Searching For God Knows What IV

August 30, 2007 | Filed Under books, donald miller, gospel, scripture, way of Jesus |

searching-for-god-knows-what.jpgHere is another excellent excerpt from chapter 10 of Donald Miller’s “Searching For God Knows What.” The title of chapter 10 is “The Gospel of Jesus: It Never Was a Formula.”

Becoming a Christian might look more like falling in love than baking cookies. Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that in order for a person to know Jesus they must get a kind of crush on Him. But what I am suggesting is that, not unlike any other relationship, a person might need to understand that Jesus is alive, that He exists, that He is God, that He is in authority, that we need to submit to Him, that He has the power to save, and so on and son on, all of which are ideas, but ideas entangled in a kind of relational dynamic. This seems more logical to me because if God made us, wants to know us, then this would require a more mysterious interaction than what would be required by following a kind of recipe.

I realize it all sounds terribly sentimental, but imagine the other ideas popular today that we sometimes hold up as credible: We believe a person will gain access to heaven because he is knowledgeable about theology, because he can win at a game of religious trivia. And we may believe a person will find heaven because she is very spiritual and lights incense and candles and takes bubble baths and reads books that speak of centering her inner self; and some of us believe a person is a Christian because he believes five ideas that Jesus communicated here and there in Scripture, though never completely at one time and in one place; and some people believe they are Christians because they do good things and associate themselves with some kind of Christian morality; and some people believe they are Christians because they are Americans.

If any of these models are true, people who read the Bible before we systematically broke it down, and, for that matter, people who believed in Jesus before the printing press or before the birth of Western civilization, are at an extreme disadvantage. It makes you wonder if we have fashioned a gospel around our culture and technology and social economy rather than around the person of Christ.

- Donald Miller in Searching For God Knows What

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2 comments so far
  1. Bill Huffhine September 3, 2007 5:55 am

    Thanks for your thoughts on my church planting post. I’ve been curious about your church planting network in Kansas City. Is there a website for the network? Or is everything on your blog. I’d love to learn more about what you’re doing.

  2. Brad Brisco September 4, 2007 8:25 am

    Hey Bill

    I posted on your blog a copy of the church planting strategy that we are implementing here in KC, I think it will explain a lot of what we are trying to do here.