This summer, we are spending our time looking at the big story of Scripture – the single storyline that weaves its way through all the smaller sub-plots of Scripture. It begs the question before we begin… Why?

Just in the past couple of weeks we have been waiting for news about whether or not NP will be laid off from his job, I have stood at a NICU isolette looking at our good friends’ tiny 3lb baby born at 29.5 weeks, my family mourned the loss of my great-uncle, news from our country and abroad has been painful and unsettling, we heard reports of record unemployment in our state and drove past men holding cardboard signs.

What in the world is going on? Why would God allow this? Why is this world so irreparably broken? Why do bad things happen to good people? What does this all mean?

We have a tendency to open our Bibles looking for specific answers. We cling to verses like Jeremiah 29:11 and Romans 8:28 and sometimes sling them at people as the pat and simple responses to the agonizing cries from their wounded hearts.

The Bible, indeed, is full of hopeful answers. But they are rarely cut-and-dry, rarely quick and easy. Building a Biblical foundation for our understanding of the world that gives us satisfying answers to these fundamental questions of things like, “who is God?,” “what is He like?,” “what is right and wrong, and who gets to determine those categories?,” “what went wrong in this world?,” “what will fix this brokenness?”… these questions need more than a list of a few verses. These questions need a fuller explanation of the story – God’s Story. The book He gave us explains this whole mess – it tells us who He is, it explains to us what He is like and what He desires from us, it tells us that right and wrong are derived directly from His holy nature, it reveals to us the depth of our brokenness and the how desperately we need Him, it tells us that this holy God did the unimaginable to redeem the brokenness of our hearts… and that He will eventually redeem the brokenness of this world.

When we understand the bigger picture, we can discover our place in the narrative. We can’t see all the pieces – we don’t know exactly why the details of our lives are playing out the way they are… but as our understanding of God grows bigger, as our comprehension of His plan is firmly established in our minds, it gives us a deep sense of certainty and calm in uncertain and frightening times.

Because in the beginning, God was.

In this day, God is.

In the end, God will be.

His plans will never be thwarted, His purposes have been established before the beginning of time. As I know Him, as I trust Him and rest in His grand and sovereign plan, I no longer need to understand it all… I just want to behold His glory in the midst.

Friends, I don’t know what the deep and unsettling questions are in your heart and mind this day. I don’t know what loss you are facing, what fears you are battling, what questions creep up in your mind unbidden and unwanted. But I invite you to join me as we journey through God’s story together. Ask Him to reveal Himself to you in new ways, ask Him to speak through His Word and pull you into the Scripture, ask Him to open your eyes to see His amazing plan and find where you fit within it.

Our God is great. His Word is rich. His story is stunning.

It’s going to be a good summer!

If you’ve missed anything in the One Summer, One Story series, you can find all the posts indexed here! Would you consider taking a moment to share this post on facebook and invite your friends and family to join us on this journey? Understanding God’s plan and the bigger story of Scripture is lifechanging – and maybe even eternity-changing. Want to make sure you don’t miss a post? Click here to receive these posts directly to your email inbox each day.

I think my jaw hung open for an entire semester as I sat in Dr. Miller’s Old Testament Survey at Cedarville University {actually, Cedarville College at that point.}

I had been saved at four years old. I had grown up in an amazing Christian family with family devotions every night, church three times a week, years of Christian camps and retreats, and 10 years of Christian school.

And I had never seen the Bible like this.

It was like I had been looking at one of those “Magic Eye” pictures – staring and staring and staring at it for years, trying to comprehend, and then POW! All of a sudden instead of tiny individual fragments I saw the Bigger Picture. The one overarching story that tied all of the tiny pieces together stood out to me like a three-dimensional image, and it was breathtaking. The bigness of my God was breathtaking.

My understanding of God grew. My hunger for the Bible grew. My faith grew.

I remember riding in the car with my dad when he had picked me up from my dorm to take me to dinner while in the area on business. I was passionately telling him about everything I was learning; I remember turning to him and saying, “Why didn’t anyone teach me this?!” He told me something that changed my life – “because no one taught us.”

The next fall I changed my major to Bible. I wanted everyone to see the the larger picture of what God was doing in Scripture, the story that tied all the others together. I wasn’t sure what I would do… write curriculum? Teach? Speak? Work in a church? Who knows – but God had tapped my heart and I wanted the Bible to come alive for others as it had for me.

Years later – my life is small. But God has given me opportunity to write, teach, speak after all.

So, this summer, we will dive in. Three months, 66 books, one story, one amazing God. We won’t cover it all – every tiny piece is inspired and important, but for this series, we will focus on the larger picture – that “Magic Eye” picture that pops out if we see the Bible as a whole. It is my prayer that this series will springboard you into deeper study of your own – a deeper thirst for Scripture, a thirst to know more of our great God, a strengthened faith from seeing the broad strokes of his pen in this stunningly beautiful plan He has written for us to read.

So, beginning Monday, June 6th, we will spend a summer in the Story! I hope you’ll plan to join us, and perhaps invite others to join us on facebook or twitter! You can follow along easily by subscribing to this blog by email or in an RSS reader!

Ready?

On Tuesday I posted God’s Big Story, which is something that has been rolling around in my head for years and finally has been making its way onto paper the last couple of weeks. I was thinking about writing this explanation post and then an old friend from college just called to say that she was thinking about giving The Big Story to a friend of hers, and we were talking about why I wrote it, etc. I think it would probably be appropriate for me to fill you in, also! :)

I have pondered for years the way we as believers typically share the Gospel with someone. If you were trained to share your faith in the past, you probably were encouraged to write out your testimony and then share the problem of sin and the solution of salvation through Christ. Sometimes we hand out tracts that summarize the Gospel into a few short bullet points.

The problem is, as time goes on our society is becoming more and more biblically illiterate. Add to that the postmodern bent to people’s thinking (who are you to say that I “sin”? Who defines what “sin” is and who “God” is? My truth is different than yours! I agree that Jesus was a good man but I think you’re being judgmental to say that He is the “only way”), and we are increasingly speaking different languages.

This was cemented in my mind and heart a few weeks ago when I was speaking with a friend who leads classes at our local Pregnancy Support Center. She had a particularly interested and spiritually curious group who had asked a lot of questions. She mentioned something about Adam and Eve at one point in their discussion, and then realized that many of them had never heard of Adam and Eve! How do you explain the Gospel to people with absolutely no Biblical foundation?

To answer this question, it is helpful to go to the book of Acts. The early church was sharing the Gospel both with Jews who had all the background and needed to connect the dots and see that Jesus was the promised Messiah they had been waiting for, and with Gentiles who had no understanding of the True God whatsoever.

Acts 17 is a fascinating study of evangelism. When Paul arrives in Thessalonica, he goes to the synagogue – “on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that the Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead. ‘This Jesus I am proclaiming to you is the Christ,’ he said.” (17:2-3) His audience understood his language – the Jews had been expecting The Christ, the promised Seed. What they needed to understand was that Jesus was the Christ! So, he started right at what they needed to understand.

Later in Acts 17, Paul is in Athens and engages the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers in conversation. “Some of them asked, ‘What is this babbler trying to say?’ Others remarked, ‘He seems to be advocating foreign gods.’ They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, ‘May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean.’” (17:18-20)

They didn’t get it. It was “strange” to their ears, it sounded like babbling – it was as though they were speaking another language. So, when Paul spoke in the Areopagus, guess where he started? Not with Jesus, but with creation – “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth…” (17:24) He built a basis for understanding so that they could see who Jesus was and why it mattered.

We are surrounded by many people who not only don’t believe in Jesus, they might not even have heard of Adam and Eve, the fall, depravity, and the One True God who desires to have a relationship with them. When we walk by them with our Christian slogans on our t-shirts, or hand them a “four spiritual laws” tract, or tell them at Christmas, “Jesus is the reason for the season”… it sounds like you’re speaking a foreign language. Tell them they are sinners, that Jesus is the only True Way, and they are confused or angry – it doesn’t make any sense in their mental framework!

I have found that it is very hard to find resources that explain the whole story of Scripture – either for “unreached Americans” who haven’t been taught anything about Scripture, or for new believers who find it confusing to crack open the Bible for the first time and don’t know where to start or what in the world it means.

This is why I wrote out God’s Big Story – to give people some mental “pegs” to hang Truths on in further conversation. After explaining the whole story, creation, the fall, sin, Israel and the law, Jesus … it all makes so much more sense! It is my prayer that it will open doors for further discussion, further questions, further openness to the Truth.

Please feel free to download the PDF of The Big Story. Feel free to use it on your blog or church website. Grab the Big Story button on the right hand side – it will link readers back to the God’s Big Story post here on Run the Earth, Watch the Sky. Read it and use it in discussion with your unsaved friends.

Whatever you do, I pray that this will give you some ideas on ways to share and explain His Truth. We’re not in the synagogue anymore, folks – we’re in Athens. We’re surrounded by people who think we are babbling in a different language. Let’s stop babbling to ourselves and start helping it to make sense to the unreached around us every day.

[You can read more about the background behind this post here.]

The Bible can be intimidating to read. It’s a big book full of smaller books, some of which are narrative, others are poetry, some are prophecies that seem confusing and strange.

The Bible was penned by many different authors and is full of stories, but all the stories and poetry and prophecy are really telling one Big story. It’s what the Bible is all about – from beginning to end, God’s message has been the same.

This is God’s Big Story.

God’s Big Story

Ready to dive into reading the Bible for yourself?  Courtney has written a helpful great general overview of the books of the Bible with suggestions about where to start. Find yourself an easy-to-read translation like the New International Version (NIV) of the Bible, and open up God’s Word!!

If you’d like to learn to study the Bible for yourself, this is my free gift to you!

Feel free to download this as a PDF and use/ distribute as you wish. Fellow bloggers, grab the “God’s Big Story” button for your blog to link your readers back to this post!