The Big Story

The Truly Amazing Tale of the Great Big God with a Reckless Crazy Love for the Whole Wide World and Every Person in It including You

Sundays, 10:00 a.m., February 19 - April 8

Most people hear the Christian story only in sound bytes. They hear a verse or two from the Bible on Sunday morning but have no idea how they fit together. Or they see Christians on television blathering about Sodom or Saddam or Sudan and can't figure out why the people who love unborn babies also hate Muslims. The average person probably knows that Christianity involves Jesus, hell, televangelism, Moses, Santa Claus, Easter, and opposition to gay marriage but has no idea what those seemingly random things have in common.

Christianity has become a mishmash of ancient stories and moral imperatives that add up to this: Be nice to everybody, unless they disagree with you, then send them to hell. This is what makes God happy. Few seem to understand the real story, the whole story--the big story--of who God is and what in God's name has been happening here for the past ten thousand years.

The Christian worldview is not a series of random God-bytes, nor is it only the story of Jesus' birth, death, and resurrection. All of those smaller stories are part of a grand drama that sweeps across the whole Bible, the entire universe, and all of human history. To understand who God is, it is vital to see the master plan of God's thought and work throughout time.

This series is about that big story, the truly amazing tale of a great, big God with a wild, crazy, love for the whole wide world, and every person in it. This is a story about everything that has happened from the beginning of time up to now--and it is a story about you.

The purpose of this series is to help people make sense of who God is and what he is doing in the world by communicating the entire story of human history in eight simple statements. The result will be that listeners feel more confident in their general knowledge of the Bible and the basic themes in Christian theology. They will be better able to articulate what they believe and will have a better understanding of how those beliefs join together to form a consistent worldview.

So here it is, the Big Story in just eight lines:

First, God made the world,
Then people messed it up.
So God made a promise,
And he set some rules.
When people kept on sinning,
Jesus came to save us.
Now it's up to us,
Until he comes again.