Loving, Learning, and Living the Jesus of the Story

I’m blessed to have been steeped in great Bible teaching since Mr. Schmidt first stirred my love for God’s Word in seventh grade Bible class.  I’m forever indebted to my Bible professors in college and seminary for making me tear the text apart and put it back together again.  During those years I learned the Bible’s drama, doctrine, and directions well. I was launched into ministry with a well-worn Bible, and I’ve enjoyed opening it for others for over twenty years of ministry.  For many of those years, though, I lived and taught the Bible’s stories, its theology, and heavy doses of its rules to live by and examples to follow, but I never put them together, not for my life nor for my listeners.  This new way of thinking about the Bible as drama, doctrine, and directions infuses my study, teaching, and preaching of God’s Word with renewed energy.  But I have to be careful that I don’t lose my grip on the gospel at the same time that I think I’m getting a better grasp of the Bible.  It’s happened to me before.

During our third year of marriage and second year of seminary, all of my Bible learning ran smack into a wall of reality when a losing battle to secret sins drove me to the counselor’s office. There I re-learned that the Bible, with all of its stories, theology, and rules-to-live-by, is about Jesus.  God began to apply the fullness of the cross shaped drama, doctrine, and directions of His Word to my life.  Step by step God’s Spirit used our conversations to help me see how Jesus wants me to live my little story as part of His Larger Story found in the pages of the Bible, to live the life I now live in the flesh by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me (Galatians 2:20).  The Bible was written so that I might love, learn, and live in Jesus by loving, learning and living in His Story.

Robert Webber once suggested that as believers in the only True Story that narrates the world we can picture the timeline of history like an hourglass on its side.  In the middle of the hourglass are the historical events of Jesus’ incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and His promise to return.  These events comprise the central story that explains the entire Story of the Bible.  All of the drama, doctrine and directions found in Genesis 1 to the Gospels lead and direct us to the bloody cross and the empty tomb.  From Acts to Revelation the Apostles unveiled new drama, doctrine, and directions that lean and depend on what happened on that cross and in that tomb.  All of history prior to Jesus flows to Jesus and His work of salvation, and all of remaining history has since flowed from the life, death, and resurrected life of Jesus.  We must remind ourselves and our hearers that the biblical drama we love, the doctrine that helps us learn it, and the directions that help us live in it must lead us to lean on Jesus as He is offered in the gospel or else they have no power to transform us or our world.  Richard Lovelace once wrote that “spiritual growth is not produced by the transfer of information but by responses of faith.”  Faith comes by hearing and hearing through the drama, doctrine, and directions of Christ (Romans 10:17).  Biblical transformation happens when we continually embrace by faith the Jesus revealed to us by biblical information.

It’s simply not enough to know what the Bible is or even Whom it is about.  In his introduction to In My Place Condemned He Stood, J. I. Packer exhorts students of the Bible to remember that we will not be fully informed by the Bible until we know it is about the person of Jesus Christ.  But even then, we cannot be fully transformed by the Bible until we know Jesus Christ personally.  Here's how Packer put it:

In recent years, great strides in biblical theology and contemporary canonical exegesis have brought new precision to our grasp of the Bible’s overall story of how God’s plan to bless Israel, and through Israel the world, came to its climax in and through Christ.

But I do not see how it can be denied that each New Testament book, whatever other job it may be doing, has in view, one way or another, Luther’s primary question:  How may a weak, perverse, and guilty sinner find a gracious God? Nor can it be denied that real Christianity only really starts when that discovery is made.

And to the extent that modern developments, by filling our horizon with the great metanarrative, distract us from pursuing Luther’s question in personal terms, they hinder as well as help in our appreciation of the gospel.

The church is and will always be healthiest when every Christian can line up with every other Christian and sing (or, in these musically dizzy days, learn to sing) P. P. Bliss’s simple words, which really say it all:

Bearing shame and scoffing rude
In my place condemned He stood
Sealed my pardon with His blood
Hallelujah!  What a Savior!

In my concluding article next week, I’ll show you how the Spirit is using the drama, doctrine, and directions of Jesus’ Story to help me love, learn, and live in Jesus.

JIMMY DAVIS is an Associate Pastor at Metrocrest Presbyterian Church in Carrollton, TX, an Associate Editor for the Worldview Church, and maintains the Cruciform Life Blog and @cruciformlife Twitter account.

Suggested Colson Center Store resource: God’s Big Picture: Tracing the Storyline of the Bible(this is a fantastic little book!), or a similar but weightier book According to Plan: The Unfolding Revelation of God in the Bible.  .