Best Story Ever.

Here is the understanding of the Jesus story in a nutshell:

God is real.

God is not a white man sitting on a cloud, but is the very source of life and love and beauty in the universe. God is love. (1 John 4)

Love cannot be confined, so love creates. (Genesis 1)

Human beings are meant to be co-creating, image bearing, creation tending embodiments of God in the world. (Genesis 1:27-29)

We screw it up. (Genesis 3-present day)

Two thousand years ago, a man named Jesus tells people that God is not done with human beings, not finished with Creation. He said it like this, "The Kingdom of God is at hand." He tells them that God's future world is not like this one. There won't be any more war or poverty or racism in that world. No more sin and selfishness to mar God's good world and destroy relationships. No more power-hungry human rulers like Caesar to rule over them, but God alone. No more death, disease or famine.

So they kill him.

But He doesn't stay dead. He rises from the dead like he said he would, and the world is changed forever.

One of Jesus' best friends put it this way, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God... The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us."

That force of life in the universe..that power that holds molecules together and that causes plants to shoot up out of the ground...whatever it is that keeps the trilliions of cells in our bodies working together to keep us breathing... God. God puts on human skin and tells us that it's not over yet. Creation is not done. Someday all things will be restored (Matthew 19:28, Revelations 21, Romans 8, Ephesians 1:10). We believe that in Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, God has dealt sin and death the decisive "death-blow", and is now beginning is grand project of restoration. This is "good news", it is "gospel".

Jesus is God's plan for the healing of creation, and when we live our lives "in Christ", we become a part of the "new creation" that God wants to bring into the world (2 Corinthians 5:17).