Searching for God Knows What

My small group just got done reading the book Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller and it was another great read. Here is some of what I found most interesting:

• After my friend told me 'reality is like fine wine, it doesn't appeal to children,' I started reading the Bible very differently. I stopped looking for the formulas and tried to understand what God was trying to say. When I did that, I realized God's message to mankind wasn't a bunch of hoops to jump thru to get saved and it wasn't a series of ideas we had to agree with; rather an invitation to know God.
• The problem with God-impostors is that they worship a very small god to validate their identities. This god falls apart as soon as you touch him.
• Man is wired so we get his glory from God. God's love is so pure that Adam & Eve felt no insecurity at all. But when that relationship was broken, they knew it instantly. All of the insecurity rose the instant they realized they were alone.
• What God must have felt, arriving on the scene just after the Fall, knowing all He had made was ruined. Meeting Adam & Eve's eyes for the first time. They are shaking, feeling the trustworthiness of their first love and wondering if He would love them again. Hearing Him speak for the first time as the One who had been betrayed. "Who told you that you were naked?"
• If you declare war against someone else you either have to handcuff them or kill them to win. But if you want them to be forgiven by Christ and live eternally in heaven with Jesus you have to love them. Declaring war in the name of an agenda, in the name of God, is what militant Muslims are doing in the Middle East, and we don't want that here.
• When we read the Bible for other reasons than text to explain God, it becomes a puzzle by which we test our knowledge against our friends, and the views by which we distinguish superiors from inferiors. Its is as though we believe when we die, Alex Trebeck will be standing at the gates of heaven leading us in a mad round of religious Jeopardy.
• Fasting is mourning Him, baptism is identifying with Him, Communion is remembering him.

I love the different viewpoint presented in the book. I never thought of what God must have felt like after the fall, or that God didn't design the Bible specifically for modern day America. But for everyone (yes, everyone) around the world to have a relationship with him. To give us the opportunity to live within the context we were designed and to know His love.

Pretty awesome, I have to say.

Book Review: Ragamuffin Gospel & Rede

For my mentorship group, we just finished reading The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning. It actually took me reading the book 2 times to like it and to understand it. I am generally a pretty good, fast reader. However, with the way I read and Brennan writes I had a hard time following the first time (but everyone else in the group didn't have this trouble). The second time around I had caught onto his writing style and was able to get a lot more out of the book.

Here are some of the points that I pulled out and have really meditated over:

• You are accepted. Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery that you really are accepted. Trust in the God who loves consistently and faithfully nurtures confidence, free disciples. A loving God fosters a loving people. "The fact that our view of God shapes our lives to a great extent may be one of the reasons Scripture ascribes such importance to seeking to know him." (Peter Van Breemen, Certain As the Dawn)
• Her spiritual poverty enables her to enter the world of the other even when she cannot identify with that world. The poor in spirit are the most nonjudgmental of peoples; they get along well with sinners.
• The gospel of grace calls out: Nothing can ever separate you from the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord. You must be convinced of this, trust it, and never forget to remember. Everything else will pass away, but the love of Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Faith will become vision, hope will become possession, but the love of Jesus Christ that is stronger than death endures forever. In the end, it is the one thing you can hang onto.
• The dichotomy between what we say and what we do is so pervasive in the church and in society that we actually come to believe our illusions and rationalizations and clutch them to our hearts like favorite teddy bears.
• The alternative to confronting the truth is always some form of self-destruction. In order to free the captive, one must name the captivity.
• Freedom in Christ produces a health independence from peer pressure, people-pleasing, and the bondage of human respect.
• Perhaps the simplest, though certainly not the easiest place to start, is with myself. Carl Jung, the great psychiatrist, once reflected that we are all familiar with the words of Jesus, "Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, that you do unto me." Then Jung asks a probing question: "What if you discovered that the least of the brethren of Jesus, the one who needs your love the most, the one you can help the most by loving, the one to whom your love will be most meaningful - what if you discovered that this least of the brethren of Jesus... is you?"
• Perhaps we are all in the position of the man in Morton Kelsey's story who came to the edge of an abyss. As he stood there wondering what to do next, he was amazed to discover a tightrope stretched across the abyss. And slowly, surely, across the rope came an acrobat pushing before him a wheelbarrow with another performer in it. When they finally reached the safety of solid ground, the acrobat smiled at the man's amazement. "Don't you think I can do it again?" he asked. And the man replied, "Why yes, I certainly believe you can." The acrobat put his question again, and when the answer was the same, he pointed to the wheelbarrow and said, "Good! Then get in and I will take you across." - This is just the question we have to ask ourselves about Jesus Christ.
• The fallacy in Peter's mind was this: he believed his relationship was dependent on his consistency in producing the qualities he thought had earned him the Lord's approval.
• The mature Christians I have met along the way are those who have failed and have learned to live gracefully with their failure. Faithfulness requires the courage to risk everything on Jesus, the willingness to keep growing, and the readiness to risk failure throughout our lives.

Although I wrote out a lot, there is a lot more in the book! I would totally recommend reading it.

While I'm on the subject of books you need to read... if you haven't already done so, read Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers!!!! I couldn't put it down... I read a 500 page book in a weekend... you will love, love, love it!!! She does an amazing job of story telling. I will be reading The Mark of the Lion series soon.

Book Review: The Case for Christianity

I just finished reading The Case for Christianity by C. S. Lewis and if you haven't read it yet I say go do it now!!  It's a very short book (only 56 pages) and its a pretty easy read.  Lewis definitely thinks much deeper than I do and I love seeing a short view of his perspective on Christianity.  

There were a few passages that I felt I needed to share because they just lept off the page at me...

First speaking of free will:

Of course God knew that would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk.  Perhaps we feel inclined to disagree with Him.  But there's a difficulty about disagreeing with God.  He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you couldn't be right and he wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source.  When you are arguing against Him you're arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all:  it's like cutting off the branch you're sitting on.  If God thinks the state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will - that is, for making a real world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings - then we may take it is worth paying.

And second, speaking of Jesus 'just' a great moral teacher:

I'm trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really silly thing that people often say about Him:  "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God."  That's the one thing we mustn't say.  A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said wouldn't be a great moral teacher.  He'd either be a lunatic - on level with the man who says he's a poached egg - or else he'd be the Devil of Hell.  You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.  You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.  But don't let us come with any patronising nonsense about about His being a great human teacher.  he hasn't left that open to us.  He didn't intend to.

Wow.  Amazing.  Powerful.  At least to me.  Read it for yourself and let me know what you think...

Blue Like Jazz

I just finished maybe the greatest book I have ever read... Blue Like Jazz. I love the author, Donald Miller, and pray that maybe one day I will be lucky enough to meet him. On the cover it states the book is 'nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality' and I love the explanation. I love the way the book flows. I love the thought patterns presented. Some of the things I took away from the book are:




I just finished maybe the greatest book I have ever read... Blue Like Jazz. I love the author, Donald Miller, and pray that maybe one day I will be lucky enough to meet him. On the cover it states the book is 'nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality' and I love the explanation. I love the way the book flows. I love the thought patterns presented. Some of the things I took away from the book are:

Wasting time - this is why the devil tries so hard to get Christians to be religious. If he can sink a man's mind into habit, he will prevent his heart from engaging God. Pg 13

I am the problem. Pg 20

God is not here to worship me, to mold himself into something that will help me fulfill my level of comfort. My problem is not that God is not fulfilling, my problem is that I am spoiled. Pg 92

The trouble with deep belief is that it costs something, it carries responsibility and if I believe these things I actually have to do something about them. Pg 107

Passion about nothing is like pouring gasoline in a car with no wheels. It isn't going to lead anybody anywhere. Pg 110

What I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do. Pg 110

A person who thinks of himself unlovable cannot be in a relationship with God because he can't accept who God is; a Being that is love. We learn that we are lovable or unlovable from other people. That's why God tells us so many times to love each other. Pg 146-147

"I think it would be easier to trust God if I had extra money to trust him with." "That would not be faith, then, would it?" pg 196

It comforts me to think that if we are created beings, the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to understand it. It would have to be greater than the facts if our reality, and so it would seem to us, looking out from within our reality, that it would contradict reason. But reason itself would suggest it would have to be greater than reality, or it would not be reasonable. Pg 201

The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money. Pg 218

Instead of withholding love to change someone, pour it on lavishly. Nobody will listen to you unless the sense that you like them. Pg 220

Pray often that God will give you the strength and dignity to receive love. Pg 226

And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it. I think apart from the idea that I am a sinner and God forgives me, this is the greatest lesson I have ever learned. When you get it, it changes you. My friend Julie from Seattle told me that the main prayer she prays for her husband is that he will be able to receive love. And this is the prayer I pay for all my friends because it is the key to happiness. God's love will never change us if we don't accept it. Pg 232

Amazing. My little quotes don't do it justice. I suggest reading it if you haven't done so already.

Do it immediately.