Vol 2:9 Re-Storying the World: Living Missionally - Living the Word of God in the World

Eugene Peterson in his introduction to Micah in The Message expresses:

“Prophets use words to remake the world. The world – heaven and earth, men and women, animals and birds – was made in the first place by God’s Word. Prophets arriving on the scene and finding that world in ruins, finding a world of moral rubble and spiritual disorder, take up the work of words again to rebuild what human disobedience and mistrust demolished. The prophets learn their speech from God. Their words are God-grounded, God-energized, God-passionate. As their words enter the language of our communities, men and women find themselves in the presence of God, who enters the mess of human sin to rebuke and renew” (Peterson, Introduction – Micah, The Message).

This is an apt description of our participating with God in God’s redemptive mission – we are about remaking the world because God is about remaking the world. But it has more do to than just using the right words. Indeed we are shaped by the words we use, but more importantly we are shaped by the Story in which these within the Word of God are expressed – this is what Peterson alludes to as prophets learning “their speech from God.”

As a people who are called to live in mission with God we are a people who are also called to live out the Word of God, or God’s Story and Vision, in the world. The Story we live reveals a different rhythm, a different cadence of how we are human in the world. The Story we live, rather than contributing to the disordering or destroying of the world, instead remakes the world in light of God’s vision of shalom. In a sense, we live in a world that has been de-storyed (a play on the word destroyed). What we are about as we participate with God in God’s mission, is re-storying the world in light of God’s Story and Vision – remaking and restoring the world in light of God’s present and coming reign, seeing the breaking in of God’s will being done here on earth just as it is in the realm in which God rules.

And so as a people being about re-storying the world, we are called to be a people who are immersed in Scripture – because we recognize that we are not complete has human beings unless we are formed and transformed by the Story that is rooted in God, centered in Jesus Christ, and continues being expressed in us and through us in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Immersing ourselves in Scripture gives us a vocabulary, a phraseology, a narrative, a Story that shapes the way we live, speak, and act as a new creation. We cannot be God’s missional people without the Story and Vision of God being part of our DNA. Reading Scripture, reflecting upon Scripture, dialoguing on Scripture – particularly as a community, are the practices which open us to be permeated by God’s Story in our lives.

In this way we discover that the Word of God is as necessary for our being the people of God as the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are necessary for our being human.

Let’s be about remaking, restorying the world as a people living lives immersed in the living Word of God.