Finding your Story in God's Story
As a church family, we want to be people of the word - of the Bible. SO - we have decided to take the better part of this year to go through the entire Bible - to dig into the story. The WHOLE story. This story that begins in a garden and ends in the new Jerusalem. The story that begins with sin infecting the beautiful earth that God created and ends with God declaring, "Behold! I am making all things new!".
So the question is: what happens in between? We certainly are familiar with many of the characters throughout the Bible - David, Noah, Peter and so on. But how do these Lower Stories of human experience tie-in together to tell the Upper Story of God and his ultimate victory? This is what we want to dig in to and discover.
Part V - Exile And Promise
Hard times are truly a universal part of the human experience - times of more questions than aswers and even when answers come, they aren't the answers that you want ot hear. This is where the nation of Israel finds itself in this part of The Story - in hard times. Fragmented and in exile, held underfoot by foreign nations - it seems that God's chosen people have been forsaken. But, hark! This might not actually be the case...
From the broken pieces of this once unified and strong people rises up a renewed desire to realign themselves with their true leader - the Lord, Himself. A renewed desire to renounce their ways of compromise and selfishness and return to living as they were called to in the first place - as those set apart unto Him. As these sentiments begin to rise up from the people, they begin to receive the most amazing response from the Lord: promises. Promises for a hope and future that is indescribable and thrilling - infinitely removed from the circumstances that they now find themselves in. In hard times, a hopeful promise is worth more than gold, and the people of Israel begin to get a glimpse of the riches of that which God has for them as they hold fast to their true identity as His people.
Part VI - The True King Rises
The climax of The Story centers around one person - one hero who finally and fully stands up against the looming crisis and quells it with one fateful blow.
The crisis: a people separated from God due to sin and it's unrelenting pull to draw people towards death. Despite God's past initiatives; his deliverance, his intentional setting apart of a people and his provision of a new way to live, people have still found their way to walk in a manner that ony brings about their destruction.
However...unyielding in his desire to see people living the abundant life that they were created for, God takes drastic measures to change the game - once and for all. He, himself, steps onto the playing field - enters the world as a living, breathing human being and brings about events that stand at the epicenter of all human history.
While once rejected by the nation of Israel in favor of a human king, god now comes down to establish his rule - definitively. And, in so doing, demonstrates to the world, what the perfect king looks like and what he is able to accomplish.
Part VII - A People Sent Out
The Bible does not end with Jesus' death and resurrection.
Don't you hate when a story ends shortly after its climax? Aren't you, often times, left with curiousity; wondering how the characters go on to live their lives which have forever been changed? Fortunately, the Bible gives us a rich glimpse into this aspect of The Story.
As you will remember, the nation of Israel was instructed by God to live a certain way - that they might walk in the fullness of their identity as God's chosen people. They ended up coming short - unable to live up to the standards of this old convenant centered around God's law.
Under the new covenant established by Jesus, God lays out a way for his people to live. His people (now distinguished not by their ancestral birth, but by their new birth in Christ) are, in the same way as Israel, called to be set apart in the earth - to live differently. They are given a great task - to go out into the world and call others to follow the way of Jesus.
This sending out of God's people and its out-working is central to the final act of The Story. You see, Christ does not ascend into heaven as the end of his earthly ministry in order to stay their forever. He promises to return and finish his work of establishing things as he always intended on the earth. The question is - will his people be ready?