The love that Jesus calls his followers to is a holistic spirituality, encompassing the emotions (heart), character (soul),  intellect (mind), and physicality (strength). (Read Mark 12:28-31)

Today I decided to share 4 book recommendations for those of you looking for some stimulating summer reading.  Each of these books have deepened my own love for God, but in very different ways.

HEART

The Journey of Desire: Searching for the Life We Only Dreamed of By John Eldredge

Eldredge is a fantastic writer and story-teller, but also a man of deep spiritual pursuit.  If you read this book, I can guarantee your heart will be refreshed, challenged, and stirred to pay attention to your deepest desires.  God doesn’t want to kill our deep desires, he wants to redeem them. I can’t recommend this book enough, especially if you are feeling spiritually dry, emotionally numb, or longing to fall back in love with God.

SOUL

True Spirituality by Francis Shaeffer

This is just one of many classic books by Francis Shaeffer, who is  considered one of the most powerful voices in the latter half of the twentieth century to church and culture.  Shaeffer said  this should of been his first book.  After a major crisis of faith, Shaeffer wrote this book with a new confidence in what the Bible teaches and how followers of Jesus can truly live differently.

MIND

Wisdom and Wonder by Abraham Kuyper

This book is written at a fairly high intellectual level, so keep your dictionary close at hand and get ready to read certain paragraphs two or three times before they make sense. However, don’t let Kuyper’s depth keep you from embracing this powerful work that builds a theology specifically for Science and Art.  If you are interested and/or gifted in these two particular areas, you need to read this book.

Strength

Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World by Bob Goff

This book is made of many small chapters in which the author Bob Goff shares his own stories of a life of following Jesus in practically engaging with others.  Goff has been instrumental in the spiritual life of author Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz), and this book will inspire you to love God by loving other people with all your strength.

A primary focus of #LiveFully is to consider the intersection of faith and culture, and specifically how Christians navigate life in the world today. Below are 3 (general) kinds of Christians.  I’d encourage you to consider your personal attitudes as well as the attitudes of your community as you read.

1. Christians against the world

These Christians possess an “us versus them” attitude.  To be a committed Christian means to stand staunchly against anything that is secular and not Christian in nature. Christians against the world have no problem with living inside a Christian subculture because this is in fact the point – to not engage with the secular sinful world. Generally, these people only say “NO” to the culture that surrounds them. Continue Reading…

When Jesus calls his followers the “salt of the earth,” one implication is that they are to be the flavor that brings bland living to life.  Christians are supposed to live the most attractive lives and carry the most joy, regardless of their circumstance.

We should throw the best parties, hold the greatest traditions, and have the healthiest families.  Our marriages should thrive, growing more intimate as time goes by.  Our friendships should be the most authentic and meaningful.

Followers of Christ should have lives that others want, and I don’t just mean other Christians. People who do not know Christ should be attracted to the depth and richness of the lives we live.  According to Jesus, they should even start to praise our Heavenly Father as they watch us live our lives (Matthew 5:16).  This is one aspect of what it means to be the salt – the savoring quality of life on the earth today. Continue Reading…

Brian Burchik, founder of #LiveFully project, shares about Christians’ calling to be salt and light of the earth, and specifically how easily we can drift from that call and settle for living in a subculture away from the world. You can listen to the entire message given at Grace Church entitled “What does God adopt us into?” here.

Picture in your head the clothes dresser in your room. How many drawers does it have? Are they all closed? (if so, pat yourself on the back, you’ve accomplished something I have never been able to do).

Now that you have your dresser in mind, I want to suggest that our lives are a lot like a dresser.  By this I mean there are many fragmented parts (drawers) of our life, and they get stacked up on each other. We have the “Family” drawer, and here we act a certain way, have certain responsibilities, and spend a great deal of time. We have a “Friends” drawer, and we relate to these people in different ways than you relate to your family, and you act a bit different as well.

If you are a student, then there is a “School drawer,” or if you are a worker than you have the “Work drawer.”  Then, depending on what you love to do, you may have a “Sports drawer,” or “Music drawer,” or “Photography drawer.”

Additionally, there is perhaps some type of “Health drawer,”  some kind of “Finances drawer,” and finally, there is your “Religion drawer.” Whether you are a Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or athiest, everyone has a religion drawer because everyone has their own answers to the big questions of life, as well as ways they act in response. Continue Reading…

Hey everyone! Thanks to all those who participated in our first annual photo contest! As we’ve said before, we hope to make this a recurring event, so if you’re a photographer be on the look out for good photos.

I would like to introduce you to our finalists. Take a look at each of them, and at the end you will get to choose your favorite one. Whichever picture receives the most votes will win!

If you believe a certain photo deserves the win, then share this page with your friends through facebook, e-mail, twitter, or whatever else you can think of. You can only vote once, but you can get as many other people to vote as you want.

Remember, the goal of this contest was to present a photo that demonstrates the idea behind #LiveFully, and here we go:

Photo 1 – Stephanie: “Being 20 years old and still finding pleasure in the beauty of childhood, the power of a swingset, is what it means to live fully.”
Click to see the other finalists

Jesus is a revolutionary, and it is a revolution of life.  He alone is the source of the most full life, and as followers of Christ, we not only have access to full life here on the earth, but we have hope that life will continue into the future, with a new heaven and a new earth and new resurrected bodies.  We have hope that when the time is right, Jesus Christ will return and establish the fullness of His reign.

German Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it like this…

“the kingdom of heaven descends, the face of the earth will be renewed, and it will belong to the flock of Jesus.  God does not forsake the earth: he made it, he sent his Son to it, and on it he built his Church.  Thus a beginning has already been made in this present age.  A sign has been given.  The powerless have here and now received a plot of earth, for they have the church and its fellowship, its goods, its brothers and sisters, in the midst of persecutions even to the length of the cross.  The renewal of the earth begins at Golgotha, where the meek One died, and from thence it will spread.  When the kingdom finally comes, the meek shall possess the earth.”

Our future as followers of Christ is better than we could ever imagine.  We are not headed toward some condo in a cloud as my pastor often says.  Our souls are not flying up to some super spiritual existence.  Continue Reading…

Every now and then, you read a book that changes your life.  This has been the case for me over the course of the last two weeks.  The book is called “Wisdom & Wonder,” and the author is dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920). Although his “big words” can make it grueling to read at times, it is worth wading through with dictionary close by to mine out the gold he offers.

A major emphasis of #LiveFully is to rediscover a Christian theology that integrates into all of life, resulting in followers of Jesus that are impacting (not escaping) mainstreams cultures of the world. Kuyper was a brilliant mind that lived with the same conviction. Continue Reading…

Teal is the official color of #LiveFully.  Besides for being a nice color, it’s very significant to the purpose of the #LiveFully project.  There is a lot of theology packed into it. Seriously.

As you know, teal is a blend of the colors blue and green (welcome back to Kindergarten).  Because it’s the color of the sky, blue often symbolizes the heavens.  Green, on the other hand, symbolizes the earth (no explanation necessary).  Put them together, you have teal – or symbolically, the unity of Heaven and Earth.

#LiveFully seeks to rediscover a Christian spirituality that integrates into all of physical life on the earth.  Just like Jesus prayed that God’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven,” we believe that biblical Christianity is not about escaping the physical earth to go to spiritual heaven.

Instead, Christians are called to engage in God’s project of redemption on the earth today, as they eagerly await the second coming of Jesus and the New Heaven and New Earth, when God will make all things new (Revelation 21:1-7) . Continue Reading…