Have You Not Read?

Friends, when is the last time you read a good fairy tale? Or, let’s broaden the scope, when is the last time you read any good story? 

And when I say ‘read’ I don’t mean ‘binge watched’ or reported on or skimmed to finish the bedtime checklist. I mean read just to enjoy.

Because if you want to live well, read well. Good stories are a God-given means of becoming godly. And so, Cities Church, I exhort you to read good stories in order to become a good character in God’s story for you. 

God’s Story of Glory

Stop and marvel for a moment. Our God, the happy, triune Creator of all, loves stories. They are his handiwork. Ever since he penned his first creative word on the blank page of the beginning, God has been weaving stories. Living stories. Stories written with magic words like “Light” and “Tree” and “Man.” The Word is always cultivating the Tree of Tales, a tree that sends out countless branches and whose roots reach right down to the bedrock of all reality — the life, love, and joy of the Trinity. God loves this story of glory.

And Friends, you and I are God’s characters in this drama. You are a branch on the Tale Tree. And so, the Psalmists tell us that every day of your life, every wandering step and every wayward tear is recorded in God’s storybook (Ps 39:8; 139:16). That’s amazing! God authored — before the foundations of the world — the book of reality, and in that book, there is a chapter that bears your name and lays out your role in his story. 

But it is even more amazing that God not only writes the tale, he invites us to participate. We are subcreators, actors with real agency in this drama. So then, how do we act well? How do we become good characters, the kind of characters that God delights in? Well, we can be good characters by seeing good characters and to do so we must attend to stories.

The Magic Mirror

Stories can act as a kind of magic mirror revealing through other characters what we look like. They may declare with Samuel-like boldness, “You are the man!” Or with Christ-like compassion, “You are not yet the man.” 

And so we should read well to live well. We should be relentlessly attentive to stories. Most importantly, we should read the Bible’s stories as stories, but we should also read fairy tales and fiction, history and epics, and the embodied stories all around us — always asking the question, “Am I like that character? And should I be?”

Fathers, when you read Prince Caspain — and you should! — and you see King Lune, a father who is first in the fray, last in retreat, and all the time the loudest laughing, does your character look like that? Or do you more resemble the generic Disney father, passive and absent?

Mothers, when you read about Harry Potter — and you should! — and you see Mrs. Weasley, a Proverbs 31 kind of woman, generous and kind and clothing her family in knitted sweaters, is your character like that?  Or do you look more like Orual from Lewis’s masterpiece Till We Have Faces, a foolish woman whose ‘love’ consumes all those around her?

Children, when you read Prince Caspian and the Voyage of the Dawn Treader — and you should! — and you see the courage of Edmund or the glad-hearted obedience of Lucy, do you see yourself? Or are you selfish like Eustance Scrub, who almost deserves his name?

And Saints, when you read and re-read the stories about Jesus — and oh you should! — does your character look like his? He is the good, true, and beautiful hero we are made to imitate and enjoy forever.

Read Well

Friends, one day the entire story of your life will be retold by God in every detail with all heaven and earth bear witness. The final judgment will be the telling of every tale in full. On that day, let us not be among those to whom King Jesus, the Author of All, says, “Have you not read?” Let us learn to read well to live well — to see good characters and be good characters. 

And this reminds us of our need to confess: 

Our triune God, a good Author and we rejoice in your authority. We are always swimming in your stories, and yet so often we are busy and blind and inattentive and so we fail to be the kind of characters you delight in. Forgive us. Teach us by your Spirit to read your Word and your world well. Convict us now in this time of silent confession.