God Gave Us a Story

You’re hopeless, you religion scholars and Pharisees! Frauds! You keep meticulous account books, tithing on every nickel and dime you get, but on the meat of God’s Law, things like fairness and compassion and commitment—the absolute basics!—you carelessly take it or leave it. Careful bookkeeping is commendable, but the basics are required. Do you have any idea how silly you look, writing a life story that’s wrong from start to finish, nitpicking over commas and semicolons? - Matthew 23:23-24, The Message

Because the gospel is so large, so encompassing, so overflowing with grace, so intriguing, and so mysterious, we can try to tame it. Try to fit it into neat statements and facts and figures. We can try to stuff it into “four spiritual laws” or “the sinner’s prayer” or some other mechanism to make sense of it all. As one author has said,

It strikes me as fruitless to try and turn the gospel into a statement when God so clearly gave us a story - or, more precisely, a person… So when someone asks, ‘What is the gospel?’ the best response is ‘Let me tell you a story.’
- Rachel Held Evans, Inspired

What if we joined Jesus and embraced the story of our lives and looked for the places where we can see the overlap with God’s story? What if we stopped trying to legislate our morality and litigate other’s sin and spend more time in wonder and awe, in curiously and worship, in contentment and joy - and even in grief and compassion? Wouldn’t that make more sense out of our lives? Read over the scripture again for today and ask Jesus to speak to you about the kind of story he’s writing in your life today.