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Sermon Details
- Pastor Name: Jonathan Cornell
- Date & Time: September 20, 2015 | 10:00am
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SERMON SERIES:
Painting God: The Parables of Jesus
Once again, good morning, friends. It is good to be with you in worship. This morning, I’m going to tell you a story. Then for the next six weeks or so, each time we meet we are going to spend time together listening to some very important and truly beautiful stories from God’s Word together. That sounds easy enough, right? You might even be thinking to yourself, I hear stories all the time: I read them to my children, I see them on the news, I hear them from my co-workers ad nauseam. But I want to suggest that these stories we hear from Scripture have the ability to change your life, if you allow yourself to be drawn into the story.
There’s an author by the name of James Bryan Smith, who has a book called The Good and Beautiful God. In it, he suggests that we as humans construct meaning in our lives through a series of narratives. In other words, we allow certain stories about ourselves, about the world around us, about God, to shape our understanding of life. Each of these stories paints a picture of the world that we see in our mind’s eye.
With these paintings, our lives exhibit either a truthful and life-giving vision of what life is like…OR like some paintings, they depict life as hopeless and without form, shape, or meaning. Tragically, Smith says, there are many who believe that the true story of God is that God is angry with them, that he’s vengeful, he’s disappointed in us because of the sin in our lives, and that God is out to get us for all the times we’ve let God down. They believe in a god who says get yourself together and only then come to me; who says unless you figure out all your issues, you can’t be in my presence, because I can’t be around your dirt.
Whether this is reflective of you or not, I think you will agree that in our world, this is the narrative that some people have about who God is and what God thinks of them. Yes? It’s true; you know it is.
For the next six weeks, we are going to look at the stories Jesus told that paint a picture of a very different God than the angry, vengeful God we hear about from those false narratives. Very simply, what we are going to do is look to the Bible, specifically the stories that Jesus told those around him—we call them parables. These parables paint a picture for us of who God is, and what God thinks about you and about me.
Download the entire transcript here: Luke 15 11-32 Parable of the Waiting Father
