Mission Begins with God not Me
“In the beginning God …” --Genesis 1:1 The Bible begins with God. If we want to get inside what the Bible means, we must begin with a basic understanding that God is the primary actor in the biblical narrative. He is the one initiates the story. He is main character of the story. And he is the producer of the story as the one who holds together the various actors who seem to never quite get what God is doing in his story. As I reflect on my years of reading the Bible, I realize how I failed to see this basic, foundational point about the Bible. I read the Bible as “God’s love letter to me” as if I was the central focus of the story. When I was in college, I began in Genesis and worked my way through the Bible on a daily basis, and I would stop and journal my impressions and reactions to what I read. Recently, I looked at what I wrote. I must confess that almost every journal entry was about what I was doing for God, what God wanted me to do or what God was calling me to do. When on...