“The gospel is absurd and the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that He lived, died, and rose again with but one purpose in mind: to make brand-new creation.

via What it means to be a Christian….

These words come from Rachel Held Evans blog but are the words of Brennan Manning. Until I had read them I was unaware of who he was. He had a very robust life and was a prolific writer for a former Jesuit priest.  He passed on to the Lord recently. Here is an additional inspiring quote from Wikipedia.

“The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle,” Manning has said. “That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”

Both of these quotes hit to the heart of why I blog here. I reject the idea that Jesus came to this earth for the sole purpose of dying for our sins. I now know that this concept was not fully fleshed until a millennium after his time on earth. Jesus came to teach us how to live a joyful and meaningful life and then he was murdered and come back to life to prove to a stubborn world that he was God’s son.

It is a well known fact that most people can’t see the difference in lifestyles of Christian from others. It is more sinful to call yourself a Christian and then go on and live you life as you had before than to skip that moniker altogether. Jesus intended us to listen to him and use his words as the foundation of our lives.

I now have a few of Mr. Manning’s books in my Kindle and hope to learn more about him.  Thanks Rachel for bringing him to my attention.

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I spent seventeen posts on my review of Philip Gulley’s book “If Grace Is True”. I’m sure this is the longest series on a single book or subject I have posted in over four years of the blog. With that extensive study complete I will be stepping back some to take a breath. In order to do that the next several posts will be pretty much “asides” in nature. That is they will be just random things that I have been thinking about lately.

Since I am my nature a guy who frequently asks “why?” many questions pop into my head on a regular basis and being a journal keeper, when they do they are usually written down for future thought. So, I will be dusting off a few for some quick words. If you have any insight into any of these topic I hope you will join in the conversation with a comment or two.