Can't get enough

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Amazing, amazing... I just can't get enough... of this book by Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way.

Some thoughts for you:

**On the testing that we often face in life:

"If there is one thing that is certain...it is that 'the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked' (Jer. 17:9).  So why would any of us suppose ourselves to be exempt?  Our faith, all faith, everyone's faith, needs testing.  And we cannot be trusted to test ourselves..."

"Do we require a God that we can fully understand and control or are we willing to be obedient to what we do not understand and could never control? [We should be] living trustingly in the seemingly absurd..."

**On living in community:

"Community is intricate and complex.  Living in community as a people of God is inherently messy."  AMEN!

**On striving for perfection:

"David [was] a man of God, but not by any means a perfect man of God... The Holy Spirit is not out recruiting an elite, all-star holiness team for the Jesus-way."

**On waiting:

"There is a lot more going on on the way than getting to a destination.  And there is a lot more going on on the way than what we are doing.  There is what God is doing... be alert and attentive and receptive... We wait for our souls to catch up with our bodies, much of the time... we can't do what must be done, so we wait for God to do it in us...much of the time we don't know what to do, so we wait until we understand what God commands us to do... we wait in hope..."

**On living life on God's Terms... not on our terms...

"Nothing in God or our relations with God can be secularized to our expectations, customized to our conditions, managed for our convenience."

"We are able to recognize the way of The Holy in unlikely circumstances, wilderness circumstances, among neighbors who are deaf and dumb and heartless, in a field of stumps."

Every day as I read a little more of this book and then the corresponding scripture passages from which the chapters are derived, I am blessed by how much God is teaching me personally and for the counsel of others around me.  I am made aware that God needs to fill me... and for Him to fill me I must be emptied of myself.  Emptied of my solutions.  Emptied of my expectations.  Emptied of my way.  I want to follow Jesus in His way.  And so I continue my study, wide, wide open to hear what God has to say.

~lk

Comments

Lisa said…
Amen!, my friend. Nodding my head in agreement. He is so good. :)

Thinking of you today...
Love, Lisa
7:25 AM
Amber Himes said…
Sounds like an encouraging book!
10:44 AM
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