A Love Story about Story

(The following is the introduction to the sermon I will be preaching February 27, 2011 at Hopewell GBC.  I will try to put the sermon audio on the blog next week.)

            You may disagree with me on this point, but I believe that everyone loves stories.  These may be oral stories shared between friends, books, TV shows, or movies, but we all love stories.

            If you were to walk into my church, or many like it, before a Sunday morning service in the fall, you would see groups of men talking.  If you approached one of these groups and listened to the conversation, hopefully not in an awkward stalkerish way, you would, more than likely, hear them telling stories of their hunting exploits from the past week.  One guy would be telling the rest about the giant buck, so huge it must have been some kind of mutant, which he just barely missed.  Maybe guys at your church are not into hunting, but they probably like to tell some type of story about their adventures. (Story telling and love of story apply to women, too.  Male examples just come to my mind quicker.)

            So, what is it about stories that make us love them so much?  While there can be a multitude of answers to this question, one major answer is that we love to get caught up in the emotion and characters of the story.  We put ourselves in their shoes.  We feel what they feel.

            Back to the hunting stories.   The guys that tell the best hunting stories are the ones who can paint a mental image in your head and put you in the tree stand with them.  When they tell you about seeing the monster buck, you can see its massive rack in your mind.  As they tell you about their heart pounding out of their chest when they raised their rifle, your heart begins to pound.  They describe putting the crosshairs right over the heart of the deer and you can see the brown fur through the scope.  Finally, they tell you how they pulled the trigger and, even though their gun has a muzzle velocity of over 2,500 feet per second, the bullet hit a floating leaf and was knocked a foot off course. You stand there and feel their disappointment and know that, if it was you, that deer would have been dead in the back of your truck.

            Even though we get caught up in hunting stories, books, TV shows, and movies, we find the Bible boring.  This should not be the case.  The Bible is filled with stories.  God did not give us a giant book of rules and procedures.  God gave us a book of stories and letters about real events and real places.  The Bible begs us to become completely wrapped up in its stories. 

We must go beyond just a Sunday School look at Bible heroes and the moral of the story and relate to the real people that lived these stories.  When we put ourselves in the shoes of the Biblical characters and feel their emotions and struggles, they we will begin to see the amazing things an amazing God did through extraordinarily normal people.

One amazing story takes place in Genesis 22.  Read it and get wrapped up in the story of Abraham.  Then hear me speak about it Sunday or listen to the audio here next week.  (I had to include a shameless plug.) Also, feel free to add a comment below with your favorite Bible story and why it impacts your life.

(An excellent book of the importance of story in our life is A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: How I Learned to Live a Better Story by Donald Miller.)