TO TELL THE GREAT STORY
“I think he works the gospel in every week,” I said, sitting in community group in a living room in Alexandria’s Del Ray neighborhood. It had taken me an entire year almost to realize it; I was of course referring to the message we were discussing from Sunday evening.
Now, you hear words like gospel and church and message and sermon and pastor and Sunday and you either start to check out or you want to run with all you’ve got for the mountains and never look back for the adventures that lie ahead there are more compelling.
“On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken.”
You wanted to run for the mountains, eh? To go on a grand adventure and never look back? What if when you got there you met God and he had been calling out to you to come find him and there was a feast with good wine and whatever it was about your life you were feeling guilty about would be taken away, and instead of closing your days in death you could explore those mountains forever and ever?
Somehow in our minds the gospel and church-going can become some mind-numbing, worthless idea that we’d quite rather live without. Can become—it doesn’t have to be this way. I should know; I’ve gone to church my entire life and it can be excruciatingly boring, a place of judgment that leaves you wanting to run for the mountains.
Good.
That’s good because there’s more coming, and if you’ve given up desiring you quite naturally may never find it. The thing is, after hearing the gospel truly, clearly, consistently every week for a year, things inside started shifting, changing; dead places began growing again.
When you begin to truly hear the gospel spoken, and you begin to grasp the full storyline of redemption that points to Jesus, suddenly it makes sense that we absolutely must connect it to all of life, and if we’re going to speak a story of truth and beauty into American politics and culture we must certainly understand and be able to tell the Great Story. A story of truth and beauty, after all, cannot be relative or else we have not redefined liberty. We might as well launch a nonprofit to say that liberty is whatever you want it to mean, but then we’re stuck with the same problems Abraham Lincoln faced in 1864.
But what if we are set free, out of the ashes, to tell the Great Story? The Great Story then, becomes the heartbeat, the driving impulse behind everything we do. By its nature we must hear it often, because we live life so disconnected from it – especially in our political culture. It takes faith, to be sure – but what if we believed the resurrection as historical fact? Michael Jordan played basketball, Columbus sailed to the New World, and Jesus rose from the dead, told us to tell the whole world about it because that’s incredible, and that we would be hated for it because how contrary it is to our daily perception of reality, but take heart—on this mountain, a feast of incredibly good food is coming, the King will return, and God himself will live with us there forever.
And so by nature of our vision of healing through freedom, we are telling the Great Story over and over, living it out wherever we can.
If we truly begin to live it out more deeply, it would change everything; but first we lay the foundation; we re-tune our heartbeat. Bringing deep restoration to the U.S. Capitol won’t come easy, and so the foundation must go deep. And the calling is to go into the entire world. Our work - on some level - is commissioned by God to be global in scale.
We will cross paths with many who do not believe, and they will be invited into the story we are writing, the projects, and the great feast that’s coming. The gospel will be the core of what we do, the reason this nonprofit exists.
From that foundation, from the vision of healing through freedom, we can engage with any who come in, who see how broken our political culture is and desperately want something better. We can offer them hope that will never let them down, a new heartbeat, a new song, an anthem. LIBERATUS—we are set free!
*Note: This post has been edited from its original content to reflect the refined and current LIBERATUS vision of healing through freedom.