Following After Jesus Together: Scripture

We Live by Stories
Before you ever knew a fact about the world, you knew a story. You learned who you were from the stories told over dinner tables and in car rides, the stories about where your family came from, what your name meant, why you mattered. Long before we can reason, we can be moved by a tale. This is not a flaw in us. It is how we were made.

We are story-shaped creatures.

The things that have actually changed you were rarely arguments. They were stories. A film that undid you. A friend's confession that reframed your whole picture of them. The account of how someone you love finally came home. Facts inform us, but stories form us. They get past our defenses and go to work on the parts of us that arguments never reach.

This is why the deepest question you will ever ask is not "What do I think?" or even “What do I believe?” but "What story am I living in?"

Every one of us is inside some story, whether we have named it or not. A story about what a good life is, what our suffering means, where it is all going. You are living by one right now. The only question is whether it is true, and whether it is big enough to hold your life.

The claim of this Bible is bold. There is one true story, the story beneath all the others, and you were made to find your life inside of it. Not to admire it from a distance, but to enter it.

The Story of the Bible
As a pastor, one of the consistent themes I've heard from people over the years is that they don’t know how to engage with the Bible. Here is what I believe: Many don’t know how to engage with the bible because they don’t know the story the bible is telling. If you’ll allow me a $5 word, it’s that they don’t know the metanarrative: a fancy word word for a big story that provides an explanation for the world. 

The story of the Bible is that God wants a relationship with you. It really is that simple. 

Think of the story of Scripture as a drama that has several acts. 

Act One: Creation.
The story opens not with a problem but with a King and a garden. God speaks and there is light, sky, sea, and land. He makes human beings in his own image and gives them a job: to reflect his rule into the world, to work the garden and keep it, to fill the earth with worship and beauty and life. Everything is very good. This is the world as it was meant to be, humming with the presence of God.

Act Two: The Fall.
Then comes the fracture. Our first parents believe a lie, that God is holding out on them, that they would be better off writing their own story. They reach for the one thing forbidden, and in that moment the whole creation cracks. Shame enters. Blame enters. Death enters. The ground itself turns hostile. We are exiled from the garden, from each other, and most of all from God. Every ache you have ever felt traces back to this rupture.

Act Three: Israel.
God does not abandon the world he made. He launches a rescue, and he begins with one man. He calls Abraham and makes a promise: through your family, I will bless every family on earth (Genesis 12:1-3). Out of Abraham comes a nation, Israel, and through them we watch God's covenant love play out across centuries. He rescues them from slavery in Egypt. He gives them his law, not as a burden but as the shape of a flourishing life. He gives them a land, a temple, kings, and prophets. But Israel repeats the pattern of the garden. They wander, they worship idols, they are carried off into exile. And the whole time, the promise hangs unfulfilled, and the prophets keep pointing forward. A King is coming. A servant. One who will do what Israel could not.

Act Four: Jesus.
This is the hinge of the entire story, the act toward which everything before it leans and out of which everything after it flows. God himself steps onto the stage. Jesus of Nazareth is the true Israel, the true image-bearer, the King the prophets promised. He announces that God's reign has arrived. He heals, he forgives, he eats with the wrong people, he tells stories that turn the world upside down. And then he does the unthinkable. He goes to a cross and takes the fracture of Act Two into his own body. ¹⁸For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God (1 Peter 3:18). Three days later he walks out of the tomb, and death itself begins to run backward. The exile is ending. The garden is coming back.

Act Five: The Church.
Here is where the story gets surprising, because this is the act we are living in. The risen Jesus pours out his Spirit and sends his people out.. ⁸But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth (Acts 1:8). The churhc is not a footnote to the gospel. It is the community carrying the news that the true King has come, living now as a preview of the world he is going to finish making.

Act Six: New Creation.
The story does not end with us escaping to heaven. It ends with heaven coming down. A new creation, a city, a wedding feast, God dwelling with his people, every tear wiped away, death itself thrown out for good. ³And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man" (Revelation 21:3). The garden of Act One returns, fuller and better than before. This is where the whole drama has been heading the entire time. 

Reading the Bible
There is a difference between reading the Bible and entering the Bible. Most of us were handed a book and told it was important, so we treat it the way we treat other important books. We mine it for information, for rules, for verses to get us through a hard Tuesday. All of that has its place. But the Bible was never meant to be read that way . It was meant to be inhabited. It is not first a rulebook or a devotional grab bag. It is a story. It is the story, the true account of everything, and God invites you to find your life inside of it.

How to Enter the Story
Knowing the story is not the same as being changed by it. To read the Bible as a rule of life is to climb inside the drama and let it rewrite yours. Try this simple pattern.

1) Pray to see. Before your eyes hit the page, ask God to open them. ¹⁸Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law (Psalm 119:18). The Bible is a living word, and we need the Author's help to read it. Do not skip this. Two quiet sentences asking the Spirit to show you Christ will change everything that follows.

2) Read the story. Read the passage in front of you, but keep the whole drama in view. Ask: what is God speaking to me in this passage? How does this scene fit the arc from creation to new creation? How is it pointing me to Jesus, the hinge of it all? You are not collecting disconnected verses. You are following a single storyline home. 

3) Reflect by putting yourself in the story. This is where reading becomes formation. Do not stand outside the text like a spectator. Step in. Feel the fear of the disciples in the boat. Stand with the crowd on the hill. Hear the father running down the road toward you. Then ask the harder question: what is this telling me about God, where am I in this scene right now, and what is God asking of me because of it?

4) Respond by living out the story. Take a minute or two and meditate on what God is speaking to you. Then ask: how can I respond to what God is saying to me today in faith? Maybe it's confession, maybe it's forgiveness, maybe it's sharing your faith, or trusting God that day. Whatever He may be speaking to you, simply respond in faith and obedience. In doing that, you begin to live out the story. It's pretty cool!

Remember that the Bible contains the story of a God who loves you, saved you, and wants a relationship with you. He is inviting you to enter into the story, and into a relationship with himself.