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Matthew: What God says matters, but so does how he says it. Let's talk about it on Key Life. That was author and seminary professor Steve Brown, and this is Key Life. We're all about radical grace because of what Jesus has done. God's not mad at you. Keep listening and that message will set you free to live a life of joy and surprising faithfulness.

Steve Brown: Thank you, Matthew.

Matthew: Hi, Matthew.

Steve Brown: This feels this feels kind of weird.

Matthew: It is weird, like, what's going on here?

Steve Brown: Matthew is one of the voices of Key Life, and you hear him in a lot of venues. But I ask him to stay in the studio this time and not leave. And so he gets to be the announcer and the teacher. How about that?

Matthew: Yeah.

Steve Brown: And we're talking about stories.

Matthew: That's right.

Steve Brown: And you introduced that yesterday as the life-changing stories and story of scripture.

Matthew: That's right. We think of story as, you know, entertaining or teaching, but we talked yesterday it reframes, it reminds us, it corrects us.

That leads me to an idea that I wanted to explore, that God is a storyteller. And we'll kind of investigate if that's true or not, but if it is, what does that mean? What are the implications of that? Does how he lets us know about himself matter as well?

I don't want anybody to get in trouble here, no show of hands, but if you've ever been in a situation where you're talking to a spouse or a significant other and you say, "How are you doing?" And you hear, "Fine."

What that person literally said matters, but how they said it is also telling you something as well. And that's something what we get in how God lets us know about himself.

A storyteller, a storyteller doesn't give everything away at once, right? They carefully kind of unpack the thing and timing is a big part of that. And anytime I think of that, I think about the covenants. And he's saying something with each one of them.

So with Noah, he says, "I'm not going to wipe you out again." Okay, that's good. That's good, that's good to know. But beyond that, you're like, "Okay, God has something in mind for us." Not going into details yet, but okay.

Now he makes the covenant with Abraham. Makes a big promise. Not only will I bless you, I will bless others through you. Okay, still light on specifics, but we can understand there's a purpose behind that promise. He has something in mind.

Then we go to David, Second Samuel 7. Sure enough, there is a purpose. "He will build a house for my name and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever."

So it's like we, the way we look at chapters of a book, God looks at centuries where it's not just a series of covenants, they're building on one another. So we go from this kind of vague sense of God has something in mind to where we now understand we should be looking for a capital P person coming.

Steve Brown: And he

Matthew: So it's

Steve Brown: It's all one big story.

Matthew: It's one big story and he doesn't just put everything out there at one time, he kind of parcels it out in his own God kind of way.

Steve Brown: You know, I've been reading a Grisham novel this past week and he writes about lawyers and and and this is a long book about a lawyer who is falsely accused of murder. He didn't do it and they found him guilty. But he took about half of that book to set up the story he was going to tell.

Matthew: Yeah.

Steve Brown: And the scripture is kind of like that, too. I mean, I wanted to say to Grisham, "Get to it."

Matthew: Let's go, man.

Steve Brown: What's the point of all this?

Matthew: You're not going to ever rush the God who created time itself.

Steve Brown: That's true.

Matthew: I tell our kids, I'm like, "God is never late." But he sure is never early. I promise you that. So I look at how he unfolds story and I'm like, that's what I understand a storyteller does.

Foreshadowing, symbols, a storyteller uses that. God certainly uses that. The bronze serpent, bronze refers to atoning for sin. It'll be raised up and you know, Jesus puts a button on that in John just so we don't mistake it. He literally connects him to that.

So it's like God's use of story is so much more sophisticated than we realize. So there's the spoken stories like the parables, we talked about that yesterday. There are symbolic stories where it makes sense on one level now, it's going to make a lot more sense.

Steve Brown: That's true.

Matthew: Centuries later. There's living stories like Hosea. God wants to illustrate something. I'm using your life as a literal flesh and blood illustration. There's relational stories. I think about we think of Heavenly Father as a metaphor.

Steve Brown: Yeah.

Matthew: Is that the metaphor? Or is our relationship with our earthly Father the metaphor? Our relationship with God is the source. He thought of all these things that we take for granted and he built them into every level of existence, so he would point us back to him.

There's institutional stories, marriage, you know, in Ephesians 5. You're like, okay, these things aren't just practical matters. He thought these through. There's there's stories baked in at the deepest level on these things.

There's missional stories, like we talked about Joshua. He's on this mission. Absolutely. But every detail is just pregnant with meaning. And covenantal stories, we talked about covenants yesterday.

I don't know if you've ever seen one of those puzzles with it's a triangle with a bunch of made up of a bunch of smaller triangles. That's what it feels like with God's storytelling. There's a story here and that's a triangle, but it could well be that that's a part of this larger thing.

Steve Brown: Oh man.

Matthew: And you're like, what a thoughtful God.

Steve Brown: You know, and I know you, so I know you're not disparaging something like no doctrine and revealed propositional truth. But sometimes we really do forget that the power of it is in the story. I mean it, we were made that way. We were made that way to hear stories and to see stories change our lives.

Matthew: Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I think this is not something that is external to us. I think story is more of our operating system, and we'll get into that more tomorrow and Thursday. But it's amazing how much when we look at it, his storytelling reveals about him.

We talked about he takes his time. What does that tell us? God's patient. And if God's patient with his storytelling, if he's patient with his stories, maybe I could be patient with my story.

Steve Brown: Or maybe he'll be patient with me.

Matthew: Yeah. Yeah. If he's not in a hurry, he's making us more into his image, but he's not in a rush. So maybe I can trust God's process and keep showing up.

Steve Brown: Yeah.

Matthew: Knowing he's got it. Take it easy, man.

Steve Brown: He's

Matthew: He's also creative. I mean, you know, what are some attributes of God? Holy, righteous, all the omnis.

Steve Brown: Yeah.

Matthew: Okay. But the first thing he tells us is he's a creator. There's a Hebrew word, it's squiggly line, squiggly line, curvy line.

Steve Brown: Bara.

Matthew: To bring into existence in a way only God does. It's used three times in just Genesis 1:37. It seems important to God that we know he is creative. So we shouldn't be shocked when his creativity extends to his storytelling.

Steve Brown: Yeah.

Matthew: So when it comes to our own stories, is he, is our story going to look just like somebody else's?

Steve Brown: No.

Matthew: He created 17,000 species of butterflies. We don't need that many butterflies. We don't.

Steve Brown: One would have been enough.

Matthew: One would have been fine, Monarch, done, love it, next. So is there, how likely is it that when it comes to your story of how he's growing you and letting you know about himself, he's going to go, copy paste. Let's call it a day.

Steve Brown: Never.

Matthew: So therefore, when we compare our own lives and our own spiritual growth to somebody else, don't do that. God's too creative for that.

And he's trustworthy and just. I know a lot of days we look at the news, I look at the news from like last night.

Steve Brown: Oh man.

Matthew: And I echo the words of Habakkuk, like, "God, how long do I have to cry out for help before you listen?" And God, just as plainly as Habakkuk makes his his complaint, God says, answers just as clearly and says what's going on.

And I take from that that God's going to God's going to resolve every story and every conflict. And some of them we will see in our timeline. Some of them it's going to be after our time, but we have to trust the author and his timing on all that.

Steve Brown: So good. These are new thoughts. I mean, I haven't thought about it exactly in the way you've been teaching us. But it's so important.

You know, my friend Dan Allender wrote a book called *Truth Be Told*. And in that book, he says that the main place that God speaks to us is through our story. And what you're saying is he speaks to us through his story.

Matthew: Yeah. As he teaches us throughout scripture. Yeah, there's a there's a preeminent French criminologist named Dr. Edmond Locard. He created basically modern forensic science. He created this idea that every touch leaves a trace. And I think that's true with God and his story that he's writing through us and with us.

Steve Brown: That's so good. We're talking about stories, your story and his story. You think about that. Amen.

Guest (Male): Good times. If you're just joining us, all this week, Steve and I are discussing the surprising ways God has used story throughout history and is even using it right now in our individual lives. Tomorrow, we'll dive into this question, if we're in a story, then what do we do when we've lost the plot? Hope you'll join us for that.

As you may know, we publish a free print magazine annually toward the end of the year. The current edition is filled with thought-provoking articles, plus exciting offers and news. Get your copy right now by going to keylife.org/freemagazine. But what you might not know is that we have just released our annual digital magazine. We put this out every summer, and this edition, man, this edition is really special. Articles from Steve, Jerry Perrys, Justin Holcomb, and Chad West, plus details on a new offer and a link for pre-ordering Steve's upcoming book. Get all of it on demand for free at keylife.org/magazines with an S at the end.

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