“If the Bible is God’s story and not a reference book where we find answers to theological questions, moral guidance for navigating ethical issues, or inspiration for the day, what are we to do when we face ethical struggles?

“Are you telling me not to go to the Bible for answers? 

“What do we do with the various beliefs about God and doctrine and so forth? 

“What do we do when we struggle to connect with God?”

We look at all this and more in today’s episode of Unfeigned Christianity.

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[Transcript]

I’m excited to be back with you. If you’ve been listening to the last several episodes, we’re doing something a little bit different.

Typically, I’m interviewing guests and we’re talking about different topics of faith and sexuality and just various human experiences that we deal with and how to live that out faithfully as followers of Jesus in our current cultural context. But in the last couple of episodes, I’ve been doing more teaching and the whole thrust of this is that, like I said, we help Christians find culturally aware, biblically nuanced in Jesus embodied responses to current day issues. And so a couple episodes we looked at how we can connect with God and our life purpose.

A struggle that I’ve heard people wrestling with, maybe it’s not that I’ve heard people specifically talk about this directly, more I hear it under the surface a little bit.

This longing for a deeper sense of clarity about purpose in life, and also a longing for greater authenticity in their walk with God.

A closeness and living out what they see in the scriptures and wrestling with some of the inconsistencies that we may see in ourselves as Christians in the church community as a whole.

And so as a part of that, I suggested in that episode, that I think we wrestle with that largely because the primary medium that we’ve grown used to or been taught to engage God is through scripture. 

Yes, there’s prayer. But we even talk about praying in ways that tend to come from scripture.

And I really believe that for many of us, especially in a post fundamentalist world, we have tended to approach the Bible as a reference book and not as story, as it was intended to be absorbed and taken. 

And so we looked at that, how it causes this frustrating experience. Similar to if you took a cookbook into a grocery store, assuming it was a shopping list, and that’s gonna be a frustrating experience.

There’s gonna be background recipes that you’re like, what’s the point of that? Why is that in here? There’s gonna be inspirational quotes that it’s oh, that’s nice it hit me in the moment and I needed that thought. But I still don’t necessarily see how that fits in with this book. Where’s you know that half teaspoon of salt?

Like salt isn’t sold in half or a quarter of a teaspoon. You get salt in bags, it’s much bigger. That’s how a grocery store is, right? It’s not gonna have quantities according to the recipe. The ingredients for that is listed in the cookbook, and in a similar way when we approach the Bible as though it’s a reference book.

It’s a frustrating experience. At the very least, it’s disillusioning. We become very bored and part of why we struggle to connect with God and part of why we wrestle with a sense of floating uncertainty about purpose is that we don’t have just a grounded sense of purpose that can guide us in difficult situations.

Just knowing this is hard. This is difficult. I don’t even really know what the best practical decision is in the moment, but I know why I’m here and I know what God is wanting to accomplish through this sort of thing. The reason we tend to only engage God through the Bible when we have questions about him, about the way he works, about ourselves as humans, and about the world.

So a theological dictionary sort of approach, or when we have ethical conflicts to find a way through, we view it as a moral handbook. 

We’re coming here because there’s a situation and we’re not sure what to do, right? So how should Christians think about abortion? How should Christians think about the current conversation of racism? How should Christians think about the way to do church and stuff like that? Should women wear certain clothes? Should men wear certain clothes? Should I pursue certain, is it wrong to, for Christians to be engaged in the stock market and different sorts of investing? That is all this kind of moral handbook approach.

Again, solely coming through scripture because I have an issue, a question I’m wanting to deal with, and that’s my engagement with scripture. That’s my engagement with God. 

Or we talked about a third way devotional grab bag, like when we’re needing inspiration. We wake up, roll out of bed, we open our Bibles, using it as a bit of an inspirational genie.

These are not approaches that the Bible was ever intended. 

God did not design the Bible to be used like this. The authors that he inspired to write the Bible did not design it to be approached in this way. It’s a story. And yes, there God does reveal things about himself. He does give instruction. He does inspire us, but he doesn’t do it through reference book mentality.

He does it through story. And so we looked at “what does it look like” in the last episode? It was a longer episode, and we walked through.

What does it mean to approach the Bible as story? 

And there were three specific things I highlighted. Now, just in full transparency, these three things. Are part of a much larger teaching than I do in my course Finding My Place in God’s story.

In the first module, we look at how to approach the Bible as a story, and there are eight main paradigms, paradigm shifters for us in approaching the Bible as a story. And these are the three most essential. 

The first one is simply that the Bible is story. 

And so it’s expertly crafted. It’s not crafted chronologically, it’s not crafted, just how, so what I mean by chronologically, it’s not crafted according to the order of events.

Neither is it crafted in just oh, you know, in 2020 I, Moses was given this to write down in 2023, I was given this to write down. And so that comes next in about, it’s not crafted in that way. The Bible is expertly organized and even edited, notated like marked and fitted together. 

A classic example is Isaiah is crafted in a variety like it. It does not flow in chronological order, and neither does it flow according to when Isaiah wrote it. The whole Bible is like that. But Isaiah’s one book to look at as an example. It’s got a distinct message that it’s being communicated.

Another example is Habakkuk. 

Habakkuk is probably, commentators don’t think Habakkuk was ever a verbal prophecy because it is a Hebrew acrostic. Its message is lost unless you see the words and you see the word and the message that’s being communicated vertically as well. There’s a lot about scripture, the way it’s organized, that it’s communicating a story, a variety of themes and ideas are being taught through it.

And so just like the Pilgrim’s progress, there’s a plot, there’s sub subplots, there’s an protagonist, an antagonist. There’s obstacles to overcome. In the same way scripture is communicating. It is a story that communicates a message. 

And then the second thing that we looked at in in reading the Bible as story is how the New Testament reveals the climax of the story and the climax is Jesus.

So just like in the pilgrim’s progress, we have the climax being Christian, reaching the celestial city, and then the resolution is the story of his family and kids, his wife and kids coming and meeting him there as well. 

Well, in a similar way, the climax of the biblical story is Jesus. And then the resolution part is the church now living out according to Jesus. The whole thrust of creation is that we declare the glory of God and we emulate his image in the world and in our community around us. 

Man did not do that. We rejected God. We decided to do things our own way, according to our own wisdom. Instead, we end up imaging ourselves, which tends to look more like the beast or the serpent.

Throughout the story, we see that cosmic struggle. Jesus comes and we’re told that he is the image of the invisible God, and so he is representing, he is embodying to us what we were supposed to be all along, but we rejected God and we did not live that out. Now we look to Jesus. Not only does Jesus set us free from the bondage of corruption, but he empowers us to now image him throughout creation.

The New Testament tells the climax of the story.

And then the third aspect that we looked at in reading the Bible as story is that the Bible is wisdom literature. It’s not a rule book. 

God does not list out things for us to do. And then we just go particularly pay attention to those things. 

We should be absorbing the whole message of the Bible so that it shapes the way we think about the world, about life, the way we make decisions, the way we interact with each other, so that we are transformed into people who can navigate a variety of situations, even when the specific rule didn’t address it.

And we are still living according to God’s design and according to his wisdom. So we walked through those periods that were very in depth. Again, scratching the surface in my course, “Finding my Place in God’s Story”. 

We dive into this. A lot deeper. We have conversation around it, but we ended our time then by doing a bit of a flyover.

What is the story of scripture? Because that’s the big question, right? So the Bible is story. Well explain to me how it’s story. What is the story? 

We looked at how Genesis 1 through 2 tells the story of creation. 

Genesis 3 through 11 tells a story of the fall. This is the problem, the cosmic struggle that all of humanity even today is dealing with. 

Genesis 12 through Malachi 4 addresses Israel, and we specifically see through Israel again this cosmic struggle. But God covenants with a family because the way he’s gonna bring about restoration is through covenant and it’s through a kingdom of covenant. Our first glimpse is Israel, but it’s also through the story of Israel and that piece of the whole story of God that we see very distinctly. Our need for a Messiah, like even the chosen people continue to reject God, continue to try to do things their own way. 

And so then the fourth aspect of this biblical narrative is Jesus. That’s the Gospels, Matthew, mark, Luke, John, and we see God in person and we learn how to image God as we were supposed to from the beginning. And Jesus inaugurates a completely new covenant. Inaugurates a new kingdom under his rule and reign and authority. 

And so now we find ourselves in the final act, the fifth act, creation, restoration. 

What’s interesting about this act is we have the book of Revelation. We know where the story’s gonna end. We know where we’ve come from. But there’s a lot that you and I experience in life, and there’s a lot even within the New Testament, that is complex, that is complicated and it’s fleshing out. We talked about how it has been said. 

One of my profs from Bible college referenced how, if you think of the biblical story being Genesis through Acts, and then the rest of the New Testament letters are kind of appendices to the book.

If you think of a story or a book, it’s often what an appendix is. There’s the main message, and then the appendix is fleshing that out in particular situations. 

I found that really helpful to think of the Bible in that way, that the New Testament letters are, it’s like listening to one side of a phone conversation where you hear the person on your end, you hear how they’re responding, you know, they’re responding to specific issues and situations.

But you don’t know the questions that are being asked or the specific situations that are being asked. All you have to go off of is the response that they give. And that’s what New Testament letters are. 

So we have this lingering question. I see this story. I understand I’m supposed to read it as a story, but what do I do with the ethical struggles that we face, that I face today?

What do we do with various beliefs about God, about doctrine and so forth? Is it just okay for anybody to believe whatever they want? Is there not one best set of doctrines? Is there not a best way forward morally, or what about inspiration? And particularly something that I hear often, especially people who enter into the course, “Finding my Place in God’s Story”.

This notion of I really struggle to get anything outta scripture and I’ve come and I read and it’s just blank and what do I do with that? And I have a hard time reading it when I’m not being inspired. 

That’s what I would like to dive into. In this episode, we’re gonna flesh out some of those more practical struggles that we face, that we think about.

Era of Improvisation

NT Wright is the one that I first heard from this notion that you can divide the biblical story into five main acts, and we went over at Creation, the Fall, Israel, Jesus, and then he called it the church. I use the term creation restoration, to include a little bit more of what’s going on, what the church is doing, being a part of.

He talks about five acts as though it’s a play. If you think of a play you have act one, act two, and so on and so forth. And in theater there’s this term, this notion of improvisation. 

Improvisation is that there is script, but then there’s stage time where you don’t have a script for. When a bad actor is gonna get to that part, he thinks I don’t know what to do. And so then it’s just awkward and they’re doing different things and you can tell they’re just flying is maybe cumbersome, maybe even just dead air and kind of falls flat. 

But a good actor who can improvise well does so because they are so immersed in the story, they’ve become a part of the story. They know where they’ve come from and they know where the story’s going, and so then they can, even though there’s no script, there’s nothing being told, they can accurately move the story forward during this period of improvisation. It doesn’t look like it’s a totally new story or a totally new character even. But in character, continue to move the story forward to the end that they know is gonna be.

NT Wright compares that to the era that we are in as the church. We are in an era of a lot of improvisation. 

There’s a lot of situations that we deal with. 

Take abortion for instance, that’s not addressed anywhere. The closest place that’s addressed is child sacrifice, right? But even child sacrifices is post birth. We’re not gonna see an ethic or a direction about how Christians should think about abortion. There’s a lot of issues that you and I interact with and deal with today that we’re not gonna find in the Bible.

If we’re treating the Bible like a reference book, as though I’ve gotta know what does God want me to do in this certain situation, we’re gonna end up frustrated because it doesn’t answer our questions like a reference book. There’s decisions that we have to make, both are wise or both are foolish, or whatever.

The Bible doesn’t help us make decisions between two wise and good wholesome choices. So what do we do? How do we know our way forward? 

How do we reflect the image of God in a period of improvisation? The way that we do that ss by immersing ourselves in the story. 

We have Genesis through third John that comes right before Revelation. We have all these letters and books that we can devour and gain the wisdom and the message that is revealed through them. We know where it’s going. We know Jesus is victorious. We know that the enemy is defeated and we,who remain faithful, will end again in the garden surrounding the tree of life in the presence of Yahweh.

I can’t wait for that, right? But we’re in this period. We don’t even know how long it’s gonna be, where we have to improvise. And so how do we do that? And that’s the gist of the question is okay, so there are ethical struggles we’re dealing with. How do we navigate through that? There are beliefs about God and doctrine.

And so forth. How do we do that?

The Bible, Doctrine, and Inspiration 

First of all, let’s look at this, the doctrinal and the inspirational. 

The Bible gives us information about God. 

I just recently read the book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It’s a huge, massive book, but it’s a blend between story and history. But history is best when it’s in story form because none of us remember, unless it was accompanied with a picture or bold text, we don’t really remember what we read in our textbook history. But when you read stories of history, that sticks. 

I actually listened to The Third Reich as an audiobook and I’m not as good of a learner through listening. It’s just a way of when I work and I enjoy interesting books like that. 

So I listened to it, but I distinctly remember that there was a suicide attempt on Hitler. In the big meeting, the one guy brought a briefcase that had the bomb. He placed it down beside Hitler and somehow it didn’t quite get Hitler enough. He fled and he thought Hitler was dead. He didn’t realize that Hitler wasn’t dead until he got to the border. By then they knew because he had fled and Hitler was still alive.

I’m positive I probably learned about the suicide attempt on Hitler’s life in my high school history. But it doesn’t stick near like it does in the rise and the Fall of the Third Reich, when they actually tell the story of how that whole process happened. And I know I’m missing a bunch of details that the author had in there, but it was through story form that I learned so true of history.

So we’re not saying the Bible’s not communicating true facts about God. It absolutely is. It’s just not doing that through a reference book mentality. 

I have this book with me called Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs. This is probably the closest thing to a reference book that I have on my bookshelf. In the reference book I see a title here is “Depravity of Man”, and right here it says, see “Fall of Man” or “Doctrine of Man”. And so I could look up Fall of Man and I could learn more about Depravity of Man or right here “Descent into Hades”. So these are topics, these are specific pieces that early church authors wrote about. 

Under “Descent into Hades” I can pull from Acts 2:25 – 27, 1 Peter3:19. But then it goes on to show me various writings from Hermas, from Milito, from Iran, from Clementa of Alexandria. That’s a reference book, right? This is totally yanking out of context of what Iran wrote, but this is specifically what he wrote about descent into Hades.

That’s how I would view a reference book.But the Bible is intended to do more than just fill me with information about God. 

The Bible is intended to show me God and to transform my life because the story and the message that it communicates is something I am currently a part of.

When you and I approach the Bible as a reference book, we’re acting as though this was stuff in the past and it’s not necessarily relevant to my here and now. But somehow, for some reason, for faith purposes, I need to know this information. And so I memorize scripture because I wanna know the information as opposed to internalizing the message as a whole so that it transforms my life and I’m then able to participate in its story for my time.

Because I’m still a part, the earth is still going, creation is still groaning. We are still a part of the biblical story. And so yes, the Bible communicates true events. It communicates historical events even, but it doesn’t do it through reference book form.

And this is another piece that I’m not gonna go into a whole lot here, but there’s many different types of genre within scripture. And so sometimes the true things that the Bible is communicating are told, and we see this probably most clearly in Jesus’s teachings, the way he uses parables, those parables aren’t true. There wasn’t necessarily a guy that walked to Jericho and or came back from Jericho and got beat up by. Robber and was left for dead. I don’t know, maybe that actually did happen. And Jesus is using that as an illustration to make another point or a deeper point. The parable of the prodigal son was a common saying. Everybody would’ve known that story, but Jesus added some pieces to it to make a distinct point about God the Father, and the purpose of, and the value that the need for people and for sinners to be in his presence.

Some of the stories that we read within scripture aren’t necessarily true, but they’re communicating truths about God and about life and about the world, even historical events. So we’re not saying the Bible doesn’t have theological facts in it. We’re just saying it’s not intended to be interacted with as a reference book, as a dictionary for early Christian beliefs.

There are two different modes of literature, two different modes of communication, right? In the same way, there are many areas of scripture that do inspire us like the Psalms. It’s poetry, it’s song. It’s intended to bring us into worship in a way that is totally different than Leviticus.

But God even wants to inspire us, if we’re using the word inspire to mean to connect with Almighty God through the Holy Spirit, through what’s going on in Leviticus. 

Yes, the Bible wants to inspire us. It just doesn’t do that through a devotional grab bag. Like, oh, I need some inspiration for today here. I’m gonna put in a couple of quarters and I hope to get a bag of Doritos, right? No, it doesn’t do it in that way. 

I need inspiration. I’m gonna read my Bible for 10 minutes, an hour, whatever, and I hope to be inspired by the end of it. That’s not how the Bible is intended to be interacted with. The Bible is story, and so we’re inspired through the message of the story and through all the moving pieces and what’s going on.

Yes, there are particular scenes that especially inspire us, and that’s totally okay. It’s okay to have favorite parts of the scripture. It’s okay to have favorite parts of the Bible, but I do think that sometimes when we get especially discouraged because of a lack of feeling that we experience when we read scripture.

I think it can symbol an expectation of our interaction with the Bible that isn’t healthy all the time. 

There’s a lot of things that go on in life that make it hard for us to just sit down and read scripture and connect with God without our minds running to many different things.

There’s a lot of things in life that no matter how true it is, that God is with us in the moment and no matter how many times I read that or I memorize a verse about the presence of God and the comfort and hope of God that in a moment of death, whether it’s the death of a person or a death of a dream, something you thought God was calling you into or relationship or whatever, that’s hard. We don’t feel these warm fuzzies all the time. 

I think there’s a place of freedom when we give ourselves the permission to be human. Made in the image of God, that we’re going to manifest a whole kitten caboodle of emotions. And that’s not just negative. Emotions are very much a part of who God made us to be.

It’s okay to go through seasons. You may need a walk along the river as much as you do 30 minutes in the Bible. Or you’re in your living room, trying to stay awake, trying to find a reason why you should stay awake, why not just go back to sleep because. 

I’ve gone through those seasons of life and when we have this reference book mentality. 

We have this sort of idea that spiritual maturity is determined by the amount of knowledge you have. Or the amount of inspiration you feel, or the amount of time that you give to studying scripture. When nowhere in the Bible does it give those things as a determinator of whether or not you’re spiritually mature.

The Bible is a story. It’s bringing us into an active message about Jesus and he is with us. Even through the stories of scripture we see these dry, depressing times and we can find a certain level of inspiration for those dark times as we press in and see this whole event that’s taking place. 

Just because I don’t get something out of it, doesn’t mean I’m not filled with the Holy Spirit. Just because I’m struggling with depression doesn’t mean I’ve given in to some sin. It might. It could. But most of the times, it’s probably just life that’s happening. We’re multidimensional beings and so we’re gonna experience these things. 

I’m telling you, you do not gain passion and desire for God by harping and disciplining yourself more and more to just be in the word. It doesn’t work that way. It actually serves to do the opposite. You become more disgruntled with God and more disgruntled with your experience with scripture. 

When we free ourselves, we realize, you know what? This isn’t a super genie for spirituality. This is a document that I happen to have bound by two folds of leather. Not all the periods of history have had that luxury. I have it on my computer. I have that in my phone. I can pull it up as I’m waiting for my oil to be changed or whatever. That’s a privilege. That’s beautiful. 

This document is communicating a message that is beautiful. It’s large, it’s complex, meaning that it can speak to so many different areas of life. And I’m invited to participate in it. 

And not only am I invited to participate like I am, whether I accept that or not, I am a part of its story. So I could deny God, I could say, you know, I don’t believe that or whatever, but I am a part of the story of creation, the cosmos that God is pushing forward the story of the cosmos. That God is pushing forward, like we are all a part of that. And by our existence we are invited to participate in that and to participate in it by knowing the story deeply. 

And so maybe it’s like me. This morning I wanted to get up really early. But I woke up a half hour late. It’s still earlier than normal, so I had plenty of time. I was tired. I was thinking about something and I started journaling about that something, and then I started talking to myself about that something, and then I realized I gotta get ready to go to work. And I didn’t get my Bible reading done today.

That’s okay. I’m not sitting here being like, oh man, like now I’m just. You know when we have these sorts of ideas that, “man, I had a rough day and I think it’s because I didn’t read my Bible at the beginning.” Wait, why are you saying that? Are you saying that because you, there’s this sort of psychological switch inside of you that like, oh, if I start my day reading the Bible, then I feel better about myself and then I have a better day.

Because God’s not up in heaven looking “oh, you didn’t start your day with Bible reading. So okay, I’m gonna throw these obstacles in your day today.” Now, if you’re saying, I didn’t have a good day today, because it is just like I was in a bad head space all day, like it’s just healthy for me to start my day because I do feel that like I, I feel that very real. I value my time of meditation, my time of reading scripture, this notion of a running mind and wake up and I start, I sit down and read and my mind just runs. And so then a habit that I’ve started starting to journal about that and through that end up praying about it, like that’s a frustrating experience.

I don’t like that. That’s not healthy. It’s a sign of either being tired or somewhat overstressed. I’m best when I have the moment to quiet my mind, to spend time in the eternally true word of God. But if I. If I have a good day because I just feel better. Like I’m somewhat holier now. Like I don’t see myself as less holy because I didn’t get my Bible reading in this morning.

I’m gonna get there. I want to know the story of God. It’s beautiful. I want Jesus. And the more I press into the story of scripture, the more I see Jesus in a really beautiful way. That if I’m just reliant on kind of my notions of Jesus or other people’s writings about Jesus and then seeing how we all fail to emulate Jesus very well, like I get super depressed and very quickly, I don’t really want anything to do with Christianity anymore.

Like it’s in scripture that things come alive to me, but I don’t always get to it. And that’s not a good habit. Talk to me in a week if I’ve had seven consecutive days of running minds and busyness, like that’s not healthy. And, but it’s not because it’s like, Oh, God’s not blessing you as much. It’s because just being run by the busyness of your mind and the busyness of life is not a healthy pace.

And it begins to crowd out your connection with God through his story. Right. But the Bible’s not this sort of genie vending machine that just oh, I need a good charge to my day, so I’m gonna spend five minutes. That reveals an unhealthy interaction with the Bible and we’re gonna end up doing things with the Bible that are probably gonna be weaponizing and we may have a great time and feel close, but we end up separating people from God because we’re using the Bible in this weaponizing way.

That just sounds exhausting a little bit. Like how do we, you know, if the Bible is a story and I gotta read it in context, can I not read it just five minutes a day. Do I have to do all this work to understand the context and the history and the moving pieces and understand the genre and everything?

No, you don’t. Actually, that’s a beautiful piece of this story is you can actually take a very surface overview of the text and get something from it. You can see the story begin to develop, but it’s multi-layered. The more time you spend in it, the more you’re gonna get out of it. And so don’t stress about it.

Busy moms, stay at home moms, single moms that are working and mothering.Moms that have kids that they have to help get up, and they have to cook food and the dad is off at work or whatever, vice versa however it is. You’re not necessarily gonna get an hour of quiet time all the time, and you can still read your Bible in 10 minutes and get something incredibly meaningful as you begin to see and stitch together that whole story. And you see it unfold, but the more time you spend in it, the more times you pass through it, the more you get out of it.

That’s the beautiful thing of scripture. I guess my whole message about people’s lack of connection feeling is don’t stress about it. Like honestly, probably the biggest thing, keeping you from getting something meaningful, inspirationally out of the Bible is a lack of delight for it. And when you pressure yourself that I gotta read the Bible every day. “oh, I missed it yesterday, or only, I only got five minutes” and you begin to feel guilty about that puts pressure on you and you lose delight for the word of God and the message of God.

God’s not standing up there saying dude, I don’t know. You’ve missed your Bible reading three days in a row. I’m not sure I can have you in the book of life. Just read your Bible, because it never says anywhere in there that that’s how God determines it. 

For 200 years, people didn’t have an organized Bible. They had to go to the synagogue or to the church house to read scripture for a thousand years, the Bible was stationary. People recited it together, read it collectively, but didn’t necessarily have a daily interaction with it. So this notion that we’ve developed that somehow we’ve got to sit in it every single day and get a certain amount of time and a certain amount of inspiration out of it, or knowledge or whatever, that’s manmade.

And it puts pressure on us and we lose delight in the message. And all God wants is he wants to be known and he’s revealed himself to us through scripture and ultimately through Jesus. And he wants to know us. He wants to be known. 

The Bible and Ethics

That leads us to this last one. What about the ethical struggles? 

The Bible is a very ancient text. It was written in different languages. It was written by a variety of authors who use language differently. It was written in different contexts. And so there’s a lot of pieces that go into biblical interpretation that are frankly difficult.

And there are areas of the Bible that I don’t know I will understand fully ever, and that’s okay. And I think sometimes, especially in the West, where we’re logical thinkers and we prioritize, I would even say idolize, knowledge and knowing things and being right. I think that’s actually really dangerous.

Yes, there’s sure truths that we can stand on, but there’s a lot about scripture that it’s you know, there are aspects of salvation that my Calvinist friend might actually be right. I don’t know. And the way I look at Romans 9 doesn’t I think Calvinists are only seeing this through one lens. There’s other plausible ways of reading this, but I could be wrong, right? Like my way of reading it could be wrong. 

But there again, nowhere in scripture does it say our hope, our eternal hope is found in figuring out doctrine. 

Our eternal hope is in Jesus Christ, and the Bible communicates Jesus Christ quite plainly.

That piece is so magnificently plain. That we don’t have to stress about this all of a sudden, like unpacking exactly how salvation works, what does Romans 9 mean? That can become fun, at least to some of us who enjoy digging in and geeking it out. You may not. That’s fine, but instead of thinking I gotta know this, or else I don’t have peace with God, no. Rather, this is complex. Whoa! Paul, what are you talking about? What are you saying? There are certain vessels intended for destruction. What are you referring to that doesn’t have to stress this out. 

You don’t have to spend your life studying it. But it’s a beautiful aspect of the story that fascinates me. I’m not entirely sure what all it means, and I expect that I’ll probably be learning about that for the rest of my life. 

The Bible is so rich and full of truth and wisdom that encompasses all of life. It’s meant to be studied. And reread and meditated on.

So what about ethical issues? And just to summarize the whole doctrinal debate, I think we would do ourselves well to loosen up. 

We tend to, post fundamentalism, have this very distinct, and it was actually, sorry, it’s probably more post reformation perhaps. I don’t know. I’m gonna get in trouble. I’m babbling on a topic that is not the point of this episode, but we have this notion that we only associate with Christians who believe the doctrines as we do.

I just think quite frankly, that’s really unhealthy. I don’t, I think that’s emulating division, not unity. And so learning how to interact with each other. Older generations were more like, if we don’t believe the same, then I guess we won’t fellowship together. Well, our generation struggles with more of this thing as well, if we should be able to fellowship together, then we may as well just believe the same. Right? Are you saying that you wear the same clothes of all your best friends? That you have all the same thoughts and ideas and dreams as all your best friends? No. 

You were made for a purpose and for a reason. And as you’re studying scripture and you’re, and you have something and you’re looking at it, it’s Hey, I don’t know that this is actually as you’re saying it. We can be in fellowship together and still have a certain level of conflict that we continue to wrestle over and talk about.

We shouldn’t be mean to each other or argumentative with each other, or foul with each other, like scripture is pretty clear about that. But we don’t have to just conform to each other’s ways of doing things. That’s not unity either. I would say that’s not healthy. That’s not like there is a certain level that your uniqueness brings to the table that is lost if all you do is just adapt to whatever. At the risk of sounding really individualistic. 

But what about ethical struggles? 

Is the Bible not trying to teach us right and wrong? I think this is something that a lot of people might wrestle with with this idea of story. Are you saying there’s no specific morality? 

I just wanna be clear. The Bible is absolutely trying to teach. It has an agenda. It’s trying to create in us a transformation of character and of people. It just does that through story form.

I think the quickest example will be to take a rule. Thou shall not murder. That is a law. That is a rule. So we have this conversation. The Bible is story. It’s not a rule book. But wait. There are rules in the story. How do we interact with those rules? Well, let’s look at how Jesus interacts with that rule, right? He takes that law and he says, “but I tell you” so Jesus quotes it. It’s a law. It’s well known. It’s a rule communicated by the same being that is now talking about what is meant by the law, right?

Anybody who has anger, public dishonor, mockery, devaluing, others, those are akin. They are the same thing as murdering people. So this law that for generations, It was this law like, we’re not gonna murder. You do not murder. 

Well, Jesus is revealing. There’s something much deeper to be learned from that law than just the act of I should never take your life. Well, I should never take your dignity either. And yet, throughout the Bible, throughout the Torah specifically, we could look at Jesus’s teachings and say, well, now that’s a rule, but Jesus is quoting the Torah. Nowhere in the Torah do you see a rule against mocking people.

And yet Jesus is equating mockery with murder. 

There’s something deeper going on that we’re only gonna grasp through meditation and through absorbing the whole narrative, the wisdom learned through story. It is trying to conform us into a people that act a certain way that reflects God’s design. 

But it doesn’t do that through a rule book mentality.

If I view the Bible as a rule book, not only will I get frustrated, but I’m gonna miss out on so many other things the Bible also teaches and wants to do in my life. And actually, I probably won’t even experience the transformation that the Bible is intended to bring about in me. I’ll just become the same fleshly filled person with a bunch of rules and that I hold myself to, and I hold you two, and there’s a facade of transformation.

If we get the rules just right, the man, you have one bad day and your habit slips or whatever. Like true character transformation is something that it’s a whole new, like you catch me on a bad day, my character’s still transformed, right? Like it’s, there’s no difference. There’s no going back, right? So instead of someone who’s, and what’s challenging about scripture is that it shows this character transformation is alive, right?

We are not fully conformed into the image of God. We are being transformed from one degree of glory to the next. So while I have this problem in my youth of anger and being driven by hostility, I’m totally transformed. The things that used to make me hostile and angry before don’t anymore, but I do still have bad days where that anger rises up.

But what’s massively different? Is that now there is repentance, just quick repentance. When I come back and I see on the face of the person that my tone or something I did, and maybe there’s a whole boatload of condemnation that I have and we have a little spat and it’s just ruined or whatever. But I know at the end of the day I was responding out of anger that was wrong and I come back and I repent and I apologize. That’s different. That wasn’t there in my youth or my repentance was because I was wanting to gain favor with you again, and that’s not why I repented it. 

The Bible wants to see us transform into new beings, into new ways of thinking about life and of doing life.

So be absorbed by the message of scripture, by the story, because that’s the way we experience transformation. I think maybe a better way of wording it is it’s through the story that we experience God. and it’s God through Jesus Christ, through His Holy Spirit that transforms us.

So this solves the problem of what it looks like to live out God’s plan, right? We flesh this out, live out God’s story. Okay? So that helps me. Okay, so I’m, so we face this situation, what wisdom do we know? What wisdom do we glean? 

What would the story of God reveal through Jesus Christ that we know of through the scriptures? How might it look to embody that in this particular circumstance? 

We get a handle of, okay, rather than reading the Bible for particular rules, let’s read the whole story and grasp, “Hey, what pieces of wisdom here guide us in this particular situation?” What about my specific situation, how does my life specifically fit into this great story?

So I see how we as the church fit in. I see how humanity fits in, but how do I, Asher Whitmer in Canyon City, Colorado, 2023 as a 32 year old father of four kids, my wife pregnant with her fifth, how do I fit in? I do copywriting and am an author. That’s my job. How does all of that fit in with God’s story?

How can I personally connect deeper with God? 

Finding My Place in God’s Story

We are going to be opening enrollment to “Finding my Place in God’s Story.” And it is a course, it’s a paid course. If you feel a real need for this, but you just don’t have the funds right now, listen we care about you. 

I’ll just be honest with you, like I’ve wrestled at times, like when I’m, it’s one thing to pay for a service to help businesses, right? What I do in copywriting stuff, it’s another thing to charge for. 

I’m just creating a resource for people in their walk with God, right? And it’s man, I don’t know, should I do that? People need help, right? And so where I’m at, where I land is I charge because that allows me to do more of it, to make more resources.

But I realize there’s people who don’t have the means, but they really need this. And so please reach out to me and be like, Hey, I really want this course. But I don’t have the means. Maybe there’s a certain price that you can afford, or maybe you just need it free, whatever, feel free to reach out.

But I’m really excited because typically when we’ve done this course, we’ve done a subscription version and it’s a certain amount per month. And so then if you’re not able to get through it in, you know, if you spend 12 months a part of the membership, that can be up to $420 a month. $420 a year.

Well, now we’re just gonna have a one time fee for this. You pay one fee and it’s gonna be at a super reduced discount for at least for a limited time, but you’ll get lifetime access to this course. It’s all in one place. The moment you pay, you access it, you can get started on the course right away. You can’t finish the course is longer than 24 hours.

So you can’t finish the course in a day, but you can finish it at your own pace, whether you take the next three years to go through it or whether you take the next three days to go through it. So the, but the course is designed, everything that we just went through in the last, in these three episodes is teaching straight from the course.

Like I’m literally giving you the gist of the gist, the best of the best, that at least as I’ve gone, I’ve taken three sets of people through this course and after the first one we did a major revision, actually even totally rechanged the name of the course and re revamped some of the lessons and so forth.

And the last two sessions have done really well. One of the things that people are saying as they go through the course is just that, yeah, scriptures. I’ve never seen it as a story before. And it is, it does come alive. It’s like putting color to black and white coloring page, right? Or some, something else that I’ve seen is just people making a connection between their life purpose and the message of God and how they’re fitting into it.

Because sometimes we view them as two separate things, like I’ve got my life and then I just reference this book to live out my life. And it has a totally different impact when we see that, oh, we’re all on the same journey. This book communicates a story that has gone before, but I’ve got my life coming back in and it’s really tra trailing along in the same narrative, the same story, and I’m a part of this whole thing.

The course is, I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m gonna have an episode that talks a little more in depth about that. But the gist of it is the course is, yes, this whole piece of learning how to approach the Bible, learning how to read the Bible, but it ends in helping you process your own story too, and discovering like what has God been doing in your life?

Because we’ve, we’re at this stage of life and I think people are tired of it, to be honest with you. As I talk with people, it’s what are your dreams? And set all these goals and have this passion lean into your skills and a bunch of people are like, you know, I don’t know what my dreams are, or I pursued my dreams and they all fell flat.

I don’t know how to navigate. Like what? I had this dream of opening a coffee shop or starting this particular business and or doing mission work and it ended up in bankruptcy and we ended up in debt or whatever. Like these tragic, or even just blah, things are happening. It’s well, that advice.

Only has a certain level of goodness to it. And this course is designed to solve all your problems. No, it’s not designed to do that, but it’s designed to give you a deeper meta-narrative for your life, like not to give you, to ground you into what is there in scripture. What is God already doing in your life?

How are these broken pieces or positive pieces fitting together to further God’s story? And how might what has happened guide you in the future into what to lean into and what to pursue. I can’t wait to tell you more about it. I’m gonna stop there. If you’re wanting more specifics of this has been great, but how do I specifically my situation in this current place in time, fit into the story?

I invite you to join us on finding my place in God’s story. Of course, I’ll have all the details and the full kit and caboodle, the offer like Ev, everything expert. Explained in the next episode, so stay tuned. In the meantime, I would love to hear what questions do you have? What? How has this impacted you?

Has this changed the way you viewed life? Has this changed the way you viewed God, the way you viewed scripture? And in what ways has it changed you? Do you have questions about it? As you go forward, you can respond. If you’re watching this on YouTube with blog, you can respond in the comment below.

If you’re listening to this just on a podcast platform or someplace where you can’t comment, you can shoot me a message at podcast@asherwitmer.com. Look forward to hearing from you.

I’d love to hear what questions do you have about God’s story and about connecting it with yours after you listen to this. You can share in the comments below.

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