs leaves probably less than 10% abstract 'intellectual' content.”

Yet we tend to reduce God’s Word to “a list of tips and techniques.” While the Bible contains principles and propositions, it is largely narrative (story). But even this description is misleading. As Dr. Paul Tripp of the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation says, “The Bible is a story, not a compilation of many stories, but one story with many mini-dramas comprising the story.” As David Wayne points out, we are often guilty “of using the Bible mainly as a factbook or as a guidebook.”

But there’s still more. Not only has God told a story. He’s invited us to participate in his story. Pastor Brent McKinney quotes from Louis Giglio’s book, i am not but i know I AM: Welcome to the Story of God: It is “not about you and making your story better, but about waking up to the infinitely bigger God Story happening around you, and God's invitation to you to join Him in it... The story already has a star, and the star is not you or me... And here's why it matters--if we don't get the two stories straight, everything else in our lives will be out of sync. We'll spend our days trying to hijack the Story of God, turning it into the story of us. Inverting reality, we'll live every day as though life is all about you and me.”

And this is a life-giving story. But too often the church spends its time and energy quibbling over words.

Bishop Geoffrey Gibraltar quotes the poet Edwin Muir:

The Word made flesh
Is here made word again,
…
[T]he Word is impaled and bent
Into an ideological instrument.

The truth matters too much to be left in the hands of logical argument.

Pastor Rod

“Helping you become the person God created you to be”