What Is My Mission?Намуна

Genesis 1, The First Chapter of a Larger Story

How does your life fit into God’s grand story for all of creation? What is God’s plan for creation?

The first chapter of Genesis is more than the introduction to the first book of the Bible. It is the opening chapter in the grand story of God’s redemptive plan for his creation.

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This comprehensive story has four parts:

• Creation (the way things were)
• Fall (the way things are)
• Redemption (the way things could be)
• Restoration (the way things will be)

This story is called the four-chapter gospel.

Many Christians today have lost this larger story told by the Bible. Despite the greatness of the biblical narrative, over the past 150 years the church in the western world has looked at the Bible from a more limited perspective. We have truncated the four-chapter gospel down to two chapters, Fall and Redemption. While sin and salvation are undeniable realities, they are not the complete gospel. This abridged version excludes God’s original good creation and his future restoration of it.

By focusing on sin and salvation, the two-chapter gospel often portrays salvation as a bus ticket to heaven. Christians believe that what they do while they wait for the bus doesn’t matter; all that matters is that they get on the bus. This simply isn’t true.

Rather than being passengers at a bus stop waiting for the bus, we have a specific mission as God’s people. The four-chapter gospel illuminates our identity and role in God’s story. Understanding this call on our lives enables us to withstand being “conformed to the world.”

From this perspective, we see our call to participate in God’s redemptive mission. That missional role is not future, but in the here and now. By recovering Scripture’s storyline, we rediscover our true purpose.

The fullness of the gospel is not solely about individual happiness and fulfillment. It is not all about “me.” Tim Keller says, “It is not just a wonderful plan for ‘my life’ but a wonderful plan for the world; it is about the coming of God’s kingdom to renew all things.” Only with the four-chapter gospel in view can we understand how our story fits into God’s story and begin to fulfill his plan for our lives.

Scripture begins with the creation of all things and ends with the renewal of all things. In between it offers an interpretation of the meaning of all history. The biblical story makes a comprehensive claim on all humanity, calling each one of us to find our place in God’s story.

Why is it important to view Scripture as one grand story? How does this view influence your understanding of the gospel?

Additional Elements

Learn more about how your work is a part of God’s grand story throughout the Bible in this book, How Then Should We Work? Rediscovering the Biblical Doctrine of Work.