Melissa

I dearly love Beth Moore (big shock huh? wink wink) and both of her daughters have become just as dear to me over the last year. I read Amanda's family blog and the Living Proof Ministries blog where Melissa posts.... here is one of her latest that I wanted to pass along:

Friday, August 14, 2009
I am begging you.

I am begging you to purchase and read "The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism" by Timothy Keller. I am not sure if I have ever mentioned this book on the blog or not... have I? If I have you might be annoyed but I remain at peace because it may just need to be reiterated. I just finished reading it for the second time and I loved it even more this time around. The first time around I was spending most of my energy processing and interacting with the content but this time I was able to sit back, relax on my couch and read it over a cup of chamomile tea and it has blessed me so. Dr. Timothy Keller is the Pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. He engages culture and gospel in a unique way and he does it all with the heart of a Pastor.


Here is a sneak peak at just one little selection... I don't want to spoil too much for you.


"The doctrine of the Trinity overloads our mental circuits. Despite its cognitive difficulty, however, this astonishing, dynamic conception of the triune God is bristling with profound, wonderful, life-shaping, world-changing implications... Ultimate reality is a community of persons who know and love one another. That is what the universe, God, history, and life is all about. If you favor money, power, and accomplishment over human relationships, you will dash yourself on the rocks of reality. When Jesus said you must lose yourself in service to find yourself (Mark 8:35), he was recounting what the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have been doing throughout eternity. You will, then, never get a sense of self by standing still, as it were, and making everything revolve around your needs and interests. Unless you are willing to experience the loss of options and the individual limitations that comes from being in committed relationships, you will remain out of touch with your own nature and the nature of things. In many other places in this volume, I've traced out how impossible it is to stay fully human if you refuse the cost of forgiveness, the substitutional exchange of love, and the confinements of community... this world was not created by a God who is only an individual, nor is it the emanation of an impersonal force... We believe the world was made by a God who is a community of persons who have loved each other for all eternity. You were made for mutually self-giving, other-directed love. Self-centeredness destroys the fabric of what God has made... The universe is understood as a dance of beings united by energies binding yet distinct, like planets orbiting stars, like tides and seasons, "like atoms in a molecule, like the tones in a chord, like the living organisms on this earth, like the mother with the baby stirring in her body." The love of the inner life of the Trinity is written all through it. Creation is a dance!" (selected from pages 215-217, 219 of "The Reason for God").


Are you kidding me??


I love it.


Seriously.


Please bless yourself and buy this book or check it out from the library or download it on your kindle or borrow it from a friend or read it standing in the aisle at Barnes & Noble...whatever you have to do, try and make it happen. And then perhaps we can move on to downloading his sermons in the near future. Wink.


Also, please do not forget to pray for God to move mightily at Living Proof Live in Fargo, North Dakota!


Happy Friday Sweet Siestas!




Posted by Melissa


I am adding this book to my "to read" list which is getting mighty long!!! Thought you might be interested too????