The Bible Is One Story — Here’s Why Nobody Told You

Every day of your life, you are being shaped. Not by politicians, not by culture, not by circumstances, but by a story. Stories rule the world. But only one story defines all other stories.

DL Moody, that 19th century American evangelist toward the end of his life, he one time said this, "Our greatest fear should not be a failure, but of succeeding at something that doesn't really matter." Let that sit for just a moment with you. Because you and I know exactly, I think, what he's describing. It's that underlying sense, right? That subtle ache that's underneath all the busyiness of our lives.

We all know that feeling that our lives are overflowing, but somehow they don't really seem to be full of the things that actually really matter. We push, we grind, we check every single box. Our calendars can be packed, but still there's that nagging small voice, right? And it whispers into our ears.

Is this all that there is? Like we're drifting through a story that we can't quite see, we can't quite wrap our minds around. You know, when Moody said those words, he wasn't offering a pep talk and he wasn't talking about our drive or our ambitions. Moody was trying to lift up our eyes to a higher reality.

He was shining a light on the danger that we all face, the danger of moving through this life, accomplishing a thousand things, but then realizing too late that none of it had any eternal value. We are all in danger. Right? I am in real danger of living my life in such a way where I will maximize the temporary but I'll minimize the eternal.

Moody understood this. He knew that our greatest fear shouldn't be failure. No, our greatest fear should actually be success. Success in the things that are irrelevant to eternity.

Things that the world listen they will applaud you for. And that brings us to something much deeper. Something beneath all the noise that's in our lives every single day. Every one of us is living inside of a story right now.

That part's not up for debate. But the real question is this. Are you awake to the story that you were born into? You know, even the closest followers of Jesus, the ones that knew him personally and the ones that loved him the most, even they struggled to see the story that they were living in.

There's this crazy moment in scripture, right? And it captures this scenario so perfectly. You can read about it in Luke 24. There's these two disciples.

They're walking down a dusty road out of Jerusalem. Their hearts are absolutely crushed. They're discouraged and they're trying to make sense of everything that just happened back in Jerusalem, the crucifixion. There's these reports now of an empty tomb, rumors that women might have actually seen Jesus alive.

And as they're talking with each other about all these things down the road, the risen Jesus himself comes up beside them, starts walking with them, and he just listens. He hears their confusion. He hears their questions and he just lets them talk. But these two men, they can't recognize Jesus.

And a better way to say this might be that they can't understand their own moment. They couldn't see the story that they were living in right then. It's totally wild when you think about it, right? They had the facts.

They knew the scriptures. They had spent years with Jesus himself, but none of it connected. That is not yet. So what does Jesus do?

Well, he doesn't pat him on the back. That's for sure. He doesn't even go, "Hey guys, it's me, right? I'm here.

It's something we might actually do." Instead, he confronts their blindness. He looks them right in the eyes and he says, "You foolish ones." Slow to believe everything that God has revealed. In that moment, those words must have cut deep, but they weren't meant to crush them. They were meant to actually wake them up.

But then, even after that moment, Jesus does something even more striking, at least to me. He takes them all the way back to the beginning to Genesis and he walks them through the entire storyline of the Bible. He shows them that every promise, every shadow, every symbol, it was all pointing to him. In other words, Jesus gave them the story.

The story they had forgotten. The story that made sense of everything they were going through. This was the story they had always been part of. They just couldn't see it.

But once their eyes were opened, once they woke up to the story that they were born into, absolutely everything changed. And that moment on the road in Luke 24, it's always stayed with me because in a lot of ways, it mirrors my own experience. I've now worked as a professional filmmaker for 15 years. This is how God chose to wire my brain.

And filmmakers, they see arcs. They notice story patterns. They pay close attention to how meaning builds from scene to scene. And over the years, I've realized something about the Bible.

Most Christians, listen, they don't struggle because their faith is weak. They struggle because they've never seen the story. And when I finally began to understand what Jesus was doing on that road, when I saw how God tells his story through covenants, how he builds his plot across time, it changed everything for me. In other words, I woke up to the story.

That hit me with enormous clarity. We are living inside the plot God has been unfolding. We're characters in his story. And the problem isn't that the story is unclear.

No, it's that no one ever taught us how to see it. And I want to help you see what I saw. The truth is you and I, we're no different than those two disciples, are we? I mean, we might know the events.

We might have some, you know, verses memorized. We might be tracking with these moments in our lives, but without the story, without this larger narrative that holds everything together, all of it feels disconnected. This is why waking up to the entire story of the Bible is so crucial. This is not some sort of academic exercise or a theological hobby.

The Bible is not a random collection of moral teachings. God is telling one story, one author unfolding one plot throughout all of human history. And that one story that God is telling, it has you in it. Listen, if we as Christians are going to stand firm in our world that's filled with competing stories and you've lived this, then we have to wake up to God's meta narrative.

I want to help you see and understand and wake up to God's entire story. So, I want to leave you with this question and please think about it. If Jesus himself were to walk beside you on the road today, would you recognize him? What would he find?

Would you find confusion? Maybe fears that you hide or those questions that you and I never really speak out loud. We weren't born into chaos. Your life, listen, is not random.

You were born into a story, a real story, a sovereign story. This is why your story revealed exists. This is the journey that I'd like to begin with you and show you that the story of scripture is the story that shapes your entire life.