Speaker: Bonnie Sala | Series: Guidelines For Living | But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect. 1 Peter 3:15

Wherever you live in the world, each morning you wake up to bad news.  Disease, disaster, death.  The narratives are bleak, yet the followers of Jesus Christ, his disciples in the here and now, are people of the Gospel and the Gospel is good news.  The Gospel is a story because God is a storyteller.  We’ve got His story of good news in His book, the Bible.

Hopefully you know the story:  how God created us in His own image, to have relationship with us.  And He made us with the capacity to worship.  But relationships can never be forced, so God gave us the choice to worship Him, or not.  And what we chose, back in the Garden of Eden, was to be rulers of our own lives. The choices that we still make every day separate us from Him and His holiness.

If we stopped there, there would be no good news, but then came Grace.  God got the attention of a man named Abraham and He told him, “Abraham, I’m going to do something with you.  Here’s a promise:  I’m going to bless all peoples of the earth through you.”  And that meant that God was going to welcome us, His creation, back into relationship with him because Jesus was going to come through the line of Abraham and pay the price of that redemption and healing.  Jesus was going to establish a Kingdom of every single people group in the world, for all people groups will worship Him.   That’s the story of the God of the Bible.

What is needed are storytellers; storytellers in a fallen world, telling a story of good news, of assurance and transformation that Jesus brings to our lives and to the world.  Right now, at this moment in history, we are in the “Storytelling Gap.”  That’s the gap between the time that Jesus came and did his work on the cross, and the time that He’s coming back to wrap things up and put evil in its final resting place.  You and I live in the Storytelling Gap.

If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, do you know why you are, ultimately, alive today?  It has to do with something Christians have called the Great Commission.  Remember Matthew 11:28 and Mark 16:15, those verses that the missionaries like?  “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel, making disciples and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you?”  These verses actually apply to every follower of Christ.  2 Corinthians 2:14 explains that God “uses us to spread the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere.”

If Jesus Christ has intersected your life, you have a good news story that you own and that you can tell.  It’s uniquely yours.  Have you ever taken the time to think through your story?  When marketers are developing a compelling story to sell a product or idea, they ask themselves, “so what?!”  We can ask ourselves, “So what?  What is different about my life because I follow Jesus, prioritizing His will rather than my own?”  If I can’t come up with an answer, if there really isn’t any difference between the way I respond to the troubles and bad news of life and the way that my non-Christian friend does, perhaps my story has really yet to begin. 1 Peter 3:15 instructs the follower of Jesus, “If someone asks about your hope as a believer, always be ready to explain it.”

If you are a Christian, you are alive in this fallen world to be a storyteller. The Bible says that good news of Jesus will be like a pleasant aroma to the person whom God is calling to Himself. (2 Corinthians 2:15-16) Who in your life is waiting to hear the best Story ever, today?

Resource reading: 2 Corinthians 2:12-17