When I was about thirteen years old my dad told me to read Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. He said it was one of his favorite books growing up. Based on the cover it looked like an old and very dull book meant to entertain people without TV’s or video games, but for some reason I gave it a try. The first chapter started slow, but I’ll never forget my amazement as the story quickly sucked me in and took me on an adventure with pirates, tropical islands, and buried treasure. The story expanded my imagination in ways nothing else ever could (I know I sound like a librarian right now).
Have you ever thought about the power of stories? Stories have the power to take us on a journey. They show us new places and introduce us to new people. They draw us in and we become a part of their adventure.
The best stories give us a glimpse of ourselves; they show us who we are and who we could be.
God’s story is like this. In fact the overwhelming majority of the Bible is story.
For thousands of years, stories were the key means for Jewish and Christian people to learn and experience God. The Biblical texts were recorded with the intent that they would be read aloud and passed down to each family.
Right and wrong were not taught in bullet points but through the tools of story.
That’s why the Bible not just a set of doctrines, self-help tips, or instructions for living… it is primarily the beautiful narrative of God loving, pursuing, and ultimately redeeming his people. It stretches from the beginning of time, across our lives and into the future.
Christianity was hurt badly by the Modern Era, the age we just passed through, where truth was thought to be found best in principles and propositions. The mind became central, not the heart, and we lost the God’s great story for a handful of rules and regulations.
While these can be helpful, they are not real life. Life is a story, after all. That’s how it comes to us. But like a movie we’ve arrived at forty minutes late, life doesn’t make sense until we understand the rest of the Story.
At Oak Hills we’re starting a new summer-long series called “Tales of Old.” Each week we'll take a look at a few "true tales" in God's Story and how God used some very ordinary and even messed up people in his grand narrative. These are stories filled with heroes and villains, love and betrayal, compassion and war. They have the power to show us things about ourselves, about God, and about His story.
Chesterton wrote that if we experience life as a story, there must be a story-teller.
God, the great story-teller, continues to write His story and desires us to find ourselves in it, discovering who we are and why we are here. "What is my role in this story?" This is one of the most important questions we could ever ask. Finding that is finding the secret to your life.
Great question to ask! Thanks for this post, got me thinking.
Posted by: Kyle Minckler | June 06, 2007 at 10:54 AM