“A Story Worth Telling” Ephesians 2: 1-10; Isaiah 44: 24-28

This week's material on integrating the "big story," that is what God has done, with our story.

The material breaks down the "big story" into four moves:  designed for good; damaged by evil; restored for better; and sent to heal.

The verse from this passage from Ephesians that stands out to be is vs. 8: "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God"  Or as Eugene Peterson translates it it in The Message:   "Saving is all his [God's] idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish!" 

Rob Bell in his book what We Talk about When We Talk about God tells this story:  "One morning recently I was surfing just after sunrise, and there was only one other surfer out.  In between sets he and I started talking. He told me about his work and his family, and then, after about an hour in the water together, eh told me how he'd been an alcoholic and a drug addict and an atheist and then he'd gotten clean and sober and found God in the process. As he sat there floating on the bard next to me, a hundred or so yards from shore, with not a cloud in the sky and the surface of thew ater like glass, he looked around and said, "and now I see God everywhere."

I also am thinking about how when we engage God, we engage God who comes toward us, who decides to save us.  

We are singing "Amazing Grace" Sunday, which carries with it a powerful story of it author and why he wrote the hymn.  His epitaph reads:  "John Newton, Clerk, once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, was, by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long labored to destroy." (you can find this from several sources.  I saw it in the notes for the Presbyterian Hymnal and then at http://www.gospelweb.net/JohnNewton/newtontombstone.htm)

I am thinking about using as the framework for the sermon what things we need to include in our story to make it a story worth telling.

What do you think?