Book review: Dirty God by Johnnie Moore

The title of this book makes it sound like this is going to be some controversial ‘the secret hidden message of Jesus that makes all of historic Christianity a joke’ books, but thankfully it’s not. It certainly is controversial, but for all the right reasons; it’s controversial because Christianity is controversial. From beginning to end this book’s about grace. It’s split into two parts, the first a detailed breakdown of grace shown in the life of Jesus, and the second a challenging encouragement for Christians to also live lives of grace.

To be honest, I found some things a bit annoying about this book at first. I’m not sure if it was just my copy or what, but there were some really weird text errors (like, half a paragraph appearing a page early) – there were too many for it to have just been a typo and they stopped halfway through, but that was pretty annoying. Also, the writer’s style is to make us realise that Jesus was a real person (something I appreciate), but at times it felt to me like he was trying a bit too hard for my liking.

That out of the way, I genuinely got a lot out of the book. At the most basic level it is ‘just another book about grace’, but the fact that Jesus is presented as a real person rather than some holy character really brings it to life, and to my mind the book got stronger and stronger the further I read. The book finishes with the author giving a vision for the global church which is absolutely massive, and that’s wonderful. What a joy to be called to be part of it!

I’d recommend this for anyone, Christian or not. It’s easy to read, fast-paced, and deeply challenging. Read and apply liberally.

I got this ebook for free from BookSneeze.com in exchange for an honest review.

Related articles

• Book Review : Dirty God (stevenruff.wordpress.com)
• My Take: Jesus was a dirty, dirty God (religion.blogs.cnn.com)

How long does it take to prepare for leadership?

English: The healing of the paralytic : wall painting in the baptistry of the domus ecclesiae in Dura Europos. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A brief answer to a question that’s often blown out of proportion.

Jesus created the entire universe. Close to 1AD he entered history as a human. In anyone’s book he was pretty well qualified to tell us all how the whole thing works.

But he spent thirty years growing and preparing for just three years of ministry. That’s a lot of preparation, and not much hands-on leadership. A bit of a difference from today’s world, where one year is considered sufficient to prepare people for decades of leadership.

Today’s post was sponsored by the word: patience.

God gives u-turns

Chinese depiction of Jesus and the rich man (Mark 10) – 1879, Beijing, China (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Someone once told me that Jesus is recorded as lying in John 7.

He isn’t.

But he certainly does say something to influence the behaviour of his disciples, which turns out to have effectively misled them.

In short, Jesus was getting put under pressure to go to a party so that he could tell everyone that he was God; he said ‘No, I don’t feel like going right now, you go on without me,’ so they do. Then Jesus goes later, in secret. Why the u-turn? Jesus knew that if he went with the gang he’d probably end up in the centre of some riot, and that wouldn’t be a good thing.

Back in November we felt confident that a house we’d looked round was the right house for us to put an offer on; the timing was perfect, independent Christians who knew nothing about our situation spoke words over us telling us to take it, and everything was just falling into place. Lovely.

Then, after five frustrating months, the house move fell through! God, did you make a mistake?

Well, no of course he didn’t, and now we’re back on track with a different property it’s easy to see that God had something better planned for us, and just wanted us to relax and focus on our little boy rather than on house moving for a while.

So, in effect, I’m quite happy to say that God told us to pursue this house, knowing all the while that it wasn’t going to go through.

Have you been in a situation where you’ve felt like you’ve followed God, only to be disappointed and disillusioned? Had you written it off as God’s mistake, or Satan’s victory, or your folly? Perhaps God’s actually still in control and knows more about everything way better than you or I ever could.

One day I’d like to preach this exact sermon

Got a spare three-quarters of an hour? If not, make the space. Then watch this:

Ok, Jesus is amazing.

What’s the point of debating?

This isn’t the first time I’ve thought this, and I’m sure I’m not the only one to think it, but aren’t online debate forums just a waste of time? In fact, face-to-face debates might be a waste of time too.

Pretty much nobody reads an online debate because they’d like to be convinced of ‘the right answer’, it’s almost always that they agree strongly with one side so want to listen to their guy and think ‘how wise!’ while looking at the other side and think ‘how foolish’.

So in the whole Christian/non-Christian thing, what’s the point? I’d love it if atheists or Jehovah’s Witnesses or whoever who debate online would hear the truth in Christianity and respond to the gospel, but it’s not like we see it all the time – is this all just a waste of time?

I think the answer’s no. For some online debates, the answer is clearly yes – don’t waste your life reading or adding to debates about whether homeschooling is better than state schooling for example. But in an online conversation in which the gospel is being preached and in which Jesus’ name is being glorified, we have a secret weapon. His name is the Holy Spirit, and he works through our imperfect actions to cause change in people’s hearts.