Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
I finished this book on January 14, 2017. This book was a noticeable change of pace for me right from the get-go. It was a recommendation from a dear friend, and I've long wanted to read Ravi Zacharias, so I used this book as an opportunity to go deeper, and it didn't disappoint. I admittedly had to navigate the words and sentences a little slower than normal, but once I got a few chapters in I really appreciated the depth and beauty of the truth that was being shared and the story telling that was firmly rooted in the teaching of Jesus Christ. The introduction of the book has a great quote by C.S. Lewis that says "I thought I had come to a place. I found out I had come to a person." That's what this book is about: "examining the places we wish to be and those we should walk away from until we find the Person for whom we are looking.". If you're wondering Why Jesus?, or simply want to draw closer and deepen your relationship with God, this book brilliantly accomplishes that, and arms you with the knowledge and wisdom to seek and defend your faith in Jesus.
"We place such stress on feeling good that we forget to ask the basic question of whether what we believe is based in truth."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"Jesus Christ does not only change what you do, he changes what you want to do."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"Truth is that foundational reality we often resist but that, ultimately, we cannot escape."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"One simply cannot live without boundaries. The question is, whose boundaries?"
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"God alone knows how to humble us without humiliating us and how to exalt us without flattering us."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"Regardless of whether or not we agree on our worldviews, it is necessary that we learn to live peaceably with our differences."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"Christian ideas like meditating on the goodness and grace of God, solitude in prayer, and commitment to community and family are all part of the gospel of Jesus Christ."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"Life is a search for the spiritual. Whether in the throes of pain or in the disappointments of pleasure, we strive for an essence that is beyond the physical."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"The good and decent among us mourn broken homes. We mourn broken lives. We mourn shattered dreams. We celebrate reunions. We delight in long relationships that have withstood the test of time. This is a clue, a huge clue of how life is intended to be lived. We are designed, shaped, and conditioned to be in relationships of honor, and in our hearts we wish to see those relationships triumph over all other allurements."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"In Christianity, the essence of each and every person and the individual reality of each life is sacred. It is sacred because intrinsic value has been given to us by our Creator."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"Worship that is properly understood and properly given is co-extensive with life... It informs all of life, everything we do and everything we say and think. At its core it is the sense and service of God."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"It is the nature of love to bind itself. Love is not free. Someone who truly loves another cannot be other than jealous for the object of their love."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"In the person of God, our Creator, revealed in Jesus Christ, we see what legitimate pleasure is and why evil inflicts pain. These real feelings/experiences point us to our essential worth and to our calling into an intimate relationship with God. That relationship has a reach that goes beyond us to others and enjoins a life of stewardship of all creation, culminating in worship."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"God is an immensely practical Being, but he also guides us with reason and wisdom. God's Word is the scroll given to us to inform, enrich, teach, correct, and guide us to the celestial city. If we lose that Word, we have lost the light that guides us on the journey."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"Love does have its boundaries, but it must have a long reach."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"Love is not free. It has to have boundaries; otherwise, it is not love at all. It is the nature of love to bind itself."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"The worst effect of sin is that one may not even sense his or her sin."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"God meets us in the most unexpected places, just as we lose him in the least expected places. It was not the prodigal son who returned to the father who missed the gift of grace, it was the older brother who was confident in his own righteousness and believed he deserved to be celebrated who missed the feast. These are startling reminders that we are talking about a person and a relationship, not a place and an idea."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"Why Jesus? He is the Lord who makes reality beautiful and helps us to find him, even in the darkest corners of the world; not because of what we know or who we are or what we have accomplished, but because of who he is."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"To question how God could ask us to love our enemies is to reduce love to a feeling and ignore the worth that God places on the object of his love."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"It is terrible to be the victim of hate, but it is even worse to be the possessor of it."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"Knowledge without character is deadly."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"In giving the answers to our deepest struggles and breaking points, Jesus also embodied what character was intended to look like and what eternal life is. But there is more. He spoke it, lived it, and is able to empower those who seek to live that way."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"He alone offers you and me the fulfillment and joy of walking with God. For that privilege we need a Savior."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"Over the fifteen hundred years of recorded history in the Holy Bible, more than forty different authors either pointed to Jesus' coming or lived and walked with him, and speak of him as the One with authority."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"This new birth that Jesus talked about is not self-caused or self-induced or self-engendered. Nor is it by the will of any human teacher or by anyone's recommendation. You can do nothing to earn it and nothing to make it happen. You cannot make yourself worthy of it or give yourself rights to it. New birth comes from God, who alone puts right what is ultimately wrong with the world — our broken souls. No amount of meditation or silence or retreat from the world will accomplish that. Only God in his grace is big enough. The only reasonable conclusion to any self-examination is that we cannot mend our world on our own, we cannot mend our broken spirits; we need someone from the outside to enter our world and our lives and set things right. We need a Savior."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"From carpenters to fishermen to educators to theologians to civic leaders to a medical doctor — they all converge on the same truth. These don't sound like people who would make up a story and one by one go to an early death to support it! Take Paul alone — a Hebrew by birth who studied in Greece and was a citizen of Rome, a highly educated man and a leader in his community. There was nothing he wanted to do more than to disprove Jesus as the Messiah. Yet he ended up writing one-third of the New Testament and paid for his faith in Christ with his life. Why would he make up such a thing?"
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"Renouncing his rights as the Son of Man, he made it possible for the Son of God to be the sacrifice that he was."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"In the grim darkness of temptation, the light of Scripture shines upon the seduction and sends the seducers scampering. Truth will ever trump deceit when the text is applied within its context."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"When I think back to the things I hated then and love now, the contrast is unimaginable. I hated reading. Today I can hardly wait to get to the books I so dearly long to read, the history of thought, of philosophy of religion, but most of all, to those books that draw me nearer to God."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"The message of Jesus is totally relevant in connecting the greatest distance in life — the distance from the head to the heart — a journey that each one of us must take."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"Jesus proclaims the truth — that is why it must exclude all that is contrary to it. He lived and spoke with authority — that is why what he said applies to each of us. His message bridges the greatest gulf within us — that is why it is relevant even today, two thousand years later."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
"The Christian believes, too, in justice and liberation and in caring for the neediest among us. The Christian believes, too, that the mind will suddenly grasp the Ultimate. The Christian believes, too, in the ultimate synchronicity of all that is true and good and beautiful. The Christian believes, too, in moments of deep reflection and meditation and in God's self-disclosure to the one who truly seeks after him. The Christian believes, too, that the harmony of the soul that is longed for is to be sought. But the Christian believes all that is foreshadowed in the now is consummated in the divine presence of God when we are called to be with him. It is not in us. It is in him that we find it all."
― Ravi Zacharias - Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality
0 comments: