Hey guys!! hope you all are well... I'd like to tell those that were with me at onething atl this weekend... Thank you so much for coming. the combination of people and what was on all of our hearts made the weekend a great experience for me that I'll never forget, and forever learn from. and to those who didn't go, I am positive God would have used you to increase that blessing we feltte exponentially.
anyway....
Ok, so topic: Pursuit of the Holy
this weekend I bought Corey Russell's book Pursuit of the Holy. I'm about 5 pages into the first chapter and already it's awesome. I just wanted to share an excerpt from the first chapter (entitled "What is the Knowledge of God?") of the book. The section is subtitled "God wants to be known." The [brackets] are my comments. Emphasis added with underlining and italics.
"Deception is creeping into the Church [that's a big "C," meaning body of believers] today and it's centered around the question, "Who is this Man Jesus?" We have watered Him down. We have questioned His claims of who He is and minimized His teachings about what it means to follow Him. The present-day Jesus is a hippie-looking dude who just wants everybody to get along and be happy.
"That's not Jesus. Jesus came to bring division, not peace. Jesus came as a sword to reveal what was in the heart of man. And what was revealed is that mankind has an inner disagreement with - yea, even a hatred of - who God is and how He does things. 'He came to His own and His own did not receive Him' (John 1:11). Today, we hear preachers and pastors deny the deity and historical existence of Jesus. We hear them question the reality of His death, resurrection and ascension. We hear them downplay His second coming and the events that will surround His return. Beloved, this is serious. This is what John referred to as the antichrist spirit - that which denies that Jesus is Christ and that He has come in the flesh.
"So how do we defend ourselves against this deceiving spirit? We defend ourselves by gaining living knowledge of God. Knowing Jesus involves much more than remembering the altarcall we responded to ten or twenty years ago. Knowing Jesus means having an ongoing, ever-increasing, ever-deepening, personal relationship with a Man who is God. It involves striving, searching and sacrificing."
- Corey Russell, Pursuit of the Holy, p. 14, 15.
anyway... just wanted to share that with you guys. that's pretty much what the whole book is about. He uses the quote from Job 36:26 "Behold, God is great, and we do not know Him." the idea is that we need to delete and throw away what we think we know about God and about Jesus, and that we need to re-learn, from the start, who God really is, and what he is to mean to us as Christians, who are made to be madly in love with Him. Mike Bickle wrote the foreword to this book, and in it he states (concerning the gaining of the knowledge of God): "Matthew 7:7-8 tells us what to do. Matthew 5:6 tells us why we should do it. And Proverbs 2:1-5 tells us how to do it." (p. 2, emphasis added). I urge you to look up those passages. they are vital to begin the journey of gaining the knowledge of God, which, in turn, will make us righteous before the throne of God. This ten-chapter book eventually touches on (i looked ahead to the last chapter and looked at some of the subtitles of the last chapter) the season in which we live, and the urgency of the hour; that if we do not gain this knowledge, then we will be found wicked before God, and we will perish.
sooo after that, if anyone would like to borrow this book after I'm done, feel free to ask!
my next book I plan to read is End Times Simplified, by David Sliker, followed by "The Rewards of Fasting. the two I can't wait to get to are Unrelenting Prayer, by Bob Sorge, and A. W. Tozer's Knowledge of the Holy. Don't know why I shared my reading shedule with you.. but hey.. if you want, get those books, and read them and share with me what you got out of them.
God bless guys (and girls)! :p
rg
