The Return

Review: Grace is Greater: God’s Plan to Overcome Your Past, Redeem Your Pain and Rewrite Your Story Kyle Idleman Baker Books 2017 What’s not to like about this book?   Not much in my opinion.   Idleman has a way of talking about grace that hits home in very practical ways.   Ways that we all live every day.   He tackles the hard stuff and tempers it with the grace of God.   A peak at the table of contents says as much.   Grace is Greater…Than Your Mistakes,   …Than   Your Hurts…Than Your Circumstance.   Within those   I found his discussions that touched on forgiveness some of the best I’ve read anywhere.   But, I thought this book was about grace. It is.   Grace and forgiveness are closely linked.   We know that, most of us anyway.   Just like we know that grace is greater.   Grace is something that just reading about it isn’t going to be enough. Idleman covers that ground, too, with some very...

Review: No Easy Jesus: How the Toughest Choices Lead to the Greatest Life Jason Mitchell Tyndale 2017   Mitchell approaches one of the saddest parts of church life---boredom, disappointment, disillusionment and although he doesn’t use the word, dechurching.   He traces this situation that describes many more than will admit it aloud to accepting a belief in Jesus that had no relationship with life.   The here and now stuff we experience every day.   He says of his own life that he realized he had “settled for an ‘easy Jesus’…. a Jesus who didn’t ask to much of me…the promise of eternal life in heaven but conveniently left me alone in this life.”   (23-24).   After struggling with that revelation, he concluded that, “Yes, we need to believe in order to have faith.   But at some point our faith in Jesus must blossom into faithfulness to Jesus if we are interested in growing as followers of Jesus.” (25)   There’s the premise of t...