The Story You Were Made For
The Story You Were Made For
Our love for stories is pointing us to the true Story.
My father-in-law loved telling our kids stories when they were little. He even made up a character—Ellie the Elephant—and crafted imaginative tales of this sweet elephant and her adventures to captivate my kids or to put them to sleep.
My kids are all adults now, but they still talk about Ellie to this day. A few Christmases ago, they compiled pieces of these Ellie stories, had them illustrated, and turned them into a book for their “Pa” that he proudly displays on his office bookshelf.
Stories are sticky. The best stories reverberate deep inside of us, stirring imagination and emotion and memory and meaning and purpose. There’s something deeper at work here.
The Story Behind Every Story
In September of 1931, C.S. Lewis took a famous walk with his friend J.R.R. Tolkien across the campus of Magdalen College in Oxford. Lewis loved stories and ancient myths, especially those about gods dying and rising again, but assumed Jesus was just another of these mythological narratives.
Tolkien asked a question that ultimately shattered Lewis’s intellectual barriers to the Gospel:
“Why do you love mythology so much? And why do you love story so much? Isn’t it possible that those are pointers to the ultimate greatest story, the true story?”
The two men ended up talking in Lewis’s office until 4am, and just eight days later (on a ride across town in the side car of his brother’s motorcycle) the greatest apologist of the 20th century gave his life to Jesus.
The Great Story
We’re all makers and partakers of stories. Stories are how we make sense of life. I believe the power of story is built into how God designed us as image bearers.
The Bible is actually one big overarching story. We call it the metanarrative of Scripture.
We can easily be tempted to see the Bible as a book of spiritual advice, just one more religious text alongside all the other religious texts in the world today. But the Bible is unique because the Scriptures are one unified storyline—the Story of God. This is the Great Story you and I are invited into and called to proclaim in all the earth.
Here it is in a nutshell:
CREATION: God made us in His image to dwell with Him and cultivate this world with Him.
FALL: Sin separated us from our Maker and sent us spiraling into a disconnected and distorted counterfeit of God’s original design where death reigned supreme.
REDEMPTION: God wasn’t willing to leave us there. He began a long pursuit of His lost and sin-broken creation—first through a man (Abraham) and his family, and then through a people (Israel) called to be a light to all nations. His presence broke into our lost world—first through a temporary tabernacle, then through a permanent Temple. And then He did the unthinkable: God wrote Himself into the Story! The Word became flesh, lived the life we could not live, died and was resurrected to defeat the ultimate enemy. When Jesus died on the cross, He cried Tetelestai, “It is Finished!” declaring His Kingdom had been inaugurated on earth as it is in heaven.
RESTORATION: God is making all things new again. His Kingdom is already here in those of us who have surrendered to His lordship over our lives. We are His temples, the overlap of heaven and earth in this world. And yet there is even more that has not yet come in its fullness. One day Christ will return again and finish the final and beautiful chapter of this Great Story that will echo into eternity.
My kids still roll their eyes at me because I can connect the most obscure TV show or movie scene to the deep longing we all carry for the world (including ourselves) to be made right and whole again.
But maybe that longing is the point.
Maybe every storyline that moves us, every tale of sacrifice, redemption, justice, love, restoration, and homecoming, is echoing something deeper.
Maybe, like Tolkien suggested to Lewis that night in Oxford, all these smaller stories are pointing us toward the ultimate true Story.
Where death is defeated.
Where grace triumphs over sin.
Where the Author writes Himself into the narrative to rescue His creation.
The invitation of the Gospel is not just to admire that Story from a distance, but to lose ourselves in it completely. To place our small stories inside His Great one. And to spend our lives proclaiming this Great Story to a world desperate for Someone to put all things back right again.
Erik Cooper
Erik began his career in the business world before spending twelve years in full-time ministry, serving on staff at a large suburban church and later as a church planter in downtown Indianapolis. Today, he serves as the President of a family of business-oriented nonprofit organizations that work together to mobilize the marketplace to make Jesus known in the world. He leads The Stone Table, which equips marketplace believers and invests in global mission initiatives, and Community Reinvestment Foundation, a nonprofit real estate company providing high-quality affordable housing in Indiana and directing its profits to missions through The Stone Table.
