What’s the Big Picture? (2)

 

 

I. Required readings

 

Psalm 78

Mark 1:1-15

John 20:19-23

Romans 8:18-25

 

Christian Reformed Church, “Our World Belongs to God”

 

Christian Biography for the Day: Martyrs of Uganda
 

Chris Wright, “Have We Lost the Three-Dimensional Gospel?”

 

Alden Swan, “On Grasping the Big Picture”

 

 





II. Quotation for the day

 

“The whole point of Christianity is that it offers a story which is the story of the whole world.”

            --N. T. Wright

 

III. Journal prompts


   

Identity

 

If you want to identify me,
ask me not where I live,
or what I like to eat, or
how I comb my hair;
but ask me what I am living for,
in detail, and ask me
what I think is keeping me
from living fully for
the thing I want to live for.

 

--Thomas Merton ("My Argument with the Gestapo" )

 

 
















1. Have you ever thought of your identity in the terms Merton suggests above?  If someone asked you to skip the Sunday School answers and to explain honestly what you are living for—and what is keeping you from living for the thing you want to live for—how would you respond?

 

2. The Christian Reformed Church published “Our World Belongs to God” in the mid-1980s as a “testimony of faith for our times.”  In doing so, it sought to offer an account of the “big picture” of scripture and some of the implications of that story for daily life.  What did you find helpful in this contemporary testimony of faith?

 

3. Chris Wright suggests—among other things—that we have a tendency in our age to reduce the gospel to a “me-centered personal salvation” and reduce the church’s mission to a “you-centered personal evangelism.”  Given what he goes on to say about our call to participate in God’s cosmic mission, do you think he may be right about the way in which we have narrowed the good news of Jesus Christ? (The NT readings for today may speak to this issue as well.)

 

4.  Swan tells the story of his own personal epiphany, of the day he came to realize that he was part of something bigger and grander than his own narrow agenda, story, and loyalties.  In what ways do you feel yourself a part of what scripture calls the “kingdom of God” or the “reign of God”?  In what ways have you found that this reality draws you out of your own narrow world?

 

IV. Links of possible interest

 

            Jason Zahariades and Mark Feliciano, God’s Story.  Another helpful attempt (this one a little longer—it’s a 35-page pdf file that’s intended to be used in churches as a five-part study) to offer the “big picture” of scripture. 

 


The Martyrs of Uganda

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