The Storytelling God [eBook]

Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Parables

Throw away your flannelgraphs…

The prodigal son. The good Samaritan. The treasure hidden in a field. Most of us have heard Jesus’s parables before. Yet if these stories strike us as merely sweet, heartwarming, or sentimental, we can be sure we’ve misread them. In The Storytelling God, pastor Jared Wilson helps us to see how Jesus’s parables reveal profound spiritual truths about God, humanity, the world, and the future.

Discarding the notion that Christ’s parables are nothing more than moralistic fables, this book highlights how each one is designed to drive us to Jesus in awe, need, faith, and worship.

Jared C. Wilson is the pastor of Middletown Springs Community Church in Middletown Springs, Vermont. He has written a number of popular books including The Pastor’s Justification, Your Jesus Is Too Safe, Gospel Wakefulness, and Gospel Deeps, as well as the curriculum Abide. Wilson blogs daily at “Gospel Driven Church,” hosted by the Gospel Coalition.

“Growing up in church and Christian schools, I was taught that Jesus’s parables were basically about how we should live. To be sure, many of the parables do show us God’s standard for our lives, but they also reveal how we have failed to live up to that standard, and how God in his infinite mercy has done for us what we could never do for ourselves. My friend Jared Wilson shows how Jesus used parables to illustrate the upside-down and counterintuitive ways of God compared to our ways. We see how the parables are not a witness to the best people making it up to God, but rather a witness to God making it down to the worst people—meeting our rebellion with his rescue, our sin with his salvation, our guilt with his grace, our badness with his goodness. Thanks for the reminder, Jared. I keep forgetting that this whole thing is about Jesus, not me.”
—Tullian Tchividjian, Founder, LIBERATE; author, One-Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World 

“Jared Wilson’s new book is a punch in the gut. Gone are the tame, bedtime-story versions of the parables we’ve been told in the past. Instead, Wilson invites us to see them afresh with all of their explosive, imaginative power.”
—Mike Cosper, Pastor of Worship and Arts, Sojourn Community Church, Louisville, Kentucky

“In showing us the parables of Jesus for what they are (and are not), Jared Wilson invites us into a deeper understanding of their author and the kingdom he came to establish. The Storytelling God teaches us to read and reflect upon the parables with great care, and rightly so. The parables, and this book, point the way to life abundant.”
—Scott McClellan, Communications Pastor, Irving Bible Church, Irving, Texas; author, Tell Me a Story: Finding God (and Ourselves) through Narrative

“My own bookshelf has precious few commentaries on the parables and this will definitely fit nicely into that gap. In fact, this book is actually two books for the price of one. Part devotional commentary and also doubling as a solid gospel tract. This book serves the gospel straight up on a plate. His chapter commenting on the gospel and the poor is worth the price of the book alone. Clear, straightforward, biblical, gospel-centered writing. Definitely recommended reading.”
—Mez McConnell, Senior Pastor, Niddrie Community Church, Edinburgh; Director, 20schemes

“With a characteristic combination of wit and wisdom—humor and sobriety—Wilson grabs your attention, fixes it upon Christ, and keeps it there for the duration of the book. Readers in search of a pastoral introduction to biblical parables that is rich with real-life applicability can gladly make room for this volume on their bookshelf.”
—Stephen T. Um, Senior Minister, Citylife Presbyterian Church, Boston, Massachusetts; author, Why Cities Matter