Transcript
The narrative of life is God's story. It's not, first, my story. Think about this. The four most important words in all of the Bible are the first four words, "In the beginning, God," because if God is on site, everything in life changes. If God is the Creator and Originator of this life that we're living and of us, then life is about Him.
It Is Not About Me
It's not about me. It's not my will and my plan and my pleasure and my accomplishments and my instincts and my desires and my decisions and my, my, my, my, my. It's God and it's such a grace that this book that explains life begins with putting God in my face because my instincts are to forget His existence or to deny His existence, to act like I'm in the center, to live in an entitled, demanding, self-oriented life. That's my instinct.
And so, I'm forced from the very first words to know that this story is about God. The chief actor on stage will never be me. It's God. And so, everybody then in human life has to live a God-ward life. Even the atheist has to say what? "I don't believe in God." He's got to relate to that. It must drive an atheist crazy that he has to mention God, that it's a-theistic is the way that he defines himself because this is the ultimate fact by which every other fact is interpreted, understood, and evaluated.
God is the ultimate fact of facts. If you leave God out of the equation, I don't care what your total is at the bottom, it's going to be wrong. It's going to be bad spiritual math because this is the ultimate fact, the unavoidable fact, and scripture puts that immediately in front of me.
Off the Throne
And once I understand that, it's deeply humbling because then, I'm off the throne and God is on the throne, and everything has to do within, "How do I relate to this Being that is on center stage, that is the dominant Character of the story. What is His will? What is His plan? What is His pleasure? What is His glory?"
That's where it takes me, not what do I want, when do I want it, how do I want it, where do I want it. That's such misshapen humanity to live that way. So God is the ultimate fact of facts and the core of theology is "Here is your God".
