We live in a story. As a kid, I was a storyteller. “Show and Tell” was always TELL for me and I loved to color outside the lines and make my stories bigger and more adventurous than an eight-year-old would actually enjoy. Big stories, small stories made big, real stories, stories to illustrate a point - I had no idea these tools would become such a part of my toolkit. I do try hard to make them all accurate and will tell you when they are not.
Let’s face it, we all live in a story. Advertisements are usually a short story with a product as an answer to a problem or issue and characters who have had an itch scratched by that product. These advertisements are assembled to invite you into this story, where you will also find an answer.
Sit in a restaurant and listen to the people around you talk; they tell stories. Stories about kids. Stories about work. Stories about life. Stories about friends and adventures. Stories about travel or wanting to travel. Stories about the past. Stories about the future. Stories about conflict, battles, love, friendship, obstacles that stopped us or that couldn’t stop us. We live in a story.
What if one of the plans of God for us was to live in his story? Heck, what if we only experienced the “life abundant” Jesus mentioned (John 10:10) when we live inside a story God is telling?
The Bible is our front-row seat and a golden ticket into a single story God is telling. The Bible is meant to introduce us to our Creator and Redeemer. IT is put together to tell us how God himself moved people, space, entered into time, raised and lowered kings and people, all to tell a specific story. The Bible introduces us to Characters who, by will, choice, love, and commitment, entered into THE story God was and is telling. The Bible shows us that God, the greatest story creator, and teller ever, has an unstoppable story that is being written as he chooses and finished as he already planned.
Last week, we entered into a story-driven experience at church. We took communion. Initially, the entire design of what is called Passover and the post-resurrection expression of this story-driven experience was simply to invite us into a story God has been and continues to tell.
Jesus, on the night he was betrayed and murdered, celebrated Passover with his friends. The name Passover gets its meaning from a story. When God was delivering the nation of Israel from slavery, he told his people to put the blood of an unblemished lamb on the doorposts of their home, and God would “pass over” that home. But those homes without the blood of a lamb would not experience God “passing over” the home; rather, they would experience His judgment upon that home.
By the time Jesus celebrated Passover, the stories were entrenched in the hearts and minds of those at the table, so imagine their surprise when Jesus used the same symbols to tell a different story. Instead of the meal representing the Passover, Jesus said it represented a new page in the story, the one where his body and blood, the LAMB of God, would cover the people. He then told his friends, every time they take communion, they enter into the story God is telling by remembering and then living it out to others.
God is still writing HIS story! He is not writing scriptures, but make no mistake, HE is writing HIS story every second of our lives and with every breath we take. For the next few weeks, our team will be writing about God’s story and how he lovingly invites us to be both the words in the story and the parchment upon which it is being written. We will point to the amazing grace of God that allows us to be a pen in his hand as he writes other people into HIS story.
Join us, but until the next blog, will you recount the stories of Jesus?