Friday, February 02, 2007

Furious Pursuit (Book Review)






I received a request a while back to review a book by Tim King and Frank Martin titled "Furious Pursuit (Why God will never let you go). Of course I love a free book, so I said yes.

Now i am a grace junkie i admit... I love that God loves us and that even in the sending His Son to die in our place, we see that it is out of Love that God sent His Son to learn suffering, to learn obedience, and to taste death... all on our behalf. Some that as God being a cruel Father, yet miss that the Son willingly laid down His life for us, to give His life to us... in that to live His Life in and through us. In this Jesus also turned this fallen worlds system of power and authority on it's head... and restored all back to God through Himself.

So often we hear of wrath, or of an angry God that is out for vengeance, and in that we think, of a god that desires to only punish sinners and hates sinners... which is farthest from the truth... If God hated sinners, He would not have even tried to save us. For scripture tells us in Romans 5:8-11


"But God demonstrates his own love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, because we have now been declared righteous8 by his blood, we will be saved through him from God’s wrath. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, how much more, since we have been reconciled, will we be saved by his life? Not only this, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received this reconciliation."


At first as i was reading this book I kept finding myself going "yep, heard that before, yep, and that... and.... hmmm that was a pretty interesting.... hmmm wow, that was insightful, and..." In other words, I found that though much of this book seemed on the surface a retread of many other great books on Grace and God's love out there, just when i thought I knew exactly where the authors were going, they hit me with some great thoughts. I really loved the chapters covering Hosea and Gomar. How God told Hosea to married of all things a prostitute... and love her... even in and through her unfaithfulness... The authors point out that all of us are Gomar... truly not worthy of forgiveness and even worse that we seem thing that when we are done "having our fun" that we can just go back to God like nothing happened... yet instead of wrath and hatred and punishment, God woos us into the desert and lavishes His love on us, to restore us to Himself... it is an amazing story and truth of scripture.

I truly recommend this book and the work book that is also available and I hope to soon start a small group that will study through this.

Blessings,
iggy



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