The Larger Story Series

ILLUST> In the movie Patch Adams, Patch is a medical student with a huge heart for people and a dream to be able to offer health care to the less fortunate in society. So he rallies some others around him and begins to chase his dream. Then tragedy strikes; his girlfriend is murdered by one of the outcasts that he was trying to rescue. All of a sudden life makes no sense. He finds himself on the top of a cliff trying to make sense of God and of life. He can only come to one conclusion. God creates us, we suffer enormous amounts of pain, and then we ultimately die. That is the only way that the story, that Patch finds himself living in, can possibly make any sense.

My guess it that life has felt a lot like that for most of us at some point in our lives too. Life doesn’t come at us in black and white or like a math problem that can simply be solved. It comes to us the way a story does day by day, moment by moment, scene by scene. What will happen next we don’t really know, we are forced to take the journey as it comes to us, as it plays out. There are moments when it seems like a comedy, others where it seems like a soap opera, at yet others where like with Patch life feels like a brutal tragedy. We are living in the midst of a story that is sometimes wonderful sometimes awful, and most often some weird and confusing mixture of both. There really is no wonder that we find ourselves losing heart. It often just doesn’t make much sense unless….unless what…unless we know and understand the rest of the story. So what could we possibly be missing? That’s what I want us to talk about as we jump back into this today.

But before we get there and do that good morning and welcome to this place that we call DCC. It is so good to have you with us especially if you are new or if you were new last week because I wasn’t here to welcome you last week. My good friend and mentor Craig McConnell from Ransomed Heart Ministries was here while I was away. He’s a guy who walks more closely with God than anyone I have ever met before, has been a huge influence in my life over the past 8 years, and a huge part of this place that we call DCC. So thanks for being good to Craig, it means a lot to him and to me too. If you are new we hope that you walk out of here today absolutely convinced that these three things are true, all of my story was safe and welcome there, I belonged there regardless of what I believe, and I was just in a building full of people just like me. Hope you believe that because every bit of it is true. So a special shout out to you if you are new and to all of our friends watching online today too. It’s always good to have you with us.

So we are in this series called Ransomed Heart and I want us to jump back in today by going back to two of the things that we talked about in the first week. In week one we said that there is a difference in living forgiven and living free. What we are after in this series is more than forgiveness and a trip to heaven, it is this amazing abundant life of freedom that Jesus came to bring all of us today. We also said that a big part of our challenge in finding that is that we understand the significance of sin but not story. So, we need to change that, starting today with a better understanding of the larger story, of exactly what we are up against in this larger story that we all find ourselves living in. So let’s jump back into this together and chase after that.

If you have a Bible we are ultimately going to be in Revelation chapter 12 today, but are going to start in Isaiah 14. So hold Revelation and go to Isaiah. If you don’t have a Bible we would love to give you one. They are back on the back tables that you can grab right now if you would like if you close or on you can always grab one on your way out. As always you can hit our app or the You Version app too. Or you can ignore all of that and read along with me on the screens. So, we spent a few weeks in the creation story but today I want us to back up. Like, you mean before creation? Exactly. Before we get to creation there’s this Isaiah chapter 14 beginning with verse 12…