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God Lovingly Writes Himself into His Own Story

In a video on YouTube, Pastor Tim Keller says:

Dorothy Sayers wrote a series of detective novels focused her fictional character Lord Peter Wimsey. Sayers' creation Whimsey was an aristocrat detective from the 1930s who solved all kinds of crimes. She wrote a whole series of stories and novels about Lord Peter.

Then about halfway through her Wimsey detective series, a woman suddenly shows up in the novels. Sayers new character is named Harriet Vane, a female mystery writer and one of the very first women to get through Oxford. Harriet and Peter fall in love. Until that point in the series, Whimsey was an unhappy, broken bachelor, until Harriet Vane shows up and her love starts to heal his broken soul.

It's interesting because Dorothy Sayers, like her fictional creation, was one of the first women to graduated from Oxford. Like Harriet Vane, Dorothy Sayers was a writer of mystery novels. Dorothy Sayers looked at her character, Lord Peter Wimsey, and saw that he needed someone to help him out. So who did she put in there? A detective novelist, a woman, and one of the first women to go through Oxford. Who was that? She put herself into her own stories. She looked into the world that she had created and she fell in love with the chief character, Peter Wimsey, and she wrote herself into that story so she could heal him.

Possible Preaching Angles: God creates the world, we've turned away from him and become damaged by our sin. But God looks into this world and he loves us and he writes himself into his own story. Only he really writes himself in, he really puts himself in there in Jesus Christ, and he comes and he heals us and he takes us to be his bride.

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