The Minor Prophets | The Book of the Twelve & The Shape of Your Story

Friends, this morning our teaching scripture is 3 verses

from three different books. Come, let us return to the Lord.

Hosea 6. Return to me with all your

heart, Joel Chapter 2. Return to me, says the Lord of

Joel 2 · chapter mention

hosts, and I will return to you from Zechariah.

This is the word of the Lord. OK, thanks for being here,

friends. Welcome to the new year.

Welcome to a new season of of your life.

I don't know if that's how it feels for you at the beginning

of the year, but that's that's kind of how it feels for me.

I'm super grateful to be here with Parker and the rest of our

teams. You know, obviously it goes

without saying that at the turn of a year, there's a lot of

reflection that goes on, a lot of sort of assessment of the

past year, a little bit of a looking ahead to the next year.

And if you were with us last week, we heard from three people

who have leaned their life towards this community and the

invitations that God is having for them over the past year,

June and and Quran and Joel, thank you.

I'm used to seeing Joel in the back corner, but he's not there.

They did a phenomenal job of just sharing with this community

just ways in which God has been inviting them to respond.

It was, it was very meaningful and it just got me a little bit

reflective on my, I, my past year.

I've been thinking a little bit about where I find myself in my

own story at the end of 2025, at the beginning of the year of our

Lord 2026. And you know, like what's the

shape of my story? I don't know if you guys, you

guys get reflective at all at the end of the year.

It's a little different than just setting resolutions.

But I just noticed that like I'm slowly making my way to the age

of 50, which sounds incredible. I'm, I'm still 2 years away.

By the way, I'm in my 25th year of marriage.

I have a really a handful of really hard years behind me.

I have a lot of gratitude for the shape of my life.

I'm in a season where most of my kids are heading into their

adult years. And I've just been a little

reflective on the basic shape of my story.

Like this is the basic shape of my story right here in the

middle of my life. And, you know, this is the kind

of thing we do. We, we ask some questions, we

make some goals. Maybe some of you have chosen

some some words for the year. That's kind of a bit of a trend.

You know, words like, you know, eat pray, love.

Do you guys remember that eat pray love kind of word season?

Actually, that sounds like a great year.

I bet I could find a sign to put on my wall to just help me

remember that. That's a good agenda, but I'm

crossing over. We're crossing over from one

year to the next. And I've been reflecting on the

shape of my life in the season, and I've been sitting with this

idea, and I came across something that writer Kurt

Vonnegut used to talk about. Vonnegut was one of those odd

prophets of the 20th century, kind of sarcastic, a little bit

brilliant, a little bit heartbroken.

He actually would have fit really well in this community.

And he survived the firebombing of Dresden in World War 2.

And he spent most of his life and writing career trying to

make sense of a world that seemed kind of bent towards

absurdity. And he wrote novels to try to

find meaning. And anyway, Vonnegut gives this

lecture that you can find on the Internet by Googling it, it's

became kind of a popular lecture.

And he would begin to to kind of sketch out the shape of stories

on a chalkboard. And he basically said that the

stories that we see in the novels and the movies, they have

a particular emotional tenor and a typical emotional shape to

them. And he says that you can kind of

graph the the movement of a story with the horizontal axis

representing the timeline from the beginning to the end, and

the vertical axis representing the character's good fortune or

I'll fortune. And when you, when you hear

Vonnegut say it, you realize like, he's right.

There's like four or five basic kinds of stories that all of the

stories sort of move into. And he believes that the shapes

of stories are not random, but they reflect the rhythms of

human experience. The rises and the falls, the

losses and the gains, the good years and the hard ones, the

things that we wish did not happen and the things that we're

really grateful that have happened.

He says this next graph, he kind of graphs it out.

He says that this is a story where the character starts out

fine and falls in a hole and everything kind of turns out

fine in the end. It's like the man in the whole

story is what he calls it. And here's another story that he

talks about. He says this is a story where

something somebody is going through, like a bad season and

just goes from bad to worse. And like, people actually love

this story. They have to read about this

story. Or there's another story about a

little girl who's in a really bad shape and, you know, she

loses her mom and her dad remarries another woman.

And the other woman had two sisters.

And so now she has two stepdaughters and things are not

going very well, but she meets a fairy godmother who gives her a

dress and some shoes and a way to get to the ball and to meet

the boy. And at midnight, the clock

strikes and down, down, down, she goes into the hole until the

guy shows back up with slippers. And she lives happily ever

after. Like, this is the shape of that

story. And he believes that the shapes

of these stories were of literary structures were kind of

reflective of the of the shape of our own lives.

OK, why am I saying all of this? It's because the Scriptures are

just stories. And most of the stories of the

Scriptures are about different parts of the journey of one

particular people called the Hebrews, which was a people that

was originally made-up of 12 tribes, which then multiplied

and increased in population. And each of these tribes can

trace its origin back to a common family, the family of

Jacob, who was later named Israel, whose father was Isaac,

whose father was Abraham. And almost all of what we now

call the Old Testament is the story of this family who God

began to reveal himself to through a series of visions and

dreams and conversations that began with Abraham and then

continued on down in the line of his family.

Where God slowly reveals to this family, which had become a

people and a nation, what kind of God he was and how this God,

whose name was Yahweh, was different from all of the other

gods. This is the basic shape of the

Old Testament story. The other gods that people

worshipped were gods of war and violence.

And this God, who was said to be the God over all of the other

gods and the one responsible for all of creation, was not a God

of War. He was not a God of violence.

He was not a God that required you to sacrifice your babies on

an altar. This one God who revealed

himself to Abraham was a God pursuing peace and justice, and

he desired to reveal to this particular people, not just to

this one family, but to the whole world, that all of the

people have been created by God in a way where God has placed

inside of them a representation of his own self.

You and I were made to be like God.

That is how God has created you to be, and that the people have

always been meant to reflect back to each other what it is

that God is like. And so this family that becomes

this collection of tribes, which become a people who trace their

ancestry back to Father Abraham, are the recipients of this

ongoing slow relational outpouring of the Creator's love

for the humans and for all of the world.

Sounds like a pretty good story, right?

But over time, what happens is that the relationship has these

seasons where the relationship between the people and God

becomes strained. And so the story takes on the

shape of like the man and the whole story, everything is going

fine. And they dip down and they come

back up and they're constantly being reminded that they were

meant for a kind of relationship with their Creator that was

better than the one that they were living in.

And so while they're in the midst of their own story, they

tell another story to try to make sense of the plight that

they find themselves in. And they told a story inspired

by God that was meant to explain what it is that had gone wrong

in the whole situation. And the shape of the story that

they told to to explain sort of how it is that they've ended up

a bit of a mess over and over and over again.

The shape of the story they told was, was this, they said in the

beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and the

earth was formless and empty and darkness was hovering over the

surface of the earth and over the waters.

And so they start their story with this story of darkness and

chaos and emptiness. Darkness, chaos and emptiness.

And then the God that has been wooing this family into

relationship is also there at the beginning through the spirit

that is hovering over the darkness and the chaos and the

emptiness. And God said, let there be

light. And the origin story is off to

like a really good start and it looks something like this.

Everything is fine. We could just do this forever.

Light comes in the midst of darkness.

Order is spoken into chaos. The emptiness is filled with

life and beauty and abundance and vision and love and

tenderness and a sense of purpose and vocation.

And it's said that God walked with the humans in the cool of

the morning and everything is going great.

And then the serpent comes and the lies and the shame and the

nakedness turns into hiding, and the rightly ordered loves and

desires begin to get off track and the mutuality between God

and the humans is broken. Do you do you see the shape that

the story is beginning to to make right here?

This is the shape of the story that they tell.

We're over and over, this God of all creation comes to the family

and says, I made you. I love you and I'm coming after

you. I'm inviting you into this

project of restoration. And over time, this God gave

them some feedback and some input and he says, I want to try

to make you like me once again. And so I'm going to give you

some laws to try to follow, like simple things like don't lie to

each other. Don't covet the things that your

neighbor has. I'm, I'm going to give you

everything you need because I'm a God of abundance.

And so don't covet. And you can just trust me.

Don't commit adultery. Just be faithful to the one that

you have because this relationship is actually

indicative of the kind of faithful love that I have for

you. You know, don't, don't lie to

your neighbor. Don't bear false witness about

your neighbor. Relationships are built on

trust. All of these things God began to

say. And so God begins the

restoration project to restore and rightly size all of the

human relationships. And the stories multiply.

There's seasons of glory. There's seasons of heartache

where their God is near and leading them and guiding them

and providing for them. And then seasons where they

wonder if God is even real. And I happen to know that there

are some of you here that you have been in a season where you

are just like, I don't even know if any of this is real.

And I just want to let you know that the scriptures have

multiple instances where people are asking that question.

So you're in like, really good company.

So the general shape of their story becomes like this.

It's the one with the really curvy.

There you go, over and over and over again, ups and downs.

There are seasons where their shoulders are turned towards

God. There are seasons where their

shoulders are turned away from God.

And in these seasons where their shoulders are turned away from

God, there are a few people among them who have not

forgotten who got it. In fact, there are a few people

among them who have a really tight knit, close relationship

with God. And God begins to speak to these

particular people and ask these people to tell everyone else and

to remind everybody else of what they're supposed to be doing and

the kind of relationship that they're supposed to have.

And these people, the ones who have not forgotten about God,

they live their life in a way that tries to get the attention

of all of the other people. They tried to explain to the

others or remind all of the other people and all of the

leaders of the people that God was still around, that God was

waiting for their return, that God was desiring them to be

faithful to their mutual commitment to one another.

And these individuals, they told stories, they told particular

kinds of stories. They lived their story as a as a

witness to the faithfulness of God.

They embodied their life with a message that corresponded to

what God had wanted the people to pay attention to.

And these people became known as the prophets.

There it is, the prophets. This is all to say we are

beginning a new series. We are going to spend the next

12 weeks all the way up to Easter looking at a group of

prophets that the tradition has come to refer to as as the minor

prophets. And these minor prophets,

they're not minor because of their influence.

They're minor because they just didn't write very much.

So I don't know what that means. Maybe write more, I don't know.

But the minor prophets, the scope of their writing was

small, But in the Hebrew tradition, there were twelve of

these minor prophets that are interspersed throughout the

story of the Hebrew people. And as these stories were told

and written down, they were copied into one single scroll

called the Book of the 12. Did you guys know that?

I actually didn't know that until about 4 weeks ago when I

was looking into this. I was like, I and I've been

saying the scriptures for like 25 years.

So they were, they were copied on one single scroll called the

Book of the 12. And this book of the 12 Minor

Prophets has some sort of light editorial help which suggests

that there is some intentional unity and some sort of

theological coherence that formed it into a scroll.

They tried to make sense of the shape of the story that the

people of God were in. And what what we read about in

this book of the 12 is that they looked at their long history and

they noticed that it seems that there are sometimes in our

history as a people that we can see that over and over and over

again. We're kind of falling and

turning away from God and we start following the ways of the

world and we seek after other gods and we try to gain our own

security and, and follow our own ways.

And then what happens is that, well, what happens?

We fall in a whole things don't go well for us.

And then God sends a prophet, and that prophet generally does

three things they tell. They tell us the truth about

ourselves. They extend to us an invitation

from God, and they remind us of the promise that God has made to

us. Over and over again this

happens. The story within the story

changes, but the shape of the story, friends, is basically on

repeat. The prophets come and tell the

truth. They extend an invitation, and

they remind the people of the promises of God.

So they collected all these prophetic voices.

They put them on a scroll. And over the next 12 weeks,

heading into Easter, we're going to take a look at the book of

the 12/1 prophet each week. And we're going to try to wrap

our mind around the shape of the biblical narrative, the shape

that God is telling his people, because the shape of this story,

you might have noticed, tends to also be the shape of our story.

Do you guys have years where you're just like you felt like

you fell in a hole? Anybody have those kinds of

years? I happen to be coming out of

2025 was sort of a year coming out of like a three-year hole

for me, like a real wilderness season for me, struggled in all

kinds of ways and grateful for friendships and for my marriage

and for my kids and for this community and for other

communities. But it just is the shape of our

story that our story ebbs and flows.

And sometimes that is not necessarily related to like the

sense in which you're following God.

We live in a really weird world and sometimes there are just

holes that like, through no fault of our own, we kind of

fall into. Does that make sense?

Other times, it's not that way. Other times it actually is

because of the kinds of choices that we're making or because of

the things inside of us that are unhealed or, or, or the

relationships that we refuse to sort of like work out.

So we're going to try to pay attention to the way that the

biblical story is shaped and try to pay attention to how that

might inform us for the shape of our own story.

When I was about 9 or 10, I was really into BMX bikes.

Anybody remember the BMX bike phase of the 1980s?

Like my neighborhood was the height of the flurry of

activity. Of BMX bikes and we could

literally ride our bikes to this BMX park and we would sneak in

right at dusk, which was not too dark where we would like lose

our way on the BMX track, but dark enough that people couldn't

quite see us. And so all of that BMX energy

got transported back into my neighborhood and and I lived on

a cul-de-sac. So we would build all of these

ramps and the traffic was kind of low and we sort of knew all

of the little curbs that you could kind of hop over and the

kind of places that definitely were not up to code by any

stretch of the imagination. But it worked for us on our

bicycles. And there was this one evening

where some friends of, of mine put up a couple of ramps like

this and they were actually pretty close together so that

you could go down the sidewalk and you can jump over 1 ramp and

then kind of slide down the other side of the ramp.

And I'd probably done 20 or 30 turns on this ramp.

And then I got called in for dinner and it was tacos.

And you're like, how does he know what he had for dinner in

1987? Oh, hold on, we're going to get

there. So it was dinner and where my

story really progresses. I got on my bike after dinner,

kind of woofed down those tacos and I was at the top of my

driveway and I barreled down the sidewalk at the top speed headed

for that same set of home built ramps.

But what I didn't know is while I was at dinner, some of the

older boys have come around, you know, and they they're the boys

that had like titanium BMX bikes, like a third of the

weight of my bike. And, you know, I'm, I'm riding

this like clunky steel Dukes of Hazzard sort of banana seat

looking thing. And you guys remember the Dukes

of Hazzard. OK, What a show, man.

OK, actually, could that show even be made today?

I don't think it could, no. So I'm barreling down the

sidewalk, and what the older boys had done is they had moved

the ramps quite a bit apart because they could jump farther,

and they were bigger and stronger and older, and they

were riding real BMX bikes made of titanium.

And I didn't know any of that. And what also happened is I

didn't really pay much attention to the dozen or so neighborhood

kids that were lining the sidewalk yelling at me, trying

to tell me that the thing that I was dead set on doing was not

going to end well for me. And so I speed towards the

ramps, and the prophets were shouting at me.

They were telling me to stop, to turn back, to slow down.

And yet I was convinced that whatever warning they were

trying to give me probably didn't really apply to me.

And over the ramp I went, with the front tire of my bicycle

hitting the front edge of the second ramp, sending me over the

handlebars, chin first, into the sidewalk.

This turned out to be the my greatest childhood injury.

Skin ripped off to my bone, 11 stitches, emergency room and

somewhere in the middle, throne of tacos.

That's how it happens. So I want you to imagine that

the story I've just told you, it's, it's a little easier story

to remember than like Obadiah, right?

This is a parable that actually happened, by the way, a parable

for the book of the 12 prophets, because this is basically what

the storyline is for God's people in the Old Testament.

And 1 by 1, standing on the sidelines of this unfolding

tragedy, doing everything they can to get the attention of

God's people. They're shouting and they're

waving their hands, and they're jumping up and down.

And time after time, God's people just run headlong into

their own ruin. And the book of the 12 is the

collection of the writings of the 12 prophets who were

standing on the edge of the sidewalk yelling and waving

their hands. Does this make sense?

They told the truth when no one wanted to hear it.

They invited people to return to God, and they held out in front

of people and reminded the people of the faithfulness of

God's promises even in the midst of going into ruin.

That's the good news. This is the pattern, by the way,

of the prophets. The truth, the invitation, and

the promises. The truth, the invitation and

the promises and through the stories that they would tell

and, and the kind of peculiar lives that they would live.

Guys, these, these prophets were strange people and their life

took on the shape of, of a kind of strangeness.

But some of that strangeness was meant to put on display the

message that God was trying to communicate.

Like Hosea, who marries this woman named Gomer who he knew

was going to have an affair. And God uses his life and his

story as a parable for God's covenant love for his people who

are unfaithful to him. And in this story, the prophet

Hosea's suffering, it reveals not just divine judgement, but

the way that God aches for the people that God loves.

The prophet Hosea puts on display the grief that God

carries for his people who keep running after the things that

will not satisfy. Or the Prophet Amos.

His message was directed at the religious elite of his day.

I'm really looking forward to our Sunday on the prophet Amos

because there is a problem in our land around the commingling

of religion and whatever else we're going to call the thing

that we're living in. This guy doesn't even identify

as a prophet or the son of a prophet.

He doesn't come on the scene rolling out his resume.

He doesn't sort of wave a flag saying that you should listen to

me. Like he is a shepherd and a fig

picker from the middle of nowhere.

And his status as a no named outsider to the places of

influence reinforces and embodies God's confrontation

with the corrupt system of worship and power that have wed

themselves together. Or the well known prophet Jonah

who gets swallowed up by a whale when God asks him to go and

share the good news of God's love with his enemies.

And and what does Jonah do? He says I'm not going to do

that. He refuses to do it.

And his resistance to preach grace to his enemies becomes

part of the truth telling message.

And the invitation. God's mercy extends to those

that we ourselves cannot stomach.

God's mercy is for every person. So as we look through the book

of the 12, we're going to focus on three things all throughout

this series, among other things. But we're going to focus on the

truth and the invitation and the promise.

And just briefly, let me name a couple of things about each of

these. First up, the truth, the

prophets. They name reality as they see

it, and one of the main things that that they keep crying out

from the edge of the sidewalk is that God's people, they tend to

turn their shoulders to other gods.

And in the language of the Scriptures, that's called

idolatry. They turn their shoulders to

worship idols. And this describes the way that

the people kind of latch on to security and adoration and power

in ways that the world is inviting them into.

And sure, like that might work out for a little bit, but in the

end, what the prophets say is that trusting in anything else

other than God is going to lead us to ruin.

Trusting in anything else other than his provision and his love

and the energy that comes from God and his spirit has a way of

deforming us, has a way of bending ourselves towards

destruction. So like a primary, not a primary

example, but one example could be, you know, you might think,

OK, 2026, it's the year to open up my retirement fund.

And honestly, that's actually probably a good idea.

If you don't have a retirement fund, you should, you should

think about that given the culture that we live in.

And you can imagine that, you know, it starts off like

innocuous enough, you just like put a little bit of money away.

But then if there's a season like down the road where you

become kind of obsessed in your thinking about about how much

money is in that fund, you start holding back generosity from

other people. You start squeezing really tight

onto the things that God is actually asking you to let go

of. Something good becomes outsized

in a way that the scriptures will call idolatry.

It's really simple to happen. It's really easy to unfold like

that. So the prophets constantly

expose how trusting in idols, they deform people and they

cause us to lose our capacity for the things that God is

creating in US, namely justice and compassion and faithfulness

to one another. So, for example, Hosea and Amos

and Micah and Malachi, they all confront a people who've not

sort of outright rejected God, but they've allowed the things

of the world to commingle with their life with God in a way

that is actually unfaithful to what God is inviting them into

and naming the truth of what is going on.

Hosea says of God's people. Their hearts are divided.

They're performing all of these rituals, but their hearts are

somewhere else. And that split allegiance

creates a spiritual confusion and social injustice because

it's really hard to take care of your neighbors when your focus

is not in that relationship with one another.

And sometimes the prophets, they speak of judgement, but not

judgement of like an angry father or a wrathful God.

It's kind of a divine judgement that Pope Benedict many years

ago said that God allows us to feel the full weight of our own

choices. You guys ever had that happen to

you? You just like choose something

that's not best and now you're just like stuck with the

consequences. This is sort of how the Old

Testament narrative and the prophets thought about what it

meant that God was also a God, that that spoke judgement.

So friends, the prophets, they tell the truth about the

situation. And what we're going to learn

over the next 12 weeks is that. Nobody really loves.

To hear the truth about themselves When?

The truth about ourselves. Exposes the little bits inside

of us that are maybe a little unlovely.

Do you guys know? That there are unlovely.

Parts in your life? I happen to know that there are

unlovely parts in my life. I have.

I'm married. And.

I have 4 kids and life has a way of exposing some of that

unloveliness and nobody likes to get present to any of that.

But my friend Caleb has a friend named Paul and Paul's all says

this. He says the good news begins

with this, that in your unloveliness, you are beloved.

That's the gospel, and it shows up.

Over and over and over again through the prophets.

So, friends, we are. Meant to become a community of

people who know how to gently and kindly and lovingly be a

prophetic witness and a prophetic voice to one another.

We don't. Have to wait.

You know, for like an old guy with a beard and a robe named

Obadiah to show up in our life to tell us where we might be

headed down the wrong path. So when we can hear.

The truth about our lives as it really is and name reality.

What we find is this constant and faithful invitation from

God. Listen to the invitation from

Hosea. Come, let us return to the Lord.

Or or from Joel. Return to me with all of your

heart. Or through Zechariah.

Return to me, says the Lord of Hosts, and I will return to you.

Do you guys hear a little bit of a repetition here?

The invitation from the minor prophets to the people of God

and to you and I is always just just come on back.

You can just come right on back. You can turn your shoulders

again back to this relationship, back to the goodness that I have

for you. So the invitation of God is.

Always the invitation to be welcomed back into relationship

and back into the family of God and I'll.

Close with this. Once we do that, we are able to

be reminded of the promise, and the promise is that God is

always faithful, even when we are unfaithful.

You can turn. Your shoulders away from.

God over and over and over again.

And do you know what will happen next?

God will. Come looking for you.

And he will. Get in front of.

You and he'll be like, come back to me.

And. Even for those of you that are

like, like following Jesus, like you're really, you're in it.

I promise you that there are. Things that God.

Wants to continue to reveal about the truth about your life

all of these little microwaves that God just wants to sort of

come right down like a like a gentle dad and put.

Your face in his. Hands and just said can you just

come back to me in this one particular area so I.

Don't know what the. Shape of your life is at the

beginning of 2026. I, I don't, I don't know how

much thought you've given it, but what we're going to try to

do as a community from now until Easter is to think about the

shape of our life, to try to imagine where are you on this

graph? What?

Is the truth. About your life that God would

want to reveal to you. What is the invitation that God

would want to extend and what are the promises that you need

to be reminded of in the? Season that you're in so as we

turn towards a. Time of of prayer and ministry

and worship. I want to invite Noah and Naomi

to come back up and. I just want to.

Extend a little bit of an invitation to you for prayer.

We're going to have some folks in the corners to pray.

I think I'm. Just curious, you know?

What season you might be in? Are you in a season where you're

like, I'm ready to hear the truth?

Lord, we would love to pray for you just to see if God would

stir up, you know, the kind of ears that we need to have in

order to hear him. And then secondly, I just think

that there's probably some of you at the start of a year, you

just need to remember what God has promised.

And we would love, we would love to pray for you, particularly as

we head into this season of teaching.

OK, if you're able to stand, I would invite you to stand as we

worship and respond to God in prayer.

If you're part of our prayer ministry team, could you find

your way to the sides? Thank you.