Get Your Pretense On!

Chapter 1: The Greatest Story in the Word • 23

is unmasked at last in her ugliness. They are tales of transformation where the ones who live happily ever after, as by no means everybody does in fairy tales, are transformed into what they have it in them at their best to be. 4 The Story of God: the Lord’s Tale of Grace and Glory Indeed, this is where the tales and the Tale of the Scriptures hold similar attributes. To be a Christian is to believe that Supermans do live in Smallville, shy reporters can be Spiderman, and lowly toads may be shining princes, one kiss away from a new future. To be a disciple of Jesus is to be in the business of kissing frogs and nursing ugly ducklings, for nothing is as it appears to be. In the Story of God, like fairy tales, the stakes are unbelievably high and the conflict is cosmic and universal. God will elect to redeem his creation, purely out of love and grace, and to rescue out of Adam’s line a people who will live forever in a new heavens and new earth which he himself will recreate. Like in a fairy story, he will provide an intervention of grace and love so sufficient that it will take on the evil and chaos that have ruined creation, and with a single act of sacrifice, destroy death and corruption forever. And he will offer this free deliverance to any and all who believe in his Son, the true hero of the Story, whose people will serve him in a Kingdom where God is glorified forever. Have you heard it? Do you know the Story? How can we so encounter this true tale of God’s love and grace in such as way as to be transformed by it forever?

True Discipleship: How God’s Story Shapes Our Lives The Scriptures lay out for all to see the divinely authorized Story of the triune God – in his wondrous acts in creation, his people