The Story Of Trust

Many people ask, “Why do we begin with the Old Testament in the Thrive Workbooks?”  And they usually follow with, “But isn’t the real story in the New Testament?”  Great questions.

The first workbook is an orientation process to engaging God’s mission of restoration and reconciliation.  But from there we begin with Genesis and continue with the story in Scripture.  Eleven out of the twelve workbooks tell the story in Scripture.  It was our desire to tell the entire narrative.  But it wasn’t always like that.  We’re a ministry in process, you could say.

When we first began the process of developing the workbooks we considered all kinds of possibilities for spiritual formation and what would lay the foundation for teaching in the Thrive groups.  Many were based on really good methodologies.  We knew we wanted to engage what it meant to follow Jesus but the rest was sort of up in the air.  The early iterations were good but ultimately we kept finding ourselves wanting to tell the story of God in Scripture.  We were discovering the value of a narrative approach to Scripture, or seeing the story God was trying to tell, and we decided to simply tell that story.

And as we made this shift we discovered some surprising things.  God had an amazing story to tell.  And it began in the Old Testament.  In fact, much of the story of spiritual formation, of learning to trust in relationship, and of coming out of oppression and into wholeness resided in the story of Israel.  And the more we listened to that story the more we saw the bigger picture emerge.  God was drawing us into a relationship of love and trust.  It wasn’t about some grand principles (even though there were some) but about relationship.

Much of the stories in the Old Testament are of humans just like us wrestling with the idea of what it meant to trust God, which was a central component of spiritual formation.  And the story, although not always pretty, gave us a real picture of this process.  It gave us permission to be human AND continue to step forward in relationship.  God was inviting us to wrestle with him and sit with our Papa.  We essentially discover a love story.

The Old Testament also gave us a perspective of what problem God was trying to solve.  The relationship issue that was shattered in the Garden.  So much of the story we were reading was understanding the trustworthiness of God and seeing His character in action.  And the more we stepped forward in trust, the more we were restoring our own hearts.

And it occurred to us in the middle of the process that God was not an angry God looking to “get” us, the great cop in the sky as so many of us had previously learned.  He was a compassionate God relentlessly seeking out our restoration.  He was deeply pursing our reconciliation so we could engage His Spirit.  And much of the story He was trying to tell was of His desire for our wholeness.  And the pinnacle of that story was Jesus.  In Jesus we found the true expression of both the Father and our humanity.  In Jesus we found the love of the Father complete.

To read the story without understanding the problem God was solving was like reading  the last two chapters of a great Grisham novel.  It was good and interesting.  But it left us with so many more questions than we started with.  To read the whole story was to see the big picture unfolding.  Ultimately we realized that there was a really great story of trust to tell.  And we wanted to tell it.