Andy Stanley's new book, The Grace of God, gives an outstanding summation of God's Grand Narrative. When we look at the Bible as one big story, we find a lot of themes, but one theme is definitive. That is grace, but grace is one of those things that people argue about and extremely conservative Christians emphasize that Grace should not be cheap while more progressive believers accentuate the freedom that is found in Christ. The beautiful thing about the narrative of the Bible is that it isn't conservative or liberal, but all about transfoming people's lives with the message that they are worth a lot and part of a bigger story that isn't all about them or even just one group of people.

Andy's emphasis on this narrative incredibly brings out the best of many of his sermons. In fact, it is a book with a ghost writer because he dictated some of his best expositions of scripture into a recording and then the writer wrote the book. As a member of one of churches that is in the North Point Ministries cluster, I have heard a lot of what Andy says in this book from Andy. But the thing about it is, it is really just the best of everything I studied in two phenomonal courses that I took at Columbia International University.

At Columbia, I took The Progress of Redemption, and Bible for Teachers. In both, the Biblical Narrative with the stories of the Bible standing on their own two feet was central. And grace poured from those stories. What Andy said, made complete sense, and it was enlightening as well as exciting to see that the story we read in the Bible has us as characters in it. We are recipients of God's grace, and we have the ability to be released by God to love and serve others in amazing ways.