WEEK 2 - HIS STORY/OUR STORY
Monday, January 20, 2014 at 09:55AM
In week two, the main point is that God's kingdom isn't first of all a set of propositions, but a story about a King who comes to rescue his people. Jesus is the climax of the kingdom story. After he died and rose from the dead, he explained to his disciples how the story of God's kingdom all fits together in him (Luke 24:27). The first thing for Jesus disciples wasn't to learn a set of rules to follow, but to see how the story of God's love for his people reached its pinnacle in Jesus - and they were a part of that story!
If God's kingdom is a story that is still being told today, and our stories are part of his story - that means God is at work in the story of our lives! It also means that God is at work in the stories of other people in our lives. The goal of the video and discussion questions this week is to encourage each of us to consider how God's big kingdom story intersects with our own stories.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
- What did you do on your last vacation? Where did you go? What was the best part?
- What do you think about the Kingdom of God as telling a story?
- What changes if the Kingdom of God is everywhere?
- Can you think of a time when you saw that your story intersects with the story of the Kingdom?
- List the places where you spend most of your time and how you see God at work in those places.
- Did you see the Kingdom at work around you this past week? If so, where?
Reader Comments (2)
1. You admit that you are a sinner in need of forgiveness.
2. Jesus shed his blood on the cross so you could be forgiven.
3. By faith in Jesus, you are completely cleansed of sin.
4. God gives you his Spirit through his Word to help you grow in faith.
5. All who believe in Jesus have eternal life (heaven).
Now - all of those five points are true. HOWEVER, while propositional truth is very helpful, the kingdom is MORE than propositional truth. The kingdom of God is the story of a King who comes to rescue his people. That means when God brings his kingdom into our lives, we become part of his story!
A great story to illustrate this came up at a kingdom group last night. One person in the group had been in a conversation with three other people about her car. One of the guys wanted to buy a car like hers, so he was asking her questions about it. She said she didn't even like driving it anymore, but mostly because it had a GPS system that rated her driving poorly. Every time she got into the car there was this nagging shame at knowing her driving wasn't measuring up. Well, as they talked, one of the guys said he felt that way when he went to the ATM. Another guy said he felt that way when he went home to his family. Another guy said he felt that way when he went to church.
At the end of the conversation she was able to tell them something like this, "Isn't it incredible that even though we keep messing up, God forgives us and continues to love us?!"
God brought their four stories together at that moment, and through it they saw how their stories fit together in God's big, ongoing story to rescue his people. God's story and our stories all come together at the cross - where Jesus took the guilt and shame of our sin that by faith in him we have God's grace and mercy. God is able to work through our stories, even those chapters we wish we're not proud of, to highlight his incredible love for us and all people.