Pub Night Dallas

Our next teaching series is “the Story of God,” where we’ll spend 5 weeks taking an expansive look at the entire Bible. 

I (Petey) have been teaching through a series on Sundays at HPPC called “How to Read the Bible” and this past week we talked about the 5 “acts” or parts of the Bible. Over the next 5 weeks at Pub Night, I want to spend time looking at each of those 5 parts. 

Here’s a simple outline of what’s to come:

Week 1: Created & Creating Images of God // The Bible begins with God creating humans, made in his image, to live wholly satisfied lives—content with their God & Creator, their selves, other humans, and the creation around them. 

Week 2: Fractured Images of God // Though we were created to live in full content & trust with God, humans instead chose to mis-trust God and trust in themselves. We took the whole image of God in us and fractured it, causing us to feel what’s known as “the effects of the fall.” We now feel uncomfortable in our own skin, unsure of God and if we can trust him, and in broken, competitive relationships with other humans and the world around us.

Week 3: Covenant Community // In a peculiar act, God chooses a barren man & woman to conceive children and be the start of a new people group who God gives the promise & blessing of leading humanity towards restoration and healing—from our fracture-images-of-God to whole-images-of-God. The Old Testament is the story of Israel, a nation God calls and creates from nothing to push humanity to imagine a better way of life, a way of life we were created for.

Week 4: The Perfect Image of Redemption // The Gospels reveal for us an amazing move on the part of God—though Israel fails and falls short, God ultimately keeps his promise and fulfills the deepest longings and hopes of the story of Israel: Jesus becomes the person and the community that solves the broken-images-of-God problem and gives humanity hope. He dies on behalf of our brokenness and pulls us into resurrection life that we may now walk in restored relationships with God, self, other humans and Creation.

Week 5: The Image Restored in All Things // The end of Scripture, in Revelation 21-22, promises a future that re-orients our present. By aligning ourselves with a vision of life that believes death is conquered by life (and love) and brokenness has no victory, we then start to see the possibilities of the inbreaking of that life all around us.