pat loughery

I have been so powerfully affected by Scot McKnight’s blog (which I pointed you to earlier) that, when I ran across his book The Jesus Creed in Barnes & Noble a while back, I decided to pick it up to see how Scot writes in a bound-book form.

Even though I’m only on chapter 5, I’m really impressed, and deeply impacted.

The Jesus Creed is a thick book, but broken into 30 small (10-12 page) chapters which would work well as a devotional or small group study. The feel of the book is similar to much of N. T. Wright and Dallas Willard’s work – a call to authentic discipleship infused with extremely helpful historical background that help to expand upon our understanding of Scripture with a depth that most of us just don’t usually have. And like the best of Willard and Wright’s work, it’s very approachable, easily readable and yet will take some pondering and consideration to let it fully sink in.

A few examples from the beginning of the book so you get a flavor for it:

Chapter 1 – The Jesus Creed
Scot teases out the relationship between the Shema, the central prayer of the Jewish faith, with Jesus’ answer to the teacher of the law’s question about the most important commandment in the Torah (Mark 12:28-34). Scot shows that Jesus’ intention for spiritual formation in his answer is that love of God must necessarily become missional: it must express itself as love for others. Hence, the Jesus Creed is Love God; Love Others. To go a bit further, the Jesus Creed becomes Love God and Love others, and love God by following Jesus. This is a fundamental refocusing of the Shema.

Chapter 2 – Praying the Jesus Creed
Having established Jesus’ “amendment” to Shema, Scot turns to Jesus’ model for prayer given to his disciples in Matt 6:9-13. And here, he brings us back to another historical-contemporary prayer, the Kaddish (“The Sanctification”), and Scot shows again how Jesus transforms this prayer from “May God be glorified” to “May God be glorified and we also pray for what others need and what God wants for others”. Scot argues for the centrality of the Our Father prayer to spiritual formation (like Dallas Willard does as well).

Chapter 3 – The Abba of the Jesus Creed
As chapter 1 is Jesus’ Creed and chapter 2 is the prayer of the Jesus Creed, chapter 3 is the story of the Jesus Creed: the prodigal Abba in Luke 15:11-32. Here Scott describes the unconditional, overwhelming love of our Abba (sounding now like the best of Brennan Manning’s message). He focuses us on Abba in three steps of personal prayer. He includes a very interesting note about the village community’s ceremony that was performed to banish an unruly child who had returned home to a disgraced family, and how the father in Jesus’ story aggressively pursued reconciliation instead of banishment for his child.

Hopefully you get an idea of this book’s flavor. It’s still early, but I’m even more impressed with this book than I am with Scot’s blogging, and that is saying a lot.

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This post powered by the music of Broken Walls – tracks from Beautiful Great One and Created to Worship (Native America
n worship). Wow, I love this music.