In this post I want to tell you about my favorite book from 2011: Tim Keller’s King’s Cross

It’s hard to really articulate how much I’ve appreciated this book.

The flow of the book is as a very short commentary on the Gospel of Mark.

In short, Keller goes through Mark, and writes a few pages of exposition on each story told.

But more comprehensively, he turns the traditional understanding of almost every story on its head.

He shows how every story is really about us, and our need for the Gospel, and how Jesus consistently pointed our need for something that only He could every provide.

This book is so densely saturated in the Gospel!

Even after reading through the whole book, I can still pick it up, turn to almost any page, and find a challenge to my pride and yet a hope for my soul.

I keep writing and then deleting examples because any one paragraph doesn’t get the point across…

For what it’s worth, here’s an example from today:

He’s in the end of Mark 10, where the disciples – James and John in particular – ask Jesus if they can sit on His left and right hand in glory.

Basically, they are asking to be vice president and CEO of Jesus’ Kingdom.

Jesus responds that they do not understand what they are asking. He asks, “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptised with the baptism I am baptized with?” Of course, we know that He was talking about going to the cross, but the disciples didn’t, and they responded affirmatively.

Keller goes into some detail dissecting this, but he eventually ties this passage to humility. Referring to how the disciples didn’t understand that Jesus was going to establish His kingdom not through power, but through sacrifice, he says:

Because God’s manner of revelation is characterized by hiddenness, reversal, and surprise, those who follow Jesus find themselves repeatedly failing to understand the will of God… [therefore] there can be no place for smugness or dogmatism…

If our sensibilities are formed by this narrative, we will learn not to take ourselves too seriously; we will be very self-critical and receptive to unexpected manifestations of God’s love and power…

When you see how James and John respond [to Jesus], and you realize how hard it is for anybody to take in the magnitude of what the cross really means, you will be on your way to attaining the gift of humility.

At some level, your normal assumptions, your pride and your egotistical way of thinking, are blinding you to the truth.

The application that Keller comes back to over and over again is simply: stop looking at yourself and your circumstances and the people around you and start focusing on Jesus and His redemptive work.

Surrender to grace.

I know I will read this again and again.

His podcasts and books – Crazy Love in particular – have been a huge blessing to me.

You may or may not know that a few months ago he walked away from his church. No scandal, no controversy or drama – he just abruptly announced that he would be moving on with no specific plans about where.

Now that the dust has settled a bit, he has transplanted his whole family to an ‘undisclosed’ city in Asia, where nobody cares that Crazy Love just hit the NY Times best-seller list, and CNN wrote a pretty interesting article about the whole thing.

The clencher for me:

Before selling his house and packing up his wife and three children, Chan was becoming “Christian famous” in Evangelical circles.

“Even in my own church I heard the words, ‘Francis Chan’ more than I heard the words, ‘Holy Spirit’,” he said.

That was a big part of the reason he walked away at the peak of his professional career.

“I think there has been too much emphasis on me. I want to be used by God, but I think we have this desire to make heroes out of people rather than following God and the Holy Spirit.”

He quotes the apostle Paul, who told his followers “I didn’t die for you.”

Wow.

He may or may not have gone a little overboard, but either way: I think he’s on to something.

Check it out.

Like many people, I first discovered Donald Miller through the book Blue Like Jazz. He had written several books before that one ‘hit it big’, but for some reason, that one got our attention.

I enjoyed the book a lot — not nearly as much as some of my friends — but I love Don’s writing style. He has a tone that would fit perfectly if he were your good friend and sitting across from you at a coffee shop telling you the stories he writes about. Where some books engage me in a way that is a mental workout, Don’s books engage me in a way that is a mental stress-reliever. I can read his writing before bed and it actually helps my mind slow down and try and take myself out of my shoes and put on his for a few minutes.

So, I’ve been excited to get my hands on his newest work, A Million Miles In A Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life.

I won’t endeavor to write a significant review of the book — partly because I don’t have the time, and partly because several hundred other people have already done so (so why add to the noise?). I recommend Chris Brogan’s video review. Or, you can go here and read the first chapter online for free.

I will say that I think it’s a really neat concept, and it has given me another angle from which to view my experience of life. The book probably won’t change your life, but it will entertain you, engage you, and might even nudge you to dream a little better. I guess, in a way, all books change our life to a certain extent.

Anyways, the point of this post is to offer the snippet below from page 123. Every input we allow into our lives shapes our perspective and, consequently, our ambitions:

Before I started writing for a living, I had a job as a marketing guy at a start-up company that sold textbooks to the education market. In learning about my job, I had to read all kinds of other books about how to sell people stuff they didn’t need. As near as I could tell from reading those books, marking is a three-step process. The first step is to convince people they are miserable. The second step is to convince people they will be happy if they buy your product, and the third step is to include a half-naked woman in your pitch…

The thing I never realized while I was studying marketing was the process of advertising products is, in many ways, a manipulation of the elements of story. It’s like I was telling you about an inciting incident disrupting the stability of a character’s life, throwing him orher into a story. Advertising does exactly this. We watch a commercial advertising a new Volvo, and suddenly we feel our life isn’t as content as it once was. Our life doesn’t have the new Volvo in it. And the commercial convinces us we will only be content if we have a car with forty-seven airbags. And so we begin our story of buying a Volvo, only to repeat the story with a new weed eater and then a new home stereo. And this can go on for a lifetime. When the credits roll, we wonder what we did with our lives, and what was the meaning.

The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. If you want to know what a person’s story is about, just ask them what they want. If we don’t want anything, we are living boring stories, and if we want a Roomba vaccuum cleaner, we are living stupid stories. If it won’t work in a story, it won’t work in life.

The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. If you want to know what a person’s story is about, just ask them what they want. If we don’t want anything, we are living boring stories, and if we want a Roomba vaccuum cleaner, we are living stupid stories. If it won’t work in a story, it won’t work in life.

Pastor J.D. lived for a couple of years in a Muslim country in the pacific rim of Asia, and also got his PHD in Islamic studies. “Breaking The Islamic Code” is his attempt at helping us ‘westernized Americans’ better understand Islam, Muslims, and the huge gaps in culture and communication that often exist.

Having lived in a ‘Muslim’ country myself, and hoping to possibly plant a church in a Muslim context some day, I look forward to seeing what he has to say!

Remember this series of posts from several months ago?

I wrote about the book “Religion Saves (and 9 other misconceptions)” by Mark Driscoll, head pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle.

The book is based on the sermon series by the same name (which you can watch, listen to, or download for free).

Well, this month, like every month, ChristianAudio.com is giving away an audio book, and this month it’s the audio version of ‘Religion Saves’! It’s completely free!

Just follow this link during the  month of February, and you can download the book in mp3 form!

I especially recommend the book for those who consider themselves to be skeptics or opponents of Christianity. I think the book does a great job of clearing up several common misconceptions about the teaching of the Bible.

If you get it, please let me know what you think of it!

Check out this excerpt from Seeing And Savoring Jesus Christ by John Piper (download the whole book as a .pdf file for free here).

The title of the chapter is “The Glory of Rescuing Sinners, Not Removing Satan“:

Now without sin and law to condemn and accuse and oppress us, Satan is a defeated foe. He is disarmed. Christ has triumphed over him, not by putting him out of existence, but by letting him live and watch while millions of saints find forgiveness for their sins and turn their back on Satan because of the greater glory of the grace of Christ.

It was a costly triumph. But God’s values are not so easily reckoned. If God had simply terminated Satan, then it would not have been so clear that God is both stronger and infinitely more to be desired than Satan. God wills for His glory to shine forth not only through acts of physical power, but also through acts of moral and spiritual power that display the beauty of His grace with lavish colors. To take sinners out of Satan’s hands by virtue of Christ’s sin-bearing sacrifice and his law-fulfilling obedience to the Father was a more glorious victory than mere annihilation of the enemy.

A few weeks back, I shared my excitement about a new book, Religions Saves, and Nine Other Misconceptions.

I wrote a few posts since then, talking about individual chapters (1 and 2), but today I’m excited to be on the official blog tour. So, here’s my overall review of the book (and please forgive me if any of this seems repetitive to you):

What do birth control, humor, calvinism, grace, sex, faith and works, dating, the emergent church, and the regulative principle have in common?

Well, ask pastor Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church to write a chapter on each topic, put them together, and you’ve got Religion Saves, and Nine Other Misconceptions.

So, the first question that comes to your mind is probably along the lines of, “Why would anyone put those topics together in a book?”

Good question! And there actually is a reasonable answer!

The book is based on a really neat idea: pastor Mark explains in the introduction that upon reading through the book of 1 Corinthians, he noticed that a significant purpose of the letter is to address questions from the church in Corinth. And the more he thought about it, the more intrigued he was by the idea of preaching a series of sermons that are answers to common questions from people today — questions specific to our time and culture. So, last year, Mars Hill opened up a portion of their website for a forum called ‘Ask Anything‘. Over a series of voting cycles, people all over the world were allowed to post questions: any questions. These were then widdled down to the 9 most popular questions through a voting process. In the end, 893 questions were asked, 5,524 comments were made, and 343,203 votes were cast, and the following topics emerged, in order:

1. The Regulative Principle
2. The Emerging/Emergent Church
3. Dating
4. Faith vs. Works
5. Sexual Sin
6. Grace
7. Predestination/Election/Calvinism
8. Humor
9. Birth Control

Pastor Mark preached a sermon on each one in a series by the same name as this book. You can download the video and/or audio of each of these for free here. This book is basically another form of responding to those questions, with a chapter devoted to each one.

The first thing you notice when you pick up the book is the excellent design. It’s a sturdy hard-copy with a knurled texture containing an intriguing graphic of a family walking out of a typical-looking church building… and they appear to be on fire. Part of the flame is the provocative title of the book: Religion Saves. This, of course, is the exact opposite of the message of the book.

I think pastor Mark does a great job explaining the title (from the introduction of the book):

Before we proceed, the title “Religion Saves” merits a bit of explanation. The one thread that weaves this book together is religion; many of the questions that made the top nine are highly religious in nature. Religious people are prone to go beyond the teaching of the Bible to argue for positions that are not clearly taught in Scripture. They are further prone to go beyond the biblical principles on these issues and seek to impose their method on others, as if they alone are truly biblical. Religious people tend to have very strong and vocal opinions about the issues we will examine. In fact, religious people were often the most devoted voters for the questions that comprised the “Religion Saves” sermon series and this book.

…

Religious people mistakenly think that they are saving people from such things as a fruitless life, sinful sex, bad relationships, unholy humor, wayward churches, evil birth control, and what they call “strange fire.” However, religion never saved anyone, and religious answers to complex questions are simply misconceptions, which is why I have titled this book, “Religion Saves: And Nine Other Misconceptions.”

So as you can see, the purpose of this book is not directed so much at non-believers as at the most religious of believers. This book isn’t so much an apologetic or a call to holier living as it is a call to repentance from our righteousness.

Having read the book, and listened to each of the sermons upon which it is based, I wholeheartedly recommend it for the following reasons (in no particular order):

• Pastor Mark does a great job of thoroughly covering each topic. He doesn’t write a few pages telling you what you already knew. Each chapter is in the ballpark of about 30 pages, and I learned from each one, even though I had already studied each of these topics. I even passed the book on to my dad to help him with some questions he had on the topic of election. I couldn’t think of a better resource to introduce the topic, explain each side, and then make a case for the most Biblical one!
• Pastor Mark shows his cards. An apologetic book or a text book would likely present each angle of a particular topic, and then leave you to take the facts and decide what to do with them. Pastor Mark goes one step further and tries to make a case for his own view on each topic, yet is simultaneously careful not to overstate things. I would challenge a non-christian who thinks that Christianity is too close-minded or old-fashioned to read this book. I’ll bet it would challenge a lot of your incorrect stereotypes. I would also challenge the most fundamentalist, self-righteous of ‘christians’ to read this book. I’ll bet you will be challenged about what convictions you’re holding in a closed hand that belong in an open one.
• It’s a great combination of topics. The odd combination makes it a great read because the gears shift significantly every chapter. But possibly more importantly, the topics emerge from questions submitted by people in our day and age, and are incredibly relevant to our time and culture. In particular, I think that birth control and humor are two topics that are discussed far too infrequently in the modern church, and it leaves a lot of young folks with questions that they are afraid to ask.
• The thread that ties the whole book together is crucial to the Church in our time. Though the topics seem unrelated, the theme of each chapter is a call to repentance (from self-righteousness if we think we’re doing good by Biblical standards, or from rebellion if we choose to reject the Biblical standards) and to turn our eyes to Jesus. I think Mark does a fantastic job of making clear the idea that St. Augustine expressed when he said that “[the christian life] is one of continual, active repentance.“

To be fair, the book isn’t perfect. After all, an imperfect human is the author, and noone toes the line more closely than Mark Driscoll. Sometimes, he distracts from his point in the interest of humor, and sometimes he even made me wince a little bit at the length he was willing to go to be funny or make a point. Nevertheless, compared to his previous two major books, Vintage Jesus – where he pretty clearly crossed the line several times, going too far to make the book humorous – and Death By Love – which was extremely serious and almost completely lacked humor in the interest of making a very clearly explaining the cross of Christ – I think he found a good balance of humor, intrigue, and weight.

But the good far outweighs the bad, and Religion Saves is a book that I’m glad I read. I am such a prideful individual, and repentance is so unnatural for me. Unfortunately, it’s also uncommon in the modern church, and I am thankful for the clear and consistent message bringing it to the forefront of my mind that I found in Religion Saves.

]]> http://www.therieslands.com/2009/08/01/religion-saves-driscoll-book-review/feed/ 0 http://www.therieslands.com/2009/07/07/religion-saves-humor-mark-driscoll/ http://www.therieslands.com/2009/07/07/religion-saves-humor-mark-driscoll/#comments Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:14:09 +0000 Zack http://www.therieslands.com/?p=3671 I had a great time hearing all your thoughts on the birth control discussion last week!

Now it’s time to move on to chapter 2 of Religion Saves – And Nine Other Misconceptions.

In this chapter, pastor Mark Driscoll tackles the 8th most popular question:

Why do you make jokes about Mormon missionaries, homosexuals, trench coat wearers, single men, vegans, and emo kids, and then expect these groups of people to come to know God through those sermons?

Just like last time, I’ll write up a bit on the chapter, but before I do, I want to ask you:

When you think of the Bible, do you think of humor? Why or why not?

What is your favorite example of humor in the Bible?

Ready? Go…

As I mentioned in the introduction, Religion Saves + And Nine Other Misconceptions addresses the top nine questions submitted and voted on by people around the country.

Each chapter is dedicated to a question and pastor Mark’s answer, and they go in backwards order.

So, chapter one addresses the ninth most popular question:

There’s no doubt the Bible says children are a blessing, but the Bible doesn’t seem to address the specific topic of birth control. Is this a black-and-white topic, or does it fall under liberties?

Last week, I asked you all to share your thoughts on this comment, and boy did you come through!

I had a great time reading up on your thoughts and opinions, and I was looking forward this weekend to writing a lengthy exposition on the topic and how pastor Mark handles it in the book.

Unfortunately, things have not gone according to plan! Our internet at home was down for most of the weekend, work has been kicked up two notches, I had 2 computers dropped off that needed urgent attention, and we’ve been scrambling to get everything lined up so that we can leave for our first vacation in a while tomorrow!

And on top of all that, I actually got up extra early Monday morning and sat down and wrote most of the post anyways, and the infallible Firefox failed on me and I lost it!

So, rather than let this post dangle any longer, I want to point you at some great resources that you can check out for yourself, and maybe I’ll get a chance to come back to this at some point this weekend!

• First of all, I’m glad to announce that the official website for the book was launched on Monday! I love how creative those Re:Lit guys are!
• Secondly, you can download the video and/or audio of the sermon upon which this chapter is based here (and yes it’s free!)
• Here’s an interview with Mark Driscoll about the book that I came across today. Notably, he says that this was the hardest chapter to write because it’s such a weighty topic.
• Randy Alcorn’s writings on the topic of birth control are heavily noted in the chapter, and you can get your hands on all of those for free here (I think this article is the most succinct)
• Desiring God has a great article (Does the Bible Permit Birth Control) and sermon (Is It Wrong To Use Birth Control) on the topic

Finally, if you have any specific questions or opinions that you’d like to bounce off me, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment, or if you’d rather keep it private, you can email me at zack_at_therieslands.com

Look what came in the mail yesterday!

The awesome folks at Crossway and RE:LIT were kind enough to select our dinky little blog here for a free copy of Mark Driscoll’s newest book, Religion Saves – And Nine Other Misconceptions.

One condition: I have to review it here and tell you what I think.

This is a lot like telling a kid that he can have a piece of candy, but only if he promises to eat it, so I’m quite happy to oblige.

The first thing you notice when you pick up the book is the excellent design. It’s a sturdy hard-copy with a knurled texture containing an intriguing graphic of a family walking out of a typical-looking church building… and they appear to be on fire. Part of the flame is the provacative title of the book: Religion Saves. This, of course, is the exact opposite of the message of the book.

The book is based on a really neat idea: pastor Mark explains in the introduction that upon reading through the book of 1 Corinthians, he noticed that a significant purpose of the letter is to address questions from the church in Corinth. And the more he thought about it, the more intrigued he was by the idea of preaching a series of sermons that are answers to questions from people today — questions specific to our time and culture. So, last year, Mars Hill opened up a portion of their website for a forum called ‘Ask Anything‘. Over a series of voting cycles, people all over the world were allowed to post questions: any questions. These were then widdled down to the 9 most popular questions through a voting process. In the end, 893 questions were asked, 5,524 comments were made, and 343,203 votes were cast.

The result was nine questions, and pastor Mark preached a sermon on each one in a series by the same name as this book. You can download the video and/or audio of each of these for free here. This book is basically another form of responding to those questions, with a chapter devoted to each one.

I plan to write a short post about each chapter as I go through the book, but let me end this first post with pastor Mark’s explanation of the title (from the introduction of the book):

Before we proceed, the title “Religion Saves” merits a bit of explanation. The one thread that weaves this book together is religion; many of the questions that made the top nine are highly religius in nature. Religious people are prone to go beyond the teaching of the Bible to argue for positions that are not clearly taught in Scripture. They are further prone to go beyond the biblical principles on these issues and seek to impose their method on others, as if they alone are truly biblical. Reigious people tend to have very strong and vocal opinions about the issues we will examine. In fact, religious people were often the most devoted voters for the questions that comprised the “Religion Saves” sermon series and this book.

…

Religious people mistakenly think that they are saving people from such things as a fruitless life, sinful sex, bad relationships, unholy humor, wayward churches, evil birth control, and what they call “strange fire.” However, religion never saved anyone, and religious answers to complex questions are simply misconceptions, which is why I have titled this book, “Religion Saves: And Nine Other Misconceptions.”

So as you can see, the purpose of this book — and of these chapter reviews — is not directed so much at non-believers as at the most religious of believers. This book isn’t so much an apologetic or a call to holier living as it is a call to repentance.

And with that in mind, I hope you’ll tune in, invite your friends, and let me know what you think as we go through this together!

]]> http://www.therieslands.com/2009/06/23/religion-saves-and-nine-other-misconceptions-mark-driscoll-review-intro/feed/ 3 http://www.therieslands.com/2009/05/22/keller-on-clues-for-god/ http://www.therieslands.com/2009/05/22/keller-on-clues-for-god/#comments Fri, 22 May 2009 11:59:27 +0000 Zack http://www.therieslands.com/?p=3497 Off and on, for like a year now, I’ve been reading The Reason For God, by Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Church in New York.

I’ve read lots of ‘apologetic’ books over the years, and chewing up the meat and spitting out the bones, I learned a lot form those books. But they tend to all say the same thing, so without some prodding, I never would have picked up Keller’s book. However, after reading so many good things about it on various blogs and articles, I decided to pick it up, and man, am I glad I did.

The Reason For God is incredibly smart, well-written, humble, clear, and focused on the present American culture. It’s full of specific responses to guys like Richard Dawkins and William Dennett.

Not only that, he has a lot to say that I don’t really think anyone else is saying.

Check this out:

If we believe God exists, then our view of the universe gives us a basis for believing that cognitive faculties work, since God could make us able to form true beliefs and knowledge. If we believe in God, then the Big Bang is not mysterious, nor the fine-tuning of the universe, nor the regularities of nature. All the things that we see make perfect sense. Also, if God exists our intuitions about the meaningfulness of beauty and love are to be expected.

If you don’t believe in God, not only are all these things profoundly inexplicable, but your view — that there is no God — would lead you not to expect them. Though you have little reason to believe your rational faculties work, you go on using them. You have no basis for believing that nature will go on regularly, but you continue to use inductive reasoning and language. You have no good reason to trust your senses that love and beauty matter, but you keep on doing it.

C. S. Lewis puts this vividly:

“You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes. You can’t go on getting very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it.”

Of course none of the clues we have been looking for actually proves God. Every one of them is rationally avoidable. However, their cumulative effect is, I think, provocative and potent. Though the secular view of the world is rationally possible, it doesn’t make as much sense of all these things as the view that God exists… Those who argue against the existence of God go right on using induction, language, and their cognitive faculties, all of which make far more sense in a universe in which a God has created and supports them all by his power.

(I stole the header photo from here)

She bought it because she knows I seriously admire Andy Stanley, and I would love to learn anything I can from him.

But she also bought it because she knows that I have a borderline unhealthy awareness that our life is a vapor, and I desperately want to be faithful with all the opportunities that God has put in my life.  Everywhere I look, I see what is, and what could be should be, and the tension between the two keeps me awake at night. It keeps my mind racing.

Well, life happens and the book got hidden on a shelf and forgotten about until this weekend, and yesterday morning I excitedly dug into it.

So far, I’ve read two chapters, and I can’t begin to express how much I needed this right now. Andy uses the story of Nehemiah to pick apart the pieces of a vision.

He starts with this thesis:

Vision is a clear mental picture of what could be, fueled by the conviction that it should be.

That’s on the first page. And it seems like every other line so far is a clear articulation of a feeling that I have been wrestling with a lot lately.

So far, Visioneering is a God-send for putting this season of my life in perspective.

Hopefully I’ll be able to post some good quotes/nuggets later this week.

In the meantime, I’m curious: Do you have a vision? It could be short-term or long-term, big or small.

If so, what is it?

]]> http://www.therieslands.com/2009/02/17/visioneering/feed/ 2 http://www.therieslands.com/2008/09/17/review-crazy-love-pt-1/ http://www.therieslands.com/2008/09/17/review-crazy-love-pt-1/#comments Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:59:15 +0000 Zack http://www.therieslands.com/?p=2470

Those who know me know that I have a couple of man-crushes.

It’s so stinking hard to find admirable men in this world that when I do, I usually watch them closely to learn from them. Besides family and personal friends, a couple of my man-crushes are Mark Driscoll, Louie Giglio, and Francis Chan.

I first encountered Francis at Passion ’07 (pics), and ever since then, I’ve been soaking up as much of his teaching as I can get my hands on (you can subscribe to the free podcast here).

Recently, Francis wrote a book called “Crazy Love: Overwhelmed By A Relentless God“. I put off buying it just because we didn’t have the extra cash to throw around, but the more I listened to what God is doing in Francis’ heart and life, the more I knew this is something that Steph and I should go through together, so that’s what we’ve been doing for the past couple of weeks.

A couple of nights ago I was talking to my friend Mike, and he asked how the book was coming so far. Up to that point, I had only made it through chapter 3, so I told him that it was good, but nothing new — kind of the same old book but in a new year with a new author…

But man, chapter 4 really changed direction and 5 was even better. So far, I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It’s very, very challenging without being critical or legalistic or self-righteous.

Here are some quotables from chapter 4:

He quotes: “It is not scientific doubt, not atheism, not pantheism, not agnosticism, that in our day and in this land is likely to quench the light of the Gospel. It is a proud, sensuous, selfish, luxurious, church-going, hollow-hearted prosperity.”

—

My caution to you is this: Do not assume you are good soil. I think most American churchgoers are the soil that chokes the seed because of all the thorns. Thorns are anything that distracts us from God. When we want God and a bunch of other stuff, then that means we have thorns in our soil. A relationship with God simply cannot grow when money, sins, activities, favorite sports teams, addictions, or commitments are piled on top of it.

—

I quickly found that the American church is a difficult place to fit in if you want to live out New Testament Christianity. The goals of American Christianity are often a nice marriage, children who don’t swear, and good church attendance. Taking the words of Christ literally and seriously is rarely considered. That’s for the ‘radicals’ who are ‘unbalanced’ and who go ‘overboard’

Even though I probably shouldn’t be spending any money we don’t need to spend right now, I couldn’t go into the bookstore one more time without scoring this book.

Everyone seems to agree that it is knock-your-socks-off awesome, which I don’t usually find in books anymore. It seems like all the popular authors these days are guys who are barely any older than me, and they’re mixing in some good Truth with some dangerous lies and confusing people. Tim Keller has been a pastor for like 20 years, and he’s only written a couple of books, so I’m excited to see what he has to say!

Check out the book’s website: www.TheReasonForGod.com

I think my feelings about Rob Bell are pretty similar to my feelings about rap music when I was in high school… I liked the style and the way it was trendy, and it stirred up emotions in me, and told stories about our world and what is bad and what needs to change… and I also felt guilty because of the profanity and the mental images is stirred up.

Mr. Bell definitely isn’t profane, but I still feel guilty for liking the guy. I guess this is because he is so good at showing what is broken in our world and especially in our American christian church. I agree with him on almost all of the things he articulates so well about the heart of Christ for the lost and needy. He points out our need for Christ so well, but seems so bad at ever mentioning the big ‘R’ word: repentance.

I have never ever in my life heard him utter the word or the notion.

Nevertheless, I’ll probably read the new book, “Jesus Wants to Save Christians”.

…and I’ll probably feel guilty for liking it :0)

Do you think you’ll read it?