Quote to Ponder: The Story of Jesus

“If we want to get the full impact of the story of Jesus and the way of Jesus, there is no substitute for taking a long, slow pilgrimage through the pages of Genesis to Malachi, getting that river of narrative flowing through your bloodstream, observing the enormous attention given to place and person, so that this story is rooted in the immediate and local, in named people in the neighborhood, among the animals and angels alive in those forests and deserts…We cannot understand the way of Jesus by means of summary accounts of those two thousand years of history and belief and worship that preceded Jesus. If a summary could provide adequate preparation, the Holy Spirit would surely have supplied it and saved us the trouble of making ourselves at home in that narrative country, learning the language of faith, finding our way around the kingdom of God.” Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way, 39