Join The Underlines // The Best Of What I Read

A batch of the best highlights from what Joshua's read, .

What keeps many of us from growing is not sin but speed. Most of us are just like Johnny. We are going as fast as we can, living life at a dizzying speed, and God is nowhere to be found. We’re not rejecting God; we just don’t have time for him. We’ve lost him in the blurred landscape as we rush to church. We don’t struggle with the Bible, but with the clock. It’s not that we’re too decadent; we’re too busy. We don’t feel guilty because of sin, but because we have no time for our spouses, our children, or our God. It’s not sinning too much that’s killing our souls, it’s our schedule that’s annihilating us. Most of us don’t come home at night staggering drunk. Instead, we come home staggering tired, worn out, exhausted, and drained because we live too fast.

Messy Spirituality

Mike Yaconelli and Karla Yaconelli

The gospel is the way we learn to be human.4 As Irenaeus once put it, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”5 Second, the implicit picture of being human is dynamic. To be human is to be for something, directed toward something, oriented toward something. To be human is to be on the move, pursuing something, after something. We are like existential sharks: we have to move to live.

You Are What You Love

James K. A. Smith

Or perhaps we take seriously the act of going to bed and asking, How am I going to end this thing? Shall we lie awake in bed, letting all the replay tapes run? Shall we browse our phones for some recent celebrity scandal to bounce meaninglessly around our brain? Or shall we walk intentionally toward the rest we know we need? No one can sleep while believing that she needs to keep the world spinning. But real rest comes when we thank God that we don’t need to, because he does. Thus we kneel by the bed and place the period of God’s mercy and care for us at the end of the day.

The Common Rule

Justin Whitmel Earley

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