Brown, Steve. A Scandalous Freedom: The Radical Nature of the Gospel. West Monroe, LA: Howard Publishing, 2004.
Have you ever read something and then wondered how the author jumped in your head and wrote exactly what you'd been thinking? Scandalous Freedom sounds very similar to some of the things I have posted here. Brown's point is simple: in Christ we are really, truly free, but Christians are scared of freedom and end up creating rules for themselves in order to feel like they can do something to help God with this whole salvation and sanctification process.
It doesn't work like that. God really does love us beyond what we can imagine, and He really has already paid our debt through Christ. So we really are free already, free to dance and laugh and smile and be a testimony to the world around us, not of the drudgery of Christian life, but of the amazing freeing power of the gospel.
Scandalous Freedom is fairly well-written and reads really easily (except the sentence containing the words "I woke up unconscious" [203] which I still can't quite figure out). This book definitely deserves a first (and second) read-through.
I've read this book twice recently. What you said is the main thing: We. Are. Free.
ReplyDeleteIn one of the first chapters, he also stated that not only are we free to obey God, but we are free to DISobey God. If we couldn't, then it wouldn't be freedom. Of course, that doesn't mean we should disobey, it just means that we can. This attitude took forever to sink in.
I also enjoyed the chapter on "getting better" as well as the chapter where he talks about how modern Christians "Deify" people aka preacher aka their pastors.
All in all, it is a good book and I would recommend it for anyone who has been a Christian for a whie.