The Story of God

I promised to provide a way for you to get the slides from the Story of God series this summer. Well, here are the files for each week:

Week 1: Download PDF
Week 2: Download PDF
Week 3: Download PDF
Week 4: Download PDF
Week 5: Download PDF
Week 6: Download PDF
Week 7: Download PDF
Week 8: Download PDF
Week 9: Download PDF

A special thank you to Karianne Rillera for doing the drawings and to Becky Sehenuk for putting the slides together with such a great design. Enjoy the slides and feel free to use them.

Joshua Walker

Theology for Today

Reading the theologians of the past can be a rich experience.
We have a lot to learn from those who have gone before us. Yet like most good things, there is a potential danger. 

As we read godly men like Martin Luther, Jonathan Edwards, St. Augustine, John Owen, and many others, we are drawn to the force and brilliance of their arguments. But we seldom consider the arguments and world views that they were addressing. Does it matter? Absolutely.

We admire their argumentation, we stand in awe of the impact they had on their generations, and naturally, we want to have the same sort of impact. So we imitate their argumentation and emphasize what they emphasized. But when we don’t consider what they were arguing against, we fail to recognize that we may not be called to answer the same questions.

What I mean is this. The great theologians of the past were answering questions. But the answers they gave would not have been helpful if they were not responses to actual questions—regardless of how brilliant those answers were. An ingenious explanation of the law of gravity is not a good answer to how to bake bread. So before we adopt the great arguments of the past, we must first consider which questions we have been called to answer.

Martin Luther said it like this:
“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point” (Cited by Francis Schaeffer in The God Who Is There). 

In 1863, a soldier fighting in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania would have been considered a hero. But a soldier fighting the same way in the same location today would not be a hero—he would be irrelevant. 

Should we read old theologians? Of course! We have much to learn from them. But we cannot afford to confuse their battles with our own.
If we want to impact the world as they did then we must know the Bible well and bring that knowledge to bear on the questions and erroneous thinking of the world in which live. 

And how do we know what questions need to be answered today?
We will never know until we walk out the front door and start conversations with our neighbors. Only then will we find that the Bible has answers for real life—it always has, and it always will.

The Impossibility of “One Anothering” Yourself

We would probably all say that we desire to honor God. Who would deny this? But in reality, we have deceived ourselves into thinking that we can actually live a life that honors God apart from being in continual relationships with the body of Christ.

Many would say that this is an overstatement. After all, every one of us has relationships. But I’m talking about something deeper than getting together with people for dinner once every few weeks. This level of interaction may be a blessing to us, but it simply does not fulfill what the Bible calls us to. Really, this type of interaction doesn’t give us anything more than a progress report. But if we were to develop deep, regular relationships with other people, then we would have opportunities to practice the “one anothers” of Scripture.

We run into this problem because we exalt independence.
As a culture we esteem independence—it has become one of our main measures of success. But our exaltation of independence actually hinders the body of Christ from functioning in the way that God desires. 

Do you realize that it is impossible to live a life that honors God on your own? In order for us to fulfill the commands of Christ we must be in true relationship with other believers. We need to reject our culture’s exaltation of independence and finally humble ourselves and express our need for the body.

It comes down to this: you cannot “one another” yourself. Yet the
Bible is full of commands to do various things for one another. The inescapable solution to the dilemma is this: we need each other.
In order to be and do what God has called us to be and do, we must renounce individuality and embrace community. 

You can start this process in two ways: (1) Identify someone who has a need and do what you can to help them out. (2) Identify some of your own needs or weaknesses and bring other people into the process. Our arrogance is the only complicating factor. When we actually begin doing this, we will find that this is exactly how we were mean to live.