Linkathon 12/8, part 1

A minimalist Linkathon….

Grace.

U R who God says U R

Testimony

Do we really know God?

Facebook/Twitter ≠ glorify yourself

Seuss/Star Wars?

Driscoll/Jay-Z

Emerging church

Schullers (HT)

Must read books

Anger, rebuke, faith

Choosing celibacy

Egalitarian. Biblical womanhood.

Redemption

Month of Sundays

Crazy!

Truly Reformed (HT)

Harold Camping

Disneyization of faith

Hell?

Gospel (HT)

James White’s church

CCM Grammy nominees.

You? Blog? (HT)

Losing faith

Bock’s top books about Jesus

Marcus Lamb

Heritage Tower

New blog

Manhattan Declaration, Christian reputation

Pastor deleting Facebook

Pastors should embrace unpleasant moments in ministry

What books have changed your life?

Some people love movies. Many have a favorite TV show, or two, or more…

I like to read, and that’s been the case from the time I was a kid.

Libraries were a good place for me to hang out and get lost in the world of whatever book I chose off the shelf. After I got saved, I looked to books to answer the questions I had about my faith and how to interpret the world around me.

A recent blog post highlighted the books that most impacted several Christian leaders (the ones you’d most likely recognize are Michael Patton and Douglas Groothius).

The only book I came up with when I posted this on Facebook was Messy Spirituality by the late Michael Yaconelli.

For years I had been hammered with do-it-yourself, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and earn your salvation by the minute spirituality.

Yaconelli was perhaps the first author to openly admit being flawed, messed up, broken and that it was okay for a Christ-follower to be…well…human.

That God’s love for you and acceptance of you wasn’t dependent on your perfect actions or your perfect desires, and that you didn’t have to have it all together to be accepted.

Looking back on it it’s like The Shack…probably not the best-written book, but has one central idea that is so amazing that, if you get it, it stands out like nothing else.

Another book was Gary Habermas’ Dealing With Doubt.

It was a good help for a young man looking for answers to questions that threatened his faith, that the TV evangelists and faith teachers could not adequately address. A Liberty University professor did, and it helped bridge the gap between faith and reason in my mind.

The Shack would merit honorable mention for one reason: helping me realize that God is particularly fond of me…and you. But that’s another day’s blog posting.

What books have changed your life?

Besides the Bible, that is 🙂