Written by Bob Schindler
The Gospel is The Story from which that all other stories flow!
Here at CEDE SPORTS, we regularly share about Gospel Centricity. The Gospel Centricity perspective involves two things:
1. Seeing the Gospel as The Story God has been telling since the beginning of time, rooted in history, with Jesus Christ as the Redeeming Hero.
2. Moving to integrate all of life into that STORY.
I got this idea about STORY from two authors I respect - C.S.Lewis and Frederick Buechner. Frederick Buechner declares this reality beautifully in the following quote:
“[The gospel] is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happened and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order against chaos, in a great struggle where often it is hard to be sure who belongs to which side because appearances are deceiving. Yet for all its confusion and wildness, it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after and where in the long run everybody, good and evil alike become known by his true name... This is the fairy tale of the Gospel with of course one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept happening ever since and is happening still.” --from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale
As a student of "stories," especially from the Medieval Period, C.S. Lewis' recognition of this reality about The Gospel, pointed out to him by J.R. Tolkien, was a significant influence in Lewis' conversion from atheism to Christianity. As a story, The Gospel has all the dramatic elements of any good story. But don't miss the one crucial difference between The Gospel and all other fairy tales or stories, which is the claim made that it is true. This is what makes the Gospel THE STORY - THE STORY from which all stories flow.