“For the biblical way is not so much to present us with a moral code and tell us ‘Live up to this;’ Nor is it to set out a system of doctrine and say, ‘Think like this and you will live well.’ The biblical way is to tell a story and invite us in, ‘Live into this. This is what it looks like to be human; this is what is involved in entering and maturing as human beings.’ We do violence to the biblical text when we ‘use’ it for what we can get out of it or what we think will provide color and spice to our otherwise bland lives. That results in a kind of ‘boutique spirituality’ – God as decoration, God as enhancement… In the reading, we submit our lives to what we read, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but to see our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves”
-Eugene Peterson (Introduction to I Samuel in the Message)