The Story of God, Story of Us - Review

"The Story of God, Story of Us" by Sean Gladding is one of the best books I've read in this past year. Gladding sets out to do something desperately needed in Christian thinking today, namely get a handle on the big story of the Bible.

Gladding starts his retelling of the grand biblical narrative with an evening gathering of the Jewish exiles gathering at the end of their work week by river of Babylon. As the exiles gather the young who have never known their homeland are beginning to express their frustration at their situation on of their wise elders tells them to know who they really are they must know who their God is. It is only in the knowning of the story of a God can they find their own story. As we journey through the telling of the story of God we learn together purpose, meaning and value that God has imprinted into us all. 

The New Testament is told by a leader in an early house church sharing the Story as it sees fulfilment through the promised Christ. The audience is a curious traveller who has heard of these Christians and wants to know more. The Story he hears encapsulated the Gospel and gives us a wonderful retelling that is easily shared and understood. 

Gladding has put the grand narrative of the Bible into a very engaging and accessible retelling of it allowing you to entering into the story of God and begin to see our own stories within it

Buy it here:

We should be better

We should be better. Period.

We all know it. We all strive for it, or at least resolve to do so. We all know we have shortcomings and areas to improve in. We should all eat better, exercise more, save more, rest more but I'm not talking about us as individuals, I want to talk about us as he church. The church should be better and those of us who are a part of it need to be better. 

A called people

Let's start in the beginning. God created the heavens and the earth, He created everything, seen and unseen, including us. We are not only His creation but He created us in His image. There is a lot in hat to unpack but we all know how things went, sin entered the world and God's creation, us included, were marred by sin. God didnt leave us like this however, He hatched a rescue plan by calling a man to go in faith on the promise of descendants, land and to become a blessing to all nations. Eventually God called the nation this man had fathered out of captivity and to Himself to be His people and to begin the process of restoring a fallen world. When the people were called out of Egypt they were gathered at the base of the mountain were God, through Moses, told them who they were, where they came from and how they were now to live in light of these revelations. 

Called to be better

The people of Israel were called to be better than the nations around them. Not better for they sake of being the best but better because they were to reflect the LORD their God and the fact that God's economy and God's ethics were better than those of man. Laws like allowing for gleaning showed hat God cared about the poor. Laws like putting a fence around your roof (because in that time and place roofs were flat and often used as patios) or not leaving open pits that people and animals could fall into show us that God wants us to not endanger people on our property. Laws about debt forgiveness, proper payment of wages and treatment of foriegners show us that God values people over money. You see God's people were to be different in such a way as to make the neighbours pause and ask "Why are you so different? Why do you conduct yourself with such honour and integrity?" 

Called to reflect

You see God was wanting His people to reflect Him, the way He had created us all to be. He wanted His people to be a light in the world that had grown dark with sin. He wanted His people to bring glory and worship to Him who had created, loved and called them. As one reads through he law, Leviticus and Deuteronmy in particular, you cannot help but see how these commands about how God's people were to live are inseperably mixed with the commands covering how they were to worship. The way they conducted business, the way they treated the poor and foriegner the responsibility they took for the safety of those on their property were not one realm and worship another, they were the same thing.

We haven't been called to change

Today as the church of Christ our calling is no different. We are a called people, called to reflect our Lord and to be salt and light in the world. The principles of the law of the Old Testament are still in effect. We are still to care for the poor, treat people fairly and generally reflect God to the world around us. As image-bearers of Christ, carriers of the name Christian our conduct is inseparable from our Worship, our Monday - Friday, 9-5 inseperable from our Sunday 10am. The trouble is we too often adopt a position of church is church and business is business. That we need to keep our faith out of business and keep the business world out of the church. This false worldview makes us act poorly in the world as individuals because we are a different person at work than we are at church. It also makes us act poorly as, and within, the church because things are "spiritual" and we should not let the spritual bend to the world. It sounds good, but it's too often wrong and we end up being image-marrers rather than image-bearers. 

A call to be better, not a call to tear down

I am writing this and the posts that will follow in this thread, not to tear down but in the hope it will spark honest reflection about how we can be better. I will share some of my own experiences as well as those of others. Examples given will be as anonymous as possible and are not meant to shame or expose anyone but rather to help us to see how we can all be better because we should be.

Thou shall not steal

So we all know it

It's number eight of "the big ten" right between adultery and bearing false witness. We don't do it do we? We don't steal. I personally have never held up a convenience store, robbed a bank or even pinched a candy bar. As a church we surely wouldn't do it, the media would be all over us in no time. Just imagine this "we need to put an addition on the church but we really can't afford it right now. No problem, we'll ask all the guys in the church to bring their trucks and their muscle and we'll go meet at the lumberyard after dark and and load up everything we need for the addition. It's for the Lord's work so it's fine, who can stop us from doing His good work?" Wouldn't fly would it?

How about, it's time to rebuild our church website and everything on the web is free so what does it matter if we just download and copy someone else's site? How about if we just take some of their pictures because they're really nice. What about music, have we kept up on our CCLI fees? Do we know what they cover? Do they cover every piece of music we use in ever setting we use it? When we have a family movie night, do we have the right to show the film publicly? Are we allowed to rip off this year's blockbuster for our VBS so we can latch on to the mulit-million dollar marketing blitz that has put the franchise in the mind, clothing, bedroom and toychest of every child in our community?

But it's for ministry!

The librarian at the school I went to seminary at told me once that theological libraries have the highest rate of theft among academic libraries. Think about that, the places we are training pastors and church leaders have the highest rate of theft. We speculated at the reasons for this, often theological students are broke. Bible colleges and seminaries are almost exclusively private schools and are quite costly. Often times students are already engaged in vocational ministry and thus already living on very little. Also, the books found in a theological library tend to be on the pricey side. Then of course there is that essential ingredient to sin, the justification. That little internal dialogue where tell ourselves "I really need this to do the ministry God has called me to do. Besides, I'll return it when I'm done with it." The intent to return it never goes away, it simply serves as the justification for what we have done. 

Doing it right

Leading lives and ministries of integrity and character means respecting the law and the rights of others. Even a national hero like Chris Hatfield has to respect copywrite ( 

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/chris-hadfield-space-oddity-copyright-license-expires-article-1.1797332 ) so why shouldn't we as the church?  We'll use excuses like "it costs too much"or "it's too hard" or "we'll never get caught" ask yourself when are any of those excuses really valid.

We should be better.

The long journey

It's been over two years without a post which puts me in good stead with many bloggers. In the past two years I've moved on from the church I was at, moved back to my home town, been working in the business world but still keeping my toe in ministry. The biggest event of e past couple years has been the arrival of our son, who is very special in many ways and with him our family has been on a journey we never expected. Over he past few years I've learned much and mused much, we'll see how many of those musings make it here. 

The prep...

Last week I finished a short sermon series I had titled "Why do we do that?" which looked at the basic elements of our Church worship service. This included "Worship" "Missions" "Giving" "Communion" "Prayer" and "Study Scripture" I found it a very enjoyable series to prepare but at the same time a very difficult one. Any one of those topics could have been a very lengthy series, and quite frankly some of them might be one day. The purpose of the series though was to take a short journey through some of the basics. Now I am turning my attention elsewhere.


This weekend is very full for our church as we go through a church consultation process with our Fellowship. Much work has gone into this process in the background and this weekend we have a whole series of meetings with the team that has come in. The intent of this process it to help our church re-focus and help us to start pulling all in the same direction. This process has great potential to help us long-term. Short-term however, it helps me because I'm not preaching on Sunday which has allowed me some much needed prep time.


You see I like to plan things out. When I was in seminary, I did a fair bit of pulpit supply but rarely did I know much in advance and very rarely was I in the same place two weeks in a row. This meant many one-off messages. Now that I'm pastoring full-time and preaching every week I have an opportunity to plan further out. This planning out a whole series (10-16 weeks depending on the book we're working through) takes a lot of work on the front end but it allows me to work through what themes will get worked throughout the series. This is helpful, especially in some of the epistles where the writer is hitting on the same themes throughout the letter.


Anyway, the past couple weeks I've been preparing to preach through James in July & August. This has meant much reading and studying of the book itself and a number commentaries on it. Today I finished one of the hardest parts of this prep, outlining the entire book into individual messages. In someways this is difficult because it looks like James was intended to be a single, standalone sermon. It seems kind of strange to break it up into 10 parts but that is how we work through sermons these days. James is an interesting book, full of very practical stuff. One of the things that struck me in my prep was that one author postulated that James wasn't intending to convince one of the Gospel, acceptance of the Gospel is expected, rather, he's trying to tell how to live in light of the Gospel. There are some great challenges in James and I'm sure his original audience got as uncomfortable as many of us do when we hear what he has to say.

Why do we read the Bible?

I've recently heard it said that the Bible is the bestselling, most cherished, most owned, most loved and least read book in America. I'm sure if we could look into every home in we would find at least one in most houses. In some we might only find a tract or perhaps a Gideon Bible provided at a critical time in the recipient's life. If we a "good Christians" we likely have a more than one. We may have a heirloom family Bible. One of those big, old Bibles with worn & cracked leather binding and pages yellowed by the years. We may have a small Bible given to us in Sunday School as a child. We may have several different translations, collected over the years as different translations have been favored by different churches or Pastors. Technology has now made it possible for us to have umpteen translations that we can search and compare right on our phones. (Christianity Today had an interesting article about this last month)


A quick count of my own office came up with 11 different Bibles. I have 3 study Bibles (ESV, NASB, NKJV) I have several of just the text (ESV, NIV, Message) I have both a Greek NT and a Hebrew OT to remind me of the many hours I spent learning the original languages in seminary. I have a Reader's Hebrew/Greek Bible that has helps to make reading in the original languages a little easier. I have interlinears that put the Greek and English side by side to help me even more. Some of them are leather-bound of some kind, some hard cover, some paperback, I even have one, printed by these smart folks that is completely waterproof which I use when I'm outside in case it rains.


We must question why the Bible is such prevalent book. Why do we keep so many around? Is it because we like the look of leather-bound books? Why do we read it? Why do we go to church every week to hear it read, sing songs from it and about it and then listen to a preaching talk about? Do we like the stories? Do we find it engaging and entertaining? Do we believe it is the Word of God, communicated through His faithful servants wrote it, preserved it, copied it, translated it and made it available to us.


The Bible is to be our handbook for life. It tells us where we came from, how we ended up mired in sin, how God loved us enough to provide a way out of our sin, and finally how God is going to put everything back to rights. It tells us how we can have a relationship with God. It tells us how we should live our lives as people of God. It is something we are to study, and take to heart. We must do this because the Bible is to be the standard by which we evaluate our lives and the teachings we follow. 


If you haven't spent much time with the "Good Book" today is a great day to do so.

Prayer, not just a wish list anymore!

I've been working through a book called "Message of Prayer" by Timothy Chester from the Bible Speaks Today series. I have been challenged and enlighted by each chapter. Prayer is something that is assumed we know how to do. It is often described as simply talking to God. It is something we hear at meal times, in church services, at Bible study and we often muddle through on our own.

Now I'm a pastor and I have a seminary degree, that means I should have this stuff nailed, the truth is far from it. Prayer is an area that I must continually work on, develop and grow in. The truth is, as wonderful as it is to have the direct access to the throne of God that prayer provides, this side of eternity there is something lacking. Until that day there will be the barrier of my feeble humaness and my continued battle with the flesh that distracts and leads astray. Too often it is easy to slide into a pattern of simply coming to God with a laundry list of requests. To watch over our loved ones, our un-born child, our church, our school and the various people we know are going through various struggles. Bringing these things to God in prayer are important but prayer can be and is intended to be much more than *just* that.

That is one of the motivations for working through this particular book. Another motivation is an up-coming message I'm preparing on prayer. One message isn't going to cut it but I know I can never cover everything in one shot. This is something I'll circle back to again and again because it is so important. I finished the first hunderd or so pages and I'm really in awe of the depth and bredth of prayer. What I like about this book is that it is expositions on specific passages, all of them very familiar but seeing them through the lens of prayer has been a challenge and a joy. It is proving to be a blessing and something I must allow to digest.

More posts will be forthcoming...