Tried With Fire

The two randomly providential winners of The World Tilting Gospel are: Dave Erho and Becky Pliego. Congratulations!!!!!!  Thanks to everyone who entered. Also, thanks to Dan for linking from Pyro for the giveaway. For those who didn't win, buy the book. You won't be disappointed. Also stay tuned for future giveaways, God willing.

Having benefited from Dan Phillips' contributions to Pyromaniacs and his own blog, Biblical Christianity , I was eager to read his book The World Tilting Gospel . I was not disappointed. The Gospel turned the world upside down in the days of the early church, and that same Gospel is for us today. But sadly we have lost a right biblical view and reduced it to entry-level Christianity. While the gospel is not complicated, neither is it simplistic. If we don't have a right understanding of God and man, there's a good chance our understanding of the relationship between the two will be off base. So starting from Genesis, Dan examines who we are, who God is, and how we got where we are. He then moves us to the apex of redemptive history, the cross, and how God deals with our bad record and our bad nature. Following that, the book discusses the process of Christian growth, including distortions to the Gospel that plague the church. Finally, we're challenged to bring the tr...

God's real grace is gutsy, dynamic, transformative power. No one who receives this grace remains the same. It transforms and motivates. No transformation = no grace. If grace has not transformed your life to some degree, then grace has not saved your soul, either. And so, if we cherish any notion of "grace" that defines it as "God's way of making it okay for me to live as if He didn't exist, wasn't my Master, and hadn't spoken a word of command or prohibitions" - we had better lose that notion... Grace is God's dynamic, free, flowing gift of Himself that delivers us from the guilt and domain of sin (justification) and enables us to live lives that please Him (progressive sanctification). After we become recipients of justifying grace, we become participants in sanctifying grace. If the latter is not happening, then the former never happened. "Gutless" is the last thing God's real grace is. from The World Tilting Go...

Another book arrived in the mail today. The latest addition to the library is  The World Tilting Gospel by Dan Phillips  (also of TeamPyro ). Here's a bit from the intro: "People leap for an experience, fall short of truth, and wander off lost and aimless. A truncated "half-spell" has been substituted for the biblical Gospel. The "nice bits" are snipped out, isolated, and dolled up as more marketable. Folks have signed on without any real grasp of the Gospel in all its fullness and power. "Many professed Christians regard the Gospel as our ticket "in", and then we're done with it. It's like a contract: We ignore the lawyer-talk, sign it, and then forget about it. We think that the Gospel was beginner's material. Pray a prayer, pen your name, you're "in"; now move on to something else. "But what too many of us have not grasped is: who we really are what kind of world we are really living in how the w...