Chapter One: Let Me Tell You a Story
Chapter Two: The Story from Above
Chapter Three: The Story from Below

Chapter Four: Jesus–The Center of the Story

19 For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ, 20 and through him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.
Colossians 1:19-20 (NLT)

Whether we begin telling the gospel story from God’s perspective or from ours, we’ll end up at the same place: Jesus. With outstretched arms Jesus brings both perspectives of the story together and holds them in place until God’s glory is revealed and we are rescued from our trouble.

Until Jesus, God had been a character without a face. At different times throughout the Bible God is revealed as a force or a presence or a voice, but it’s not until Jesus appears as one of us that we are able to understand what God is really like. In Jesus, God’s faithfulness and humanity’s frailty are combined. The result is salvation with its promise of a new creation with new life, new hope, and new opportunities.

We get a better understanding of what this means by reading the gospels—the four books in the New Testament known as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
They’re like highlight reels of Jesus’ life that help us see how his life, death, and resurrection are the key to our salvation.

His Life
Jesus was born into scandal. He grew up in obscurity. Then one day he stepped onto history’s stage and changed everything. He came preaching the message of “The Kingdom of God.” This was the message of salvation that the world had been waiting to hear. But he didn’t come merely to talk about or explain the kingdom. He came to embody it. As powerful as his teachings were, they were nothing compared to the grace and truth demonstrated by his actions.

He healed the sick, raised the dead, and cast evil spirits out of people as a way of demonstrating God’s intention to heal and restore his entire creation. Jesus spent time with “sinners”—those who had been excluded by the religious elite—as a way of showing that no person, no matter how messy their life had become, was beyond the reach of God’s forgiving love.

He spoke words of truth to those who had lost their way or had been led astray. He called people to repent, to change their thinking and their actions, in response to his message. He demonstrated a way of life more befitting of human beings created in the image of God. To those who were paying attention and really listening to what he had to say, he revealed an alternative path that was unlike anything offered by his contemporaries. He invited a select group of people to be his “disciples” or “apprentices.” They followed him closely and learned this new of way life from him so that they could someday pass it on to others. Jesus began a revolution of love, grace, and hope that was building momentum and would eventually reach to the ends of the earth and include people from all nations.

All of this was supposed to be good news, but it wasn’t received that way by all who heard him. He accumulated enemies just as quickly as he gathered followers. It was the religious leaders who had the biggest problem with him. He challenged their traditions and embarrassed them with his acceptance of the same sinners they had rejected. He undermined their influence with his authoritative teaching style. He condemned their religious institutions, like the temple in Jerusalem, that were doing more harm than good. On top of all that, they were jealous of him. Masses of people were drawn to him in a way that they weren’t drawn to them.

These crowds were also a threat to the Roman Empire. Nothing made the powers-that-be more nervous than a charismatic leader who could build a following and motivate them to action. Rome didn’t tolerate revolutionaries. That is exactly what the religious leaders made Jesus out to be to the Roman authorities. Of course, Jesus was leading a revolution, but it wasn’t a revolution advanced with swords and clubs. It was a revolution of love. But that didn’t really matter to Rome.

The crowds around Jesus were large; they were also fickle. It happened in Jerusalem at the time of Passover, a season of intense religious and political fervor. Jesus’ enemies whipped into a frenzy the same people, who just a few days earlier had given Jesus a hero’s welcome into town. They convinced Pilate, the Roman Governor, that the best way to keep the peace was to execute Jesus by crucifixion.

His Death
The crucifixion of Jesus was history’s darkest moment. Not just because a good man died an excruciating death that he didn’t deserve, but also because it appeared that once again the forces of evil had thwarted God’s attempt to rescue his creation. As it turned out, the cross was actually the best, and most unexpected, plot twist in the history of storytelling. Had we been there to witness those six brutal hours Jesus spent on the cross, in addition to the torture he endured before the crucifixion, we would have seen nothing significant in his death. He would have looked just like any other failed Messiah who had come to Jerusalem with delusions of grandeur and ended up on a cross.

Yet, the Christian faith is built on the conviction that something cosmically significant was happening as Jesus was dying on the cross. Somehow, in some way, while on the cross Jesus was fighting the ultimate battle against evil on our behalf. The forces of evil threw everything they had at Jesus and he absorbed it all. The worst of the human condition—betrayal, jealously, guilt, shame, fear, doubt, isolation, and brokenness–was placed upon his shoulders. By taking all of this upon himself, Jesus made a way for us to step out from under the burden of our guilt and shame and freed us from the grip of the forces of evil which had enslaved us to sin and death.

Sometimes an image helps us understand Jesus’ death in a way that words can’t. Imagine a mother hen gathering her chicks under her wings as a prairie fire rages across a farm. As the fire passes, the chicks are protected from the flames as their mother takes the full force of the heat upon herself. Her death makes life possible for others. So does the death of Jesus. (Thanks to N. T. Wright for this image.)

His death does more than just save us from evil. It also reverses the curse brought about by the fall and restores our broken relationships. By showing us pure love in action, Jesus draws us back into relationship with God and shows us how to relate with others. From the cross, Jesus shows us what God really looks like. Having seen the face of unconditional, self-giving, sacrificial love, we see everything else in a different light as well. When we become a part of God’s story and learn to love as Jesus loved, it opens up an entirely different, and much better, way of relating to and experiencing the joys found in the world around us. His death gives us life.

His Resurrection
How can we believe that what I’ve just described is the product of anything other than a bad case of wishful thinking? How do we know that something significant happened when Jesus died on the cross? The death of Jesus is meaningful for only one reason—the resurrection.

After Jesus was killed on the cross, his body was placed in a tomb. After three days, on a Sunday, the gospels report that Jesus was raised from the dead and appeared to his disciples. The Christian faith stands or falls on whether or not this actually happened. If Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead, then he was a failed Messiah who was really no different than all the other wandering sages of his day.

If he was raised from the dead, and there is good reason to believe that he was, then everything he said and did takes on greater weight. The resurrection elevates Jesus from the status of a good teacher and doer of good deeds to the Lord of all creation and the author of salvation. The resurrection validates Jesus’ identity as the Son of God and vindicates everything he taught and did. The resurrection is God’s way of saying, “This is my son, whom I love, listen to him!”

The resurrection is also God’s way of declaring an irrefutable victory over the forces of evil. Jesus entered the shadowy world of sin and death and emerged from his tomb victorious. This is good news because if sin and death have no power over Jesus, then they have no lasting power over those who are “in Jesus.” We’ll talk more about what it means to “in Jesus” in a future chapter, but for now, please trust me when I tell you that “in Jesus” is one of the most important little phrases in the Bible.

While there aren’t enough words in any language to adequately explain the logic and process of how we are saved by Jesus, the historic Christian conviction is that our sins are forgiven, evil is defeated, creation is restored, and the light of God’s glory shines most brightly through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. There simply would be no good news story to tell without him.

To grasp the difference Jesus can make in our lives takes a lifetime of exploration. A kind of exploration done not so much by reading books, but by becoming a part of God’s story and learning how to live, love, and die as Jesus did.

How do we become a part of God’s story? We’ll take up that question in the next chapter.

Thanks again for all the helpful feedback on these chapters. Here’s the next one.

Chapter One: Let Me Tell You a Story
Chapter Two: The Story from Above

Chapter Three: The Story from Below

In the Ancient Near East–the time and place out of which much of the Bible was written–kings often erected statues of themselves in far flung corners of their empires. These statues were intended to represent the king in his absence. The statue continually reminded the people who was in charge. In a similar way, our creator left us, made in his image, to rule the earth on his behalf and carry forward his creative intent in the world.

In the beginning God created the world and saw that it was very good. We were created to live in harmony with God, each other, the world, and ourselves. (Scot McKnight’s categories: Embracing Grace)

We started out with so much potential.

Then we messed up everything. Our desire to live independently of God screws us up in all directions. Creation comes under a curse. The impact of our rebellion impairs our ability to experience meaningful relationships in all areas of life. (Read Genesis 3 to get the details)

Our sin, which is a religious word for our rebellion against God, alienated us from God. A relationship once held together by intimacy, trust, and friendship is shattered by fear, anxiety, and misunderstanding. In shame, we hide from the one knows us best and loves us the most.

Our sin also alienated us from each other. We can’t seem to relate to each in positive ways even when we want to. Several years ago, just after the holidays, David Letterman said something like the following in his monologue:

Family. It’s the bedrock, the backbone… You can’t get enough time with them, you can’t ever get them all together. So why is it that when you finally do get them all together, things go haywire? And I mean (snap) immediately haywire. I don’t mean to bore anyone with details about my holiday, but by the end of the time I was ready to fill my pockets with rocks and walk into the ocean.

We were created to live in community with others and yet we end up sabotaging it every time we get within sniffing distance of anything resembling a healthy relationship. One of our greatest fears is to be left alone, but at the same time we can’t stand the thought of someone getting too close.

Our sin has also alienated us from the rest of creation. God entrusted his world–the rivers, oceans, mountains, prairies, forests, deserts and all that lives within them–to us and we have not done well with it. Instead of taking care of God’s world we’ve exploited, polluted, and destroyed beautiful chunks of it.

We’ve managed to take everything that’s good about creation and pervert, abuse, and misuse it. Food is good, but we eat ourselves to death. Creativity is good, but we’ve created just as many ways to kill each other as to help each other. Sex is good, but we find it almost impossible to experience its goodness without being consumed by it.

Finally, our sin brought about self-alienation or shame. Shame should not be confused with guilt. We feel guilty because we do something wrong. We experience shame when we believe that there is something wrong with us. Most of us have in our minds an ideal of what it means to be a “good” person and we consistently fall short of our own standards. Our consistent inconsistency compounds our shame. Our shame usually resides in levels so deep that we are unaware of how it affects our ability to relate with others. It’s hard to imagine that we’re loved by God or other people, and it’s hard to show love to others, when deep inside we hate ourselves.

Of course, we’re still capable of goodness because the image of God has not completely left us. But we find it impossible to be consistently good. We can do something beautiful in a flash of inspiration and then ten minutes later do something awful. We can do good while harboring terrible feelings inside about the good we’re doing and we can do terrible things while at the same time thinking about how much we’d love to be doing something good. We are walking contradictions.

So we find ourselves in a big mess that we’ve helped create. The harder we try to make things better, the worse they seem to get. Even when we do the right thing we do it in the wrong way for the wrong reason at the wrong time and end up doing more harm than good.

We’re weighed down with personal guilt and unspoken shame. The heavier the burden gets, the worse we feel about ourselves, the worse we feel, the more likely we are to do things that bring on more guilt and shame.

Lurking behind all of this is a sense of dread that comes with the knowledge of our impending death. We know that death comes for us all, but we have no idea what comes after death. The more we think about our coming death the more meaningless our present life seems. What’s the point of life if we all end up dead anyway? (Read Ecclesiastes if you want to follow this depressing thought all the way to the bottom of hope.)

We’re in quite a predicament aren’t we?

There is an old story about a stork who finds himself stuck in a deep bog of mud. The stork furiously flaps its wings trying to break free but can’t. To gain leverage, the stork puts his beak into the mud and manages to pull one foot out of the mud and then the other, only to realize that now its beak has sunk too deep in the mud to be extracted. So he puts one foot down and then the other hoping to gain some leverage. . .

That’s our story. We’re stuck in the mud and we can’t get out. Our best efforts only make things worse. In fact, the harder we try to break free, the deeper we seem to sink.

The truth is we’ll never free ourselves from the compounding consequences of our sin. Someone else will have to come along and get us out of this mess we’re in. It’s only after we finally accept this reality that the gospel story starts to make sense from our perspective.

The gospel is the story of how God comes to rescue us from ourselves, our sin, and from the forces of evil that have taken advantage of our rebellious spirits and enslaved us.

Jesus joins us in the mud, gets stuck in our mess, and gives us the leverage we need to break free. The gospel is good news because Jesus has come to do what we can’t do for ourselves.

The name Jesus means “God saves.” Jesus is our salvation. In the Gospel story, salvation can have a number of meanings.

Salvation means that our sins our forgiven. It means that our relationship with God is restored. God takes away our guilt and shame and replaces it with his loving presence (a.k.a the Holy Spirit). God lives in us and we live in God.

Salvation means broken community can be repaired. Jesus teaches us to love and serve and forgive others so that we can live in harmony with each other.

Salvation means that we are equipped to do the job we were originally created to do. Jesus gives us wisdom so that we can be good stewards of the world that God has entrusted to us and better reflect God’s image back into his creation.

Salvation means that death is not the end of our story. It means that the good we do in this life is not wasted or forgotten. When God finally renews and restores this world, we will be raised to life so that we can enjoy God and his perfected people in his perfected world—forever.

This is all made possible by what God has done through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

So from our perspective, we can say that the gospel is a story about how God comes to rescue us and present us with a benefit package filled with more blessings that we can count. (Read Eph. 1: 1-13 to see how one guy gushes on and on about the benefits of salvation).

But the gospel is more than just a benefit package. It’s also a job description. Just as God created us in his image to be his creative partners in caring for the world He saves us so that we can partner with him in repairing and restoring his broken world.

Do you see why “gospel” means good news?

The gospel is good news about God: there is no end to his love. He will not be denied. He will put his broken world back together again even if it kills him (and it did).

It’s good news about the world: God is putting his broken world back together one person at a time.

It’s good news about us: God loves us so much that he has come to save us and include us in his story of redemption. He offers us a job description and an unbeatable benefit package to go with it.

Finally, it’s good news about Jesus. He is the victorious Lord who conquered sin, death, and forces of evil. None of this would even be news, much less good news if it weren’t for his life, death, and resurrection. Jesus is the key to the story from both perspectives. In the next chapter we’ll explore how this is so.

Before you look at chapter 2, let me take this opportunity to say that I haven’t dropped any footnotes in this manuscript and I don’t think it would be a good idea to put a bunch of them in the finished product, but I do see including a “for further reading/study” list at the back. A lot of what I’ve written in this manuscript has been shaped by the following writers/thinkers/theologians: N. T. Wright, Scot McKnight, Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, Robert Webber, and some others that I can’t think of right now.

If you haven’t read the introductory remarks to chapter one, you might want to take a look before you read chapter two.

I’ve tried to keep each chapter to about 1000 words. That’s a tight fit sometimes. There is always more that can be said, but my goal for each chapter is to say just enough. Thanks for reading and offering helpful feedback.

Chapter Two: The Story from Above

The Bible is long book that seems to tell a pretty complicated story, spanning thousands of years, written in three languages, with hundreds of characters known by hard to pronounce names. Yet on the other side of that complexity is a plot so simple it’s stunning. At its heart, the Bible tells a story of good news about God and God’s world. We call this good news story “The Gospel.”

The gospel story can be summarized in a number of ways. It all depends on the perspective from which the story gets told and the point from where we choose to start the telling. We usually start with our problems and needs and what the gospel story has to offer people like us. How does the gospel benefit us? What can we get out of this story? These are the questions we want to have answered above all others.

These questions have their place and we’ll get around to answering them, but they’re not the best place to start the story. Instead, let’s start with where the Bible starts.

“In the beginning, God . . .” Genesis 1:1.

The gospel story starts (and ends) with God. He’s more than the main character He’s the author who writes himself into the story. So it makes sense to ask, “What is the gospel from God’s perspective? What is God up to in this story? What kind of story is God telling?” Once we start to get a grasp on what the gospel is about from God’s perspective we can then start thinking about the story from our perspective.

It’s crucial that we get this order right. It will change the way we see God, the world, and our place within the story. Rather than asking, “How does God fit into my life and what I’m doing?” let’s ask “How does my life fit into God and what God is doing in the world?”

So here’s a summary of the gospel from God’s perspective, or at least it’s the best we can do to piece together what the Bible says about how God views the world. If we were actually able to see everything from God’s perspective it would break our hearts and blow our minds and leave us curled up in a corner repeatedly murmuring “More oatmeal please.”

For summary purposes we can break the story up into three major scenes. (Insert suggested scripture references along the way for further reading.)

Scene 1: Creation and Fall (Genesis 1-3)

In the beginning, God created everything you can see and everything you can’t. God’s creative activity was a labor of love and God loved what he created. When he finished God said, “This is good, very good.” And it was good. Creation was at peace. There was a sense of wholeness. Cosmic harmony. “Shalom” is the fancy word for this.

Human beings are God’s favorite part of creation. He created them, both male and female, in his image. By creating humanity in his image, God gives them the ability to love God and each other and to exercise God’s authority in the world. Humanity is created to be God’s partners in loving and caring for and continuing to create good things in the world.

God also gives human beings the freedom to think for themselves and make their own choices. Faster than you can say “big mistake,” they use their freedom to rebel against God. They go their own way and evil enters the world. Some call this act of rebellion “The Fall.”

The result is that God’s good world is broken in every way imaginable. The image of God in humanity is scarred and distorted by the forces of evil. Love and community give way to selfishness and violence. Human creativity develops a self-serving shadow. The earth is cursed and groans under the weight of the burden. Shalom is destroyed.

What was once very good goes bad in a hurry. God honors the choices made by those created in his image and allows it to happen. But that doesn’t mean that God is content to leave his broken world in a state of disrepair. God loves his world too much to sit back and watch it spin completely out of control.

Scene 2: Redemption

God sets a plan in motion that will reverse the curse that has come upon his creation. Just as God created humanity to be his partners in caring for creation, he also partners with humanity for the purposes of redemption.

He invites Abraham and his family to be his partners in bringing a blessing to the world. He partners with a prophet named Moses to help Israel (Abraham’s family) become a light in a dark world. He partners with famous people like King David and with people we’ve never heard of.

It’s a beautiful plan, but it has a fatal flaw. God’s partners keep failing to uphold their end of the deal. They can’t break free from the forces of evil that have enslaved them. They continue to rebel against God even as he tries to save them.

Since God can’t find a suitable human partner, God enters the story as a human being–Jesus Christ. (The fancy word for the idea that God became human is “Incarnation.”)

As Jesus, God comes into the world to defeat the forces of evil and restore the image of God in humanity by showing them how to live. This is what we see Jesus doing through his life, death, and resurrection. We’ll talk more about the specifics of what Jesus did and how he did it later on.

3. Restoration/Recreation (Rev. 21-22)

Jesus is the catalyst that sets off a chain reaction in the world that will eventually bring about a complete restoration of God’s creation. What was broken in the fall will be repaired. Evil will be extinguished once and for all. The Gospel story ends with God’s good but broken world being transformed into a new heavens and new earth. In the end, shalom will once again be the norm for God’s world.

In each of these three scenes, God is the star of the show. He does all the heavy lifting and gets all the credit. He creates, redeems, forgives, heals, restores, and repairs. As the star, God let’s his beauty, creativity, faithfulness, wisdom, strength, mercy, grace, and ultimately his glory shine into the darkness so that his world can be healed and so that his image can be restored to his favorite part of creation.

From this top-down perspective, the gospel is a story about a God who will stop at nothing to overcome human rebellion and defeat the forces of evil in order to put his broken world back together again.

Now let’s reverse the angle and tell the gospel story from the bottom-up.

Thanks to everyone for their feedback on my question about a project I’ve been working on.

Your comments have been encouraging. I’m going start putting some chapters online for more feedback. Here is what I’m thinking: this manuscript is intended to be a resource that can be used broadly by many different kinds of churches within and outside of the restoration heritage. It’s not going to be the kind of book where I’m only speaking for myself, but rather what I write needs to be something that we all can generally affirm. I’m not looking to push buttons or stretch the envelope with this project. There will be a time for that later on. Rather, I hope that what gets published is a healthy, encouraging, and motivating description of the gospel that churches will be happy to use in their guest packets, small groups, and Christianity 101 classes and that individuals will feel comfortable using as a discussion starter with their seeking friends.

With all that said, I’m putting these chapters online so that you all can interact with them on a conceptual level. Let’s not sweat the details of grammar and punctuation right now. Rather, what I need your help doing is to evaluate how the material is presented and whether or not it is going to be helpful. If something strikes you as being too confusing, too technical, or even too controversial, then let me know. If you all don’t feel good about the product, then you’re not going to use it, so here is your chance to help me produce a high quality product that you’ll be willing to use when it’s published.

Here’s the opening chapter: Let Me Tell You a Story

In order to be a lifeguard, you have to be able to swim.

Should be obvious right? Yet, there are a few people who still haven’t gotten that email. Several years ago I read a story about a young woman who, along with a half-dozen other would-be lifeguards, had to be rescued by the real lifeguards during their trial swim. It was only after she was back on shore that they read her application more closely. On it, she had said that while she couldn’t swim, she grew up watching “Baywatch” and looked good in a bikini. She thought she’d make a great lifeguard.

Huntington Beach Lifeguard Captain Steve Seim said, “Every year we get people who have no business trying out. People watch ‘Baywatch’ and say, ‘Oh, I want to be a lifeguard,’ and they have no idea what that means.”

I can’t believe that anyone could believe such a thing. Being a lifeguard is hard work and requires great skill. It’s not nearly as easy as being a doctor, which is something I’m sure I could do without ever going to medical school. Watching almost every episode of ER has prepared me to handle just about every medical emergency known to man. The only exceptions being the emergencies addressed in the episodes I’ve missed. I know I’d make a great doctor. I even look good in scrubs.

Isn’t it amazing how easy it is to let what we see on TV define our view of reality?

Think about how what you’ve seen on TV has impacted your understanding of what it means to be a Christian. You flip through the channels one night and watch a few minutes of a TV preacher making absurd promises on behalf of God while begging for money. You change the channel just it time to catch the end of a report about a group of “Christians” disrupting the funeral of an AIDS victim with words of hate. You change the channel again and get drawn into an interview with a “Christian” leader trying to influence the outcome of an election by alternating between simplistic moral pronouncements and prophecies of doom if the opposition wins.

What about the way Christians are stereotyped in sit-coms and crime dramas? At one extreme is Ned (the Nerd) Flanders on The Simpsons. On the other extreme is the crazed serial killer who brands himself with a hot crucifix and then uses his victim’s blood to write Bible verses from Revelation on the crime scene walls.

What you see on TV might make you want to be a doctor, lawyer, lifeguard or crime scene investigator, but it’s probably not going to make you want to be a Christian. I can’t blame you. I’ve got no interest in being a part of the religion known as Christianity if what we see on TV is anywhere close to beings an accurate portrayal of what it means to be a Christian.

Fortunately, it’s not. Reality TV is an oxymoron. The kind of Christianity we see on TV isn’t what exists in most churches across the world, at least not from my experience. If all there is to Christianity is what we see on TV, it wouldn’t have survived for 2000 years. It certainly wouldn’t have thrived across time, space, and culture the way that it has.

So what does it mean to be a Christian?

I’m assuming you’re reading this because you’re exploring this question for the first time or because you’re not content with the answers you’ve been given in the past. It may be that you attended a church that gave this book to you as a “welcome” gift and you’re trying to get a better feel for what kind of church you’ve just attended. Perhaps a friend gave you this book and wants to talk about with you after you’ve read it.

What follows is an attempt to explain the Christian faith in such a way that it transcends the stereotypes. I hope the kind of Christianity I’m about to describe seems less like a religion of rules that can be practiced only a few hours a week and more like a way of life that influences everything we do.

The best way I know to describe it is to say that the Christian faith is a story to be lived out in the real world in partnership with God, the Great Storyteller.

Why think of Christianity as a story?

Because everybody loves a good story.

“Once upon a time, in a far away land, there lived a beautiful princess named . . . . . .Buttercup.”

And off we go.

The attraction to stories is embedded in all human DNA. No matter where you go in the world, you’ll find people telling and listening to stories. Listen closely to the stories a culture tells repeatedly and you’ll find embedded in them the people’s most important beliefs, values, and aspirations.

It should be no surprise to us then that the Christian faith comes to us in the form of a story. When God wants to grab our attention and communicate what is most important to Him, He tells us a story. That is what the Bible is—God’s story. By “story,” I don’t mean a fictional fairy tale. God’s story is the truest story in the world. It’s also a story with a clearly defined agenda. It aims to draw us into itself and invite us to become a part of it in a way that no other story can.

So what does it mean to be a Christian?

My short answer is that it means becoming a part of the story God has been telling for thousands of years and will continue to tell throughout eternity. It means being able to see how the little stories we’re telling with our lives fit into the great big story of God.

In the pages that follow, we’ll discuss what all of this means, how it happens, and the difference it can make in us and in the world.

If you want to know more, keep reading.

I have quite a story to tell you.