Story Diamond

Plant the Gospel

Mar 19

Written By KC Underground

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Following Jesus in Story

The Bible is a Story
The story has four movements
Jesus is the center of the story
The story can shape us

BEST PRACTICES FOR USING THE STORY DIAMOND

Remember this symbol is designed to be three things:
- A Picture to understand key ideas regarding disciple-making:
  What does this tell me about being a disciple?
- A Mirror to see our reflection in:
  What does this tell me about myself?
- A Window to look at all of life through:
  What should I do about it?
We encourage you to read through the summaries five times before sharing it.
Journal on the picture, mirror, and window questions above before sharing this. The degree to which you engage this symbol personally, is the degree to which you will be able to lead others into engagement.
There are two versions included here: A four-minute summary and an extended summary.
We encourage you to draw and explain the four-minute summary out loud three times before sharing it with someone else.
When you share it with someone, draw the Story Diamond on a napkin or sheet of paper. Leave that drawing with them.
Remember to read the situation and the spiritual interest of the person you are sharing this with. It may be wisest to just share the brief highlight. Or if the interest is there, use the extended version, making it conversational by using the discussion questions.
After you share it, encourage the person you’ve shared it with to share it with another spiritually curious or hungry friend or family member within the next few days. In so doing, you are training every disciple to be a disciple who can make disciples from day one. This builds in reproduction and multiplication as the norm for every disciple.

A FOUR-MINUTE SUMMARY OF THE STORY DIAMOND

Everyone you meet lives within what has been called a dominant story. The dominant story has been told to us through our family systems and culture. It defines the way we view the world and ourselves. It’s time for us to question the dominant story we are currently living in. Is it a story worth giving your life to? How would you like your story to be different?

As disciples, we follow Jesus in His Story. Jesus’ Story is the better Story we can live in. His Story is the one Story where everyone can find purpose, transformation, belonging, and completion. The Story Jesus offers us is found in the Bible. The Story Diamond is a simple way to explain the Story Jesus is inviting us into. The Story Diamond has Four Facets.

FACET #1:
The Bible is a Story

The Bible at its core isn’t 66 books with hundreds of mini-stories, but one book with one Story. Jesus’ invitation is for us to get out of our seats and get into the Story. That is the most exciting invitation we’ll ever receive.

FACET #2:
The Story Has Four Movements: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration

The Story in one sentence is this: God made it, we broke it, Jesus fixes it and we get to join Him in this project. The Story reveals to us WHAT GOD HAS DONE, WHAT GOD IS DOING, and WHAT GOD WILL DO. All of these culminate to reveal something of utmost important: WHO GOD IS.

FACET #3:
Jesus is the Center of the Story

You’ll notice the cross in the middle of the Story Diamond. That cross reminds us that Jesus is the center of the Story because Jesus reveals to us who God is. Every smaller story within the Bible points to him. Jesus is the highest, most definitive revelation of God to humanity. The full meaning of God’s Story and our story is only revealed in Jesus. Jesus Christ – his life, death, resurrection and return is the interpretive key to understanding the Story and our stories.

FACET #4:
We are Invited to Let the Story Shape Us

Again, Jesus’ invitation is for us to get out of our seats and get into The Story. Just like the diamond is the most precious of all gems, the Story (diamond) is the most precious of all books because it is “breathed out by God” (2 Tim. 3:16). How is it that we can let the Story shape us? We read the Story in a way that is Spirit-Led, Historically-Grounded, Jesus-Centered, Communally-Enhanced, and Personally-Applied.

Spirit-Led:
To understand the Story, we must have our eyes opened by the Holy Spirit.

Historically-Grounded:
We must learn to read the Story in a way that is grounded in its literary context and historical context.

Jesus-Centered:
The person and work of Jesus is what unites and interprets the entire Story.

Communally-Enhanced:
We can go deeper together by reading the Story in community.

Personally-Applied:
The Story isn’t here just as information, but for our transformation.

Start with one of the Gospels. Read a chapter every day. Meet with others who are reading the Story. Ask these questions as you read together:

What does the passage say? (Scripture)
What is the Spirit showing me about Jesus and about myself? (Oberservation)
What am I going to do about? (Application)
How can we pray and support you in this next step? (Prayer)
Who is someone you could share this with this week?

EXTENDED VERSION OF THE STORY DIAMOND

INTRODUCTION MOVE #1:
Everyone has a Dominant Story

Everyone you meet lives within what has been called a dominant story. “The dominant story is the most prominent, compelling and controlling informant for how people perceive God, others and the world. Some call this a world-view because it is the lens through which they view the world.”

One common dominant story in America goes like this—“I want to get into my dream school, so I can get my dream job; Then, I will marry my dream spouse and we will buy our dream house. We’ll have our dream kids and go on dream vacations. One day, I will fill up my dream 401k, so eventually I can live in my dream retirement.“ If that is my dominant story, that story will impact how I perceive God, others, and the world. Often in this story, for example, God becomes the one who is there to help me accomplish my dream. I fit God into the story of my dream.

What are some of the words and phrases that describe some of the dominant stories people live in our culture? Explain. (Pleasure, Romance, The American Dream, Power, etc.)

What is the dominant story you live within? Most of us live within a story that’s been told to us through our family systems and culture.

Our dominant story includes elements like:

Our family history: What is the story of your family over the last few generations?
Our shaping culture: What the primary ethnic and geographic culture that has shaped you?
Our hopes: What are your greatest hopes for your future? Your family’s future?
Our hurts: What are the hurts, habits, and hang-ups that burden you?

It’s time for us to question the dominant story we are currently living in. Is it a story worth giving your life to? How would you like your story to be different? How can our story change in a way that increases meaning?

INTRODUCTION MOVE #2:
Jesus has a Better Story for Us to Live In

As disciples, we decide to follow Jesus in His Story. Jesus’ Story is the Better Story we can live in. His Story is the one Story where everyone can find purpose, transformation, belonging, and completion. The Story Jesus offers us is found in the Bible. The Bible can be an intimidating and confusing book. Some people read the Bible and it ends up making them more judgmental and arrogant. Some people read the Bible and it has little impact, just another book. Some people read the Bible and it ends up transforming them into more loving, wise, and centered people.

How do we engage the Scriptures in the same way Jesus did? How do we engage the Scriptures in a way that brings us into positive transformation? This is where the Story Diamond comes in. The Story Diamond is a simple way to explain the Story Jesus is inviting us into. (Draw the story diamond and write the four facets below or next to the diamond).

STORY DIAMOND: THE FOUR FACETS

FACET #1:
The Bible is a Story

In essence, the Bible at its core isn’t 66 books with hundreds of mini-stories, but one book with one Story. We’ll call that sweeping Biblical Narrative “The Story.” Many have come to understand the Bible as a series of short stories with a moral lesson attached. When we read the Bible that way, we can turn the Bible into a self-help book full of timeless principles that we plug in through merely human effort. That’s why many people read the Bible and become judgmental and arrogant, “I know the rules and I’m better at applying them other people.” The Story Diamond calls us out of this myopic, modernistic, reductive approach into a narrative way of reading that gives us a new dominant story to live out of.

Jesus’ invitation is for us to get out of our seats and get into the Story. That is the most exciting invitation we’ll ever receive.

The Story Diamond will sweep us into the breath-taking scope of the entire Story of the Scripture. This broader, wide-eyed approach will place the smaller stories within their proper meaning inside the larger Story. Being a disciple of Jesus involves immersing yourself in God’s Story, embracing that Story with the entirety of your life and then moving that story forward in history.

“In the text of the Bible we have not only the drama of God’s interaction with the world in and through Jesus (in the past) but also God’s address to future actors as they seek to play a role in the unfolding drama in the world.” The ultimate meaning of our stories can only be discovered and activated when we first understand The Story.

FACET #2:
The Story Has Four Movements

The Story has four movements: CREATION, FALL, REDEMPTION, AND RESTORATION. The Story in one sentence is this: God made it, we broke it, Jesus fixes it and we get to join Him in this project.

CREATION (Genesis 1-2)

God created us and made this world as His temple. He placed humanity here as His image-bearers and representatives, to serve as co-creators, priests, and kings. Creation was the overflow of the love, joy, generosity, and community between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One Hebrew word sums up the original intent of creation: shalom. Shalom means, peace, but it’s far more than a cease-fire. The entire earth was a place of universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight . The story begins with peace between God and us, peace with each other, peace with creation, and even peace within ourselves. Everything was as it ought to be.

FALL (Genesis 3)

Humanity rebelled, shalom was broken, which brought decay and death. Disharmony and separation cracked our relationships with God, Creation, each other, and even ourselves.

REDEMPTION

Redemption Prepared: Covenant Community
(Genesis 4-Malachi 4)

God begins his plan of redemption by creating a redemptive covenant community. Through Abraham, God creates a nation of people, who are invited to join Him in blessing and redeeming all nations and all things. However, the people of Israel find they can never keep the covenant and continually lose their way. The prophets proclaim that God will send a Messiah to rescue Israel. Furthermore, they describe a future world where shalom (peace and universal flourishing) is restored between God, humanity, and all of creation.

Redemption Provided: Christ (Matthew-John and various NT epistolary passages explicating the work of Christ)

God comes to earth In Jesus, the Messiah. He is fully God and fully man. Despite being tempted in every way as we are, Jesus lives without sin, fulfilling the covenant Israel or we could never keep. He preached the “good news of the Kingdom” and demonstrated the beauty and goodness of it with His life and miracles. Through His death and resurrection, Jesus confers that covenant faithfulness to us as a gift. Now all are invited to join in Covenant and the Kingdom, not based on their merits, but by Grace. Amazing grace is the only way to enter and live the Story. God became like us so that we could become like Him. In Jesus, God is for us, with us, one of us, and in us.

RESTORATION

Restoration Proclaimed: Church (Acts – Revelation 19)

Before Jesus, Israel was designed to be this new community God would use to bless the world. Before His Ascension, Jesus created a new community called the Church, for this purpose. All are invited! The church exists for the universal mission of making disciples in all nations and manifesting the Kingdom in all of the earth. The Bible makes this audacious claim that Jesus is now physically present on earth through this new community – through His body - through the Church. We are the hands and feet of Christ.

Restoration Perfected: New Heaven and New Earth (Revelation 20-22)

We wait for the return of Christ. The full restoration of the world will only be completed at the return of Jesus. At the second coming, evil will be judged and decisively defeated. Heaven and Earth will collide and co-mingle completely. The world will finally be as it was intended in Creation, a place of universal flourishing and universal shalom. The Bible describes this ultimate reality as the New Heaven and the New Earth. Until then, we join God in bringing that future into the present by announcing and demonstrating the Kingdom in our lives, our families, our neighborhoods, communities, and the world.

The Story reveals to us WHAT GOD HAS DONE, WHAT GOD IS DOING, and WHAT GOD WILL DO. How will we know what God wants to do in our life today? By understanding what God has done, is doing, and what God will do. Ultimately, all of that is summed up in the person of Jesus: His life, death, resurrection, and return. All of this reveals something of utmost important: Who God is.

FACET #3:
Jesus is the Center of the Story

You’ll notice the cross in the middle of the Story Diamond. That cross reminds us that Jesus is the center of the Story because Jesus reveals to us who God is. Every smaller story within the Bible points to him. All of Creation, God’s covenant with Abraham, the story of Israel, the cries of the Psalms, the wisdom of Proverbs, the words of the Prophets, and the movement called the Church all find their origin and fulfillment in Jesus.

Jesus is the highest, most definitive revelation of God to humanity. The full meaning of God’s Story and our story is only revealed in Jesus.

In the past, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways. But in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son…. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being. Hebrews 1:1-3

Jesus is the radiance of God’s glory, which means when God shines he looks like Jesus. He is the exact representation of God’s very essence which means he is what God is like all the way down to the core.

Jesus is the absolute essential, full, unqualified revelation of God. He is not one revelation among others. Jesus sums up and completes all others.

Jesus holds the entire Story together. The whole Story is about Jesus Christ—who He is and what He came to do, what He is currently doing to redeem humanity, and what He is yet do, the final restoration of all things. The Old Testament anticipates Jesus and the New Testament reveals Jesus. Jesus Christ is the interpretive key to understanding the Story and our story.

FACET #4:
We are Invited to Let the Story Shape Us

Again, Jesus’ invitation is for us to get out of our seats and get into The Story. How is it that we can let the Story shape us? We read the Story in a way that is Spirit-Led, Historically-Grounded, Communally-Enhanced, and Personally-Applied.

Spirit-Led

The Bible is a book written in many ways like any other, and can therefore be understood by anyone who is able to read. Yet the Bible is also unique because it is inspired by God. Just like the diamond is the most precious of all gems, the Story (diamond) is the most precious of all books because it is “breathed out by God” (2 Tim. 3:16). Its writers “spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:21). To understand the Story, we must have our eyes opened by the Holy Spirit. Before you read the Bible, ask the Spirit of God to bring illumination and understanding.

Historically-Grounded

We must learn to read the Story in a way that is grounded in its literary context and historical context. Literary context simple means remembering that the Bible consists of many types of literary genres: Narrative, history, poetry, prophecy, apocalyptic, and so on. Just as we would read a historical novel in a different way than we would fiction, so it is with the Bible. We must read with a sensitivity to what kind of writing it is. Sensitivity to literary context also includes reading every text in the flow of the book as a whole Story as it points toward Jesus. Second, we must be aware of historical context. The fact that various sections of the Bible were written during certain periods in history in and around the land of Palestine means that a growing knowledge of events in those periods in history, and of the land of Palestine, will enrich our understanding of the Bible. Due to the historical distance between us and the authors of the Bible, readers of the Bible today will do well to sit under sound preaching and to consult various scholarly resources that help them in their personal study, such as commentaries and Bible dictionaries.

Jesus-Centered

Jesus rebuked the Pharisees, devoted students of Scripture, for their failure to see him throughout the Story: “You search the Scriptures,” Jesus said, “because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me” (John 5:39). Later, when Jesus was on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection, he began with Moses and all the Prophets and interpreted to two bewildered and depressed disciples everything that was said about him in the Old Testament (Luke 24:27). He reminded all the disciples later that night that “everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms” (that is, the whole Old Testament) would be fulfilled (Luke 24:44).

As you read the Story from Genesis to Revelation, you will notice that there is a coherent story: creation, the fall, redemption, and restoration. These are not equal themes in the way the Bible treats them. Most of the Story is given to unfolding the third of these, the great drama of redemption through Jesus Christ. But this redemption is set against the backdrop of creation and the fall, and this redemption will find its final completion in restoration and final judgment, when the original creation is restored to what it was originally intended to be. The Old Testament develops this story line, preparing for Jesus, and the New Testament fulfills this story line, portraying Jesus. The person and work of Jesus is what unites and interprets the entire Story. As we read both Old and New Testaments through the lens of redemption in Jesus Christ crucified, we will understand the whole Story the way God wants us to understand it.

Communally-Enhanced

It’s important to read the Story alone, but we can go deeper together by reading the Story in community. Community provides the wisdom, understanding, support, encouragement, and accountability we need to live out the Story.

Personally-Applied

Unlike other books, which we read and “finish,” followers of Jesus never truly “finish” reading the Story. Just as we must eat physical food each day if we are to be physically healthy, so we must eat spiritual food each day if we are to be spiritually healthy. The Story isn’t here just as information, but for our transformation. Start with one of the Gospels. Read a chapter every day. Meet with others who are reading the Story. Ask these questions as you read, write down what you’re learning and discuss these when you meet: