I want to share something that will relate to our princess conversation on Sunday morning. These words are from a sermon from Pastor Alan and I heard them this summer. These are portions of a sermon from The Inheritance series and the real point is that bad things happen so that we will see and embrace the good things. I transposed this myself so please forgive any mistakes. These words have stayed with me and maybe I have not forgotten them so that I can share them now......
"I Have Good News, Bad News"
Part 6--The Inheritance
Alan Wright
July 13, 2008
"If I came to tell you a story today and I said we are just going to read a story...and I said once upon a time, there was a princess named Cinderella and Cinderella lived with a happy prince in a happy palace and she lived happily all the time and she lived happily ever after. Nothing ever went wrong so the coming chapters would be about how she redecorated the palace and how she would sometimes welcome people for sumptuous dinner parties and the next party was as good or better than the one previous to it... and how she and her prince liked to dance together and all they did was enjoy each other and they never had an argument and they never had sickness and they never had a falling out. Everyone was happy and they stayed happy and they were happy forever after.The irony of this is that while on the one hand that is the kind of story I would like to have of my own life, it is not the kind of story that you would want to read. It is kind of boring. No one is going to make a movie like that. If you are going to have something of interest, you have to have something in there....Cinderella was married to the prince and it turned out that the prince was no good and she was trapped in her room and it took a rescue from a knight to come deliver her from danger or maybe the Prince and Princess had to fight valiantly against invaders that had come in storming the palace and you are not sure that they are going to make it...this is the stuff we put into our stories...stories have to do with the bad and then the good news...the good news makes sense when it comes out of it...
...if you were reading the story from the outside what you would see was that it wasn't Cinderella married to a prince and she lived happily ever after...it started with Cinderella scrubbing the floors in her tattered clothes being mocked by her stepsisters and mistreated by the stepmother and then came a moment of grace....and what makes this story a story of good news is that she is plucked up out of that place of bondage and she is wed to a princeand had it not been that it was just almost a moment too late and that the pumpkin made carriage was expiring so you had to dash off so that you left in haste and you left a slipper...you'd have never met the prince...
The reason that we come up with fairy tales like that is because throughout the history of the world people have been looking for a way to tell the story of the gospel whether they know it or not...because it does make sense that though life has much evil in it and though bad things happen, the Glory of the Gospel is that the goodness of God has shown forth in the midst of a dark world.
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