WHAT STORY ARE YOU LIVING?

Each of us is living our own story within an overarching narrative. We believe the Bible is God's revelation of the ultimate story that each of us is born into and in which we must continually seek to find our place. At the most basic level, the gospel narrative is God's story about Himself, His creation, our rebellion, and His redemption. The way we enter into that story personally is through recognizing the sinful condition of our hearts, repenting of that sin and receiving the grace and forgiveness of God made available by faith in the work of His Son. We lay hold of salvation through repentance and faith and we work out our salvation by continually walking in repentance and faith.

That's a simplistic and abbreviated look at God's story, but it's important to recognize that the world offers a competing and corrupted narrative. Kevin DeYoung offers a very helpful reading of the very harmful secular narrative that dominates the "enlightened" thinking of our day and drives the wisdom of our "progressive" culture:

The secular salvation story is a derivative and deviant version of the older Christian narrative. It tells the story of self, authenticity, and acceptance.

Instead of sin committed against a holy God, we have infractions committed against the self. We don’t struggle to keep God’s law. We struggle to keep our own internal sense of right and wrong. The problem is not God-offendedness, but personal integration and identity. 

Instead of repentance before a holy God, we have authenticity of self-expression. We don’t bewail being so much less than we should be. We lament not being in touch with who we really are. The confession is not “Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips,” but “Woe to me if I think myself unclean.” 

And instead of forgiveness from a holy God, we have the casual acceptance of simply being the way we want to be. We don’t see the demands of justice met by the cries of a crucified Christ. We see the voice of conscience silenced in the cries of a thousand well-wishers. The good news is not grace and mercy, but tolerance and enlightenment. 

We are all telling a story, living by a story, evangelizing a story. One story is ancient and rugged. The other modern and banal. One confronts. The other caresses.  One truly saves. The other falsely succors. Choose your story wisely. For one starts grim, but ends in life. The other looks cheery and ends in death. 

Which story is defining your life? Is it possible that you are so surrounded by and inundated with the secular story of salvation that you inadvertently living in a choose-your-own-adventure story of the sovereign self? Or are you daily caught up in the compelling and glorious story guided by the Sovereign God and for which we were all created?