Greg Stauffer told me to read . . .

I'm reading Eugene Peterson's book, The Jesus Way, right now. It is top-notch stuff. The sort of reading that challenges my thinking and my acting. Check out some of these yanked-from-their-context quotes:

"We can't proclaim the Jesus truth but then do it any old way we like. Nor can we follow the Jesus way without speaking the Jesus truth." (p. 4)

"The North American church at present is conspicuous for replacing the Jesus way with the American way." (p. 5)

"A consumer church is an anti-Christ church." (p. 6)

You can see, I imagine, why I was so taken with the book after just a few pages. Peterson contends that the Jesus Way is the culmination, or better put perhaps, ultimate expression of the faith that is exhibited in the Patriarchs. In writing about Abraham, for example, Peterson shares the "way of faith":

A sacrificial life is the means, and the only means by which a life of faith matures. By increments a sacrificial life - an altar here, and altar there - comes to permeate every detail of life: parenthood, marriage, friendship, work, gardening, reading a book, climbing a mountain, receiving strangers, circumcision, and getting circumcised. Abraham did not become our exemplar in faith by having it explained to him but by engaging in a lifetime of travel, life on the road, daily leaving something of himself behind him (self-sovereignty) and entering something new (God-sovereignty).

Sacrifice is to faith what eating is to nutrition . . .

Good stuff!