Today I want to talk about stories.

You have a story. I have a story. Our lives, as random as they sometimes feel, are a story with a plot.

God has a story, too…a story with amazing drama, with purpose, with comedy, with pain…and with ultimate payoff in the ending. Today is about stories.

What are some of your favorite stories?

Maybe it’s easiest to think back to when you were a kid, to the stories you loved, the stories that you pretended to be in. What were the stories you dreamed about, the stories you wished you were in? What’s one of your favorite stories? [ASK]

What was it about that story that drew you in? [ASK]

I suppose something happens to us along the way to sort of shatter the ideal that our lives can be that favorite story, that fairy tale sort of life.

Somewhere along the way, we begin to discover the hard side of reality. We discover that life often feels like the old Candid Camera show: everybody seems to be setting us up, playing some practical joke to get a laugh at our expense.

Or maybe it isn’t quite that bad. Maybe the problem isn’t that we end up in a different story than we dreamed about, but rather that we end up being a different person than we wanted to be. We don’t get to be the main character; we’re more like somebody lost in the crowd scene. Our lives feel like we end up being the horse pulling the carriage instead of Cinderella herself…We’re more Ensign What’s-his-name than Capt. Kirk.

What is the story of your life?

How do you see things play out? Are you the good character, or the bad one? Is life moving toward a happy ending, or is it a tragedy? Are you a character with strong drive and purpose, or are you aimless and unsure?

Long ago, the famous philosopher Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I really believe that one of the most important tasks of the church is to help each of us examine our lives, so that we can live with purpose, with conviction, and with intentionality.

And I believe with all my heart that no matter what kind of a story we think we are in, no matter how good or bad we may think our lives are at the moment…I believe that when we take the time to look and examine, to ask why and delve deep, we will find God popping up in our life story in all kinds of places.

God shows up, in beautiful and shocking ways!

When I examine my own life, I recognize that beyond the Bible stories I learned as a child, beyond the story of Jesus and Christianity that I was taught, there truly has been a personal encounter with something that is completely beyond myself.

Here’s the part of this that truly amazes me, to be honest. My experience has not been that I discovered God after a long search. It was almost the exact opposite. After a childhood of church and Bible songs and camps, I came to middle school and high school not paying much attention to God at all. No church, no Bible reading, no conscious desire to live as God intended for me to live.

But right in that moment of looking everywhere else for meaning and purpose, God broke in. At first, God broke in through other people, people I respected and admired, who told me that living for God made all the difference for them.

And then I began having actual experiences of God. They started very similar to what Shaun McNay talked about a few weeks ago. We all have those voices or those tapes that run inside of our head, but then there comes this thought that is completely different, completely other. I began experiencing the shocking beauty of hearing from God.

This is my story!

The eternal longing love of God sought me from the time I was being knit together in my mother's womb, and to this very moment still pursues me, sometimes gently and quietly, sometimes with a relentless and nagging ferocity of loving protection.

When I think about my faith, my life with God, I really don’t believe that I have found it, or that I possess it. No, I have been found; I am a possession. How do I make sense of what has found me? How do I name what it is? Or, to frame it as I am today, how do my story and God’s story interconnect?

It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to anyone that I believe the Bible is God’s story, the way God intended for it to be told.

I believe the Bible to be true, and trustworthy, and life-changing, and powerful! Millions of people over thousands of years have trusted their entire lives to God’s story as revealed in the Bible.

It’s not simply a rule book, or just a history book, or a record of good teachings. It is God’s story, the record of who God is and what God is doing in the world.

God has always loved us human beings. God is always pursuing us. My experience is not unique. God is and has been pursuing each one of us since the beginning of time, since the time each of us was being knit together in our mother’s womb.

As we read Paul’s words to Timothy earlier, we read some of the clearest words in the Bible about what the Bible is.

Notice that Paul began, though, with Timothy’s story. Take a look again in your worship folders at the words of 2 Timothy 3:14-17.

“But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it…”

Just like I had friends and parents and grandparents who showed me what God was like, Paul reminds Timothy of his family, the ones who have taught him his whole life long. Earlier in the letter, he names Timothy’s grandmother and mother by name.

God’s story in the Bible is not some disconnected “blob” of truth; it is connected to our stories. Let’s look further.

“…and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.”

Here’s another way God’s story in the Bible is connected to us. It’s not just a story that exists out there, but it is a story that makes a claim on us, a story that affects us. Through Jesus Christ, the Bible helps us understand what God is like and provides salvation for us.

God’s story in the Bible impacts OUR stories by giving us purpose!

It gives us motivation, a direction. It empowers us, affects us, enables us to experience a different kind of ending than we otherwise would.

As we examine our own lives, our own stories, it becomes easier to discover God’s activity in us when we are ALSO examining God’s story in the Bible. Knowing and discovering who God is in the Bible helps us recognize God in our lives now.

Too many of us have a perspective of God that is warped or untrue.

The Bible tells the true and trustworthy story of God. It's a story told by many human writers from diverse cultures over thousands of years of history, but it is a story with a plot that completely resonates with my experience. It is the story of one God who created the whole universe and humanity in order to open God's self up to relationship with us.

It is the story of a God who creates recklessly, with joyful abandon, simply so that God can walk in the cool of the evening with the people he created, so that God can name God's self to Moses (and us) as "Yahweh", the great I am.

It is the story of people like you and me; people who aren't god, but who want to be and sometimes act like we are. People who ruthlessly and relentlessly want to define and choose our own story, our own life, our own frame of existence. People who from the beginning are willing to destroy relationships–with God and with other people–in order to pass the buck or increase their own power or standing in the world.

It is the story of a God who will not give up the hope of an honest and whole relationship with this rebel humanity created in God's image. It’s the story of a God who called an old man and a barren woman to give up all they ever knew to follow him and have descendants beyond count and land to live in. It’s the story of a God who ridiculously committed himself to a fickle group of whining Israelites (who followed rescue after rescue with idol after idol), the story of a God who kept raising up men and women who could hear God's voice and speak of love and justice and mercy and judgment, the story of a God who finally took the ultimate step of embracing wayward humanity to the Nth degree by becoming one–a person named Jesus of Nazareth.

This story absolutely matches my own experience of divine encounters with a pursuing, relentless, loving God.

It's a story written down by individuals who truly listened to this God. It's a story preserved by people whose encounters with God through the person of Jesus Christ changed them forever.

In Paul’s words to Timothy, the Bible is “God-breathed, useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that all God’s people may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

We can trust it to tell us what God is like. It can teach us what we need to know to do the good work of God, to join what God is doing in the world.

And those words “rebuking” and “correcting” remind us of something essential as well.

We believe that as we make the effort to examine the stories of our lives, as we learn to pay attention, we’ll see that God is in our story.

We believe that as we examine God’s story in the Bible, we’ll learn more of God’s character, more of what his voice sounds like. The Bible shows us clearly what God is like, and teaches us and trains us to see and hear God more and more in our day-to-day life.

But those words “rebuking” and “correcting” remind us that there’s one last step beyond knowing our story and knowing God’s story.

We must let our story be shaped and defined and corrected and changed by what God is doing in us and in the world.

I choose to let the Bible be authoritative in my life.

I do that because its words consistently prove able to bring me to the Divine Center; because generations upon generations of Spirit-filled people have chosen both to preserve the words and to live by them and to let them point them to the living Christ.

To me, it seems strangely arrogant to pick and choose which parts of the Bible I will allow to define what I believe, and which I will reject. Twice in my life, I have packed up and moved and left places of comfort because a group of people in a meeting for clearness told us that was their discerning of God's leading. To reject those people, my community, would have been ridiculous. I trust them. I gathered them for the purpose of helping me know God's leading. Why would I pick and choose from what they said? I choose to see the Bible as a record of millions of people's meetings for clearness. I may not like all of what it says, but I trust it to lead me to a deeper understanding and experience of the God who has already discovered me.

Do you know your own story?

Are you continuing to learn more and more of God’s story? And most important of all, is God’s story shaping and guiding and correcting your story? God is relentlessly pursuing you with love. Will you let the story of your life be shaped by God?