God Is Still Holy and What You Learned in Sunday School Is Still True: A Review of “Love Wins”
For a full and intellectual review, read the above.
For a short and simple review, read the following.
Firstly I believe when I die I will go to Heaven, because I have accepted that Jesus died and rose again, and I now live on a daily basis with the Holy Spirit. So not only will I have eternal life in Heaven when I die, but I have got Heaven, here, on Earth now, just as Rob suggests. Because I am attempting to live my life in the way Jesus taught. This hasn't fully excluded the odd Hellish day though!
If I didn't take any note of the fact Jesus bore my sins on the cross, I believe, if I died, I would spend eternity in Hell.
But for me, the book takes a lot of the Bible verses without looking at their full text, which makes them read out of context.
Page 11 "all we have to do is accept, confess and believe, aren't those verbs? And aren't verbs actions?"
Further down the page "Isn't that what Christians have always claimed set their religion apart - that it wasn't, in the end, a religion at all - that you don't have to do anything, because God has already done it through Jesus?"
Yes Rob, and once you have the faith that God did do all those things through Jesus, you feel led by his spirit to accept, confess and believe.
A few pages on Rob is still asking what saves us (which as a man who says he is a Christian, baffles me). He skirts over John 3 in which Jesus tells Nicodemus if he wants to see the "Kingdom of God" he must be "born again".
He could have completed the book there and then by referencing John 3: 1-18. Simples.
Some parts of the book I really identified with e.g page 152
"Imagine a high-school student whose family is part of a Christian church. She belongs to a Christian youth group, has only Christian friends, reads only Christian books and has to attend Christian chapel services, because it's mandatory at the Christian high-school she attends.
That student can potentially become so anesthetized to Jesus that she is unable to see Jesus as the stunning, dangerous, compelling, subversive, dynamic reality that he is . She has simply sung so many songs about Jesus that the name has lost it's power to provoke and inspire.
Her "nearness" can actually produce distance."
I was brought up with the 'wrath of Hell, save yourself today, before it's too late Gospel'
I do regret this approach, as I feel I have wasted a lot of years in fear, rather than in love.
What bothered me most was that the book really only concentrated on our choices and life here on Earth, where the real questions surely lie in the afterlife, whether you're a believer or not.
Rob makes out that God wants us all to be with him, so obviously it will work out that way because he's God. Why would God turn a perfectly good, but dis-believing human being away?
The answer surely is that God will not turn anyone away, there is no limit to who can have eternal life with him in Heaven, he sent his son to die for every single person on the planet. It's not about an elite of who's out and who's in. Absolutely everyone who believes in Jesus Christ taking their sins on the cross for them personally, will spend eternity in Heaven.
God does not and can not turn away from us. But we absolutely can and do turn away from him............at our peril.
Another review that might interest you over at discomfort foods.
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