Learning to tell The Story
Formation Focus: Witness Week 2 – Sermon Recap
One of my most vivid childhood memories is elementary school library time. Our librarian, Mrs. Brock, created a magical little story space called the Alligator Pit—an indoor amphitheater lined with stuffed alligators where she would read to us. That’s where I first met Curious George and countless other stories that quietly shaped my imagination.
As children, we don’t just learn information through stories—we learn who we are. Bedtime stories, cartoons, and family tales become the framework through which we understand the world. Long before we learn to explain our lives with facts or arguments, we describe them in stories. Every human being lives inside a story, whether they realize it or not.
That’s why, when life gets hard, we don’t usually say, “I’m struggling with an ethical framework.” We say things like, “I feel lost.” A good counselor knows this and often asks, “Tell me what was going on when this began.” Pain rarely makes sense in isolation—it only makes sense inside a larger story.
This matters deeply for the practice of witness. If story is how we make sense of life, what happens when the story we’re living in is incomplete or distorted? Partial stories don’t just leave out details; they actively mislead. If you only hear the middle of a story, you may misunderstand the characters. If you only hear the ending, you may miss the purpose. And if you don’t know how the story began, you’ll never know what the story is truly about.
Much of the confusion people experience about suffering, identity, meaning, and even faith isn’t due to a lack of information. It’s because they’re trying to live inside a story that doesn’t fit reality. The same can be true of faith. A person can know pieces of the gospel and still be deeply confused, because the gospel isn’t just information to believe—it’s a story to live inside.
We see this clearly in Luke 24, when two disciples walk from Jerusalem to Emmaus on the day of the resurrection. They know the facts of what happened, but they believe the story has ended in failure. “We were hoping that he was the one who was about to redeem Israel,” they say. Their problem wasn’t ignorance—it was interpretation.
Jesus doesn’t respond with a quick salvation outline or a list of propositions. Instead, beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He retells the story, showing how the Scriptures point to Him. In doing so, He reframes their understanding of suffering, death, and hope.
This teaches us three crucial things about witness. First, the gospel is a story, not just a statement. Jesus treats it as a narrative to be entered, not merely doctrines to affirm. Second, the wrong story produces the wrong expectations. The disciples assumed Messiah meant political victory, suffering meant failure, and death meant the end. Jesus shows them a deeper reality. Third, it’s the story—not just data—that changes hearts. Later they say, “Did not our hearts burn within us…?” Their hearts burned because their understanding of reality was being reordered.
This has practical implications for us today. We can’t assume people know the gospel story. Research shows that even basic biblical knowledge is far from common. If witness is going to be faithful and compelling, we must become fluent in the whole story of Scripture—from creation to new creation.
That story unfolds in four movements: Creation, where the world is declared good and humanity is made in God’s image; the Fall, which explains why the world is broken; Redemption, where God enters the story in Jesus to rescue and restore; and Restoration, where God’s Spirit renews us and points us toward the healing of all things.
Here’s the key takeaway: story formation precedes behavior modification. Jesus didn’t correct behavior first—He corrected the story. Grace has a story, and the better we know it, the better we can tell it. As we learn to live inside the true story of reality, witness becomes less about pressure and more about overflow—sharing the story that has made sense of our own lives.