REMINDER

With Sunday, February 20th being part of a long weekend, we did not move forward in God's Story, but reviewed our approach to reading and thinking through the Bible. We were reminded to read through 1 Samuel 16-31 and consider how God prepared David to become the second king of Israel.
As we are ‘Thinking through the Bible’, it is important to see ourselves in God’s Story. This is what we can pass on to the next generation. Here are some ways to think about this…

The Psalmist wrote about the importance of passing on God’s Story to the next generation:
Listen, my people, to my teaching,
and pay attention to what I say.
I am going to use wise sayings
and explain mysteries from the past,
things we have heard and known,
things that our ancestors told us.
We will not keep them from our children;
we will tell the next generation
about the Lord's power and his great deeds
and the wonderful things he has done.
(Psalms 78:1-4, GNT)

You descendants of Abraham, his servant;
you descendants of Jacob, the man he chose:
remember the miracles that God performed
and the judgments that he gave.
The Lord is our God;
his commands are for all the world.
He will keep his covenant forever,
his promises for a thousand generations.
(Psalms 105:5, 7-9, GNT)

Ours is a whole new world, and nothing has been more adversely affected by postmodernism than the church and its relationship to God’s Word.
Postmodernism thrives on chaos. It desires to destroy all moral criteria and replace it with no criteria. So our young people prefer virtual reality based on emotions to actual reality based on reason. As a result, biblical ignorance is intensifying, even in the church. As we seek more entertainment and less biblical truth, the erosion increases.
While we weren’t paying attention, everything became unhinged. Our world is no longer the world of our grandparents…or of our parents for that matter. I should say, they were eroding. We slipped from what we used to call a “modern world” into a “postmodern world” without even realizing it. We’ve drifted from a “Christian era” into a “post-Christian era.” That’s why we’ve found ourselves in a world that is less friendly to the church and more than ever disconnected from the Bible. So it’s no surprise that today’s citizen is more biblically ignorant than people of virtually any other time since the Dark Ages.
Ours is a whole new world, and nothing has been more adversely affected by postmodernism than the church and its relationship to God’s Word – the Holy Scriptures. When the Bible loses its central place in the church’s worship – even if good things replace it – the fallout is biblical ignorance. The longer substitutes replace the preaching of the Word as the centerpiece of Christian worship, the more we will witness the drift into ignorance intensifying… Over time, a congregation that is distant from the Word of God seeks more entertainment and less biblical truth.
Even in a culture marked by postmodernism and addicted to consumerism, the church doesn’t need gimmicks to attract people. Instead it needs biblical truth taught in an interesting manner and lived out in unguarded authenticity – in our relationship with our Lord and with one another (The Church Awakening, Charles R. Swindoll, 2010, Cover, Introduction, and Conclusion).

Eugene Peterson writes in the Introduction to 1-2 Samuel in The Message:
…the biblical way is not so much to present us with a moral code and tell us “Live up to this”; nor is it to set out a system of doctrine and say, “Think like this and you will live well.” The biblical way is to tell a story and invite us, “Live into this. This is what it looks like to be human, this is what is involved in entering and maturing as human beings.” We do violence to the biblical revelation when we “use” it for what we can get out of it or what we think will provide color and spice to our otherwise bland lives. That results in a kind of “boutique spirituality” – God as decoration, God as enhancement. The Samuel narrative will not allow that. In the reading, as we submit our lives to what we read, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but to see ourselves in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.

The time and effort we are taking in 'Thinking through the Bible' is hopefully encouraging you to see how you fit into God's Story.