Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!
Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!
Heir of salvation, purchase of God,
Born of His Spirit, washed in His blood.This is my story, this is my song,
Praising my Savior all the day long.
As we finished up the book of Obadiah this weekend, we looked at the larger story that God is telling us. While the immediate prophecy deals with a brother nation turned enemy, the punishment of God and the restoration of Israel, these are all merely the foreground of an epic playing out. God’s plan of redemption is His story from beginning to end and this ‘story’ serves as a chapter in it.
The thing about foreground narratives is that they are much more than just part of the story. The meaning of life, the reason why you live, does not just fit seamlessly into God’s plan. As a matter of fact, one of the result of sin in the world is that our personal story is naturally at odds with God’s plan. We are not just part of a larger story, we are not just living out our story within His story, we are living in competition with Him.
Which is part of why God tells us a great story, complete with a people who chose their own story over His. In the history of Israel, we see exactly how this plays out. God writes the story, invites into the story; people experience the story, wrestle the pen from God’s hand, and begin to write their own story. This doesn’t change God’s eternal plan, it simply gives the illusion of control. The only way to not ‘live an illusion’ is to know God’s story as He tells it. We will be posting daily readings leading up to Christmas that unfold God’s story.
Knowing the story is not enough; we are not sustained through knowing. Our life is series of small, repetitive acts (cultural liturgies), where truth and meaning are developed through practice. James K Smith describes this in his book, Desiring the Kingdom:
Human persons are intentional creatures whose fundamental way of ‘intending’ the world is love or desire. This love or desire–which is unconscious or noncognitive–is always aimed as some vision of the good life, some particular articulation of the kingdom. What primes us to be so oriented–and act accordingly–is a set of habits or dispositions that are formed in us through affective, bodily means, especially bodily practices, routines, or rituals that grab hold of our hearts through our imagination, which is closely lined to our bodily senses.
While there are many liturgies we live out, one of the most consistent in Christian history is the regular gathering of God’s people to worship Him in song. We are going to focus on this holiday season in our sermon series: CHRISTMAS SONGS, as we look at the songs sung by those IN the story and we look at how we might sing similar songs in our life today; both as an act of worship, but also as an act of forming and shaping us for God’s story.