Living the Cross Centered Life (1)

What is the most important thing in your life? What is the one essential that you absolutely could not live without? Where does your mind go in your free moments? What does your mouth speak of when someone is listening? What is the one word that someone thinks of when they think of you? What is the one goal you are working for? What catches your interest and keeps your attention? What cause gets your most passionate work? What is the lens through which you view life and history? What gives you the greatest joy and contentment? What angers you? What motivates you? What, above all other things, has the priority?

These are a few of the questions with which CJ Mahaney begins Living the Cross Centered Life. I don't know about you, but that's intimidating to me. My honest answers are a little scattered--a hobby here, a talent there, a friend, a doctrine, a cause, a feeling, an experience. Mostly good things. But as one of Mahaney's friends says, "Take a good thing; make it a god-thing--that's a bad thing."

Mahaney writes on pages 14-15, "Nothing else--not even things that are biblical and honorable--are of equal or greater importance than this: God sent His Son to the cross to bear His wrath for sinners like you and me. If there's anything in life we should be passionate about, it's the gospel."

I'm excited to dig deeper into this book, not that the book will do anything in and of itself, but that God will use it to soften my heart and reveal to me my sin and draw me closer to Him.

If you don't have one already, I hope you pick up a copy of the book at the TFC bookstore on Sunday! Read fifteen minutes a day, and by God's grace we'll come out in the end more in love with Him than when we began.