Join The Underlines // The Best Of What I Read

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

Jesus is more than an example to be followed; he’s a Savior to be trusted. This is why we miss the point if we see Jesus’ wilderness temptation as only how to overcome temptation, with advice like “Jesus used Scripture, so you should too.” This focuses on a flea and misses the elephant in the room. The point is not, “He did it; you can too!” The point is, “You don’t do it; so Jesus did it for you.”

The Pursuing God

Joshua Ryan Butler

It is common today to hear Christians talk of their “brokenness.” But when you listen closely, you may discover that they are talking about their wounds, the things they have suffered, not about the evil that is in them.

Renovation of the Heart

Dallas Willard

And if God’s good creation—of the world, of life as we know it, of our glorious and remarkable bodies, brains, and bloodstreams—really is good, and if God wants to reaffirm that goodness in a wonderful act of new creation at the last, then to see the death of the body and the escape of the soul as salvation is not simply slightly off course, in need of a few subtle alterations and modifications. It is totally and utterly wrong. It is colluding with death. It is conniving at death’s destruction of God’s good, image-bearing human creatures while consoling ourselves with the (essentially non-Christian and non-Jewish) thought that the really important bit of ourselves is saved from this wicked, nasty body and this sad, dark world of space, time, and matter!

Surprised by Hope

N. T. Wright

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