Book Recommendation

A few months ago, Tim and I discovered the work of Dr. Stephen Crosby. After giving several of his resources a look and a listen, and reading one of his books twice through, we'd like to highly recommend him to you. I plan on including an excerpt from his book "Silent Killers of Faith - Overcoming Legalism and Performance Based Religion" over the next several days or weeks. It is not often that we come across someone who has been teaching so many of the same things we have been teaching. It is not often we come across a body of work that this closely resembles our own.

He and his wife are moving from the west coast to North Carolina, by the way. We hope to get to meet them - we'll see what the Lord has in store!
Enjoy!

"We get it backward. We expect accountability to produce sons. Accountable behavior will never produce a father-son relationship; rather, a father-son relationship spontaneously begets accountable behavior."

"Holiness that leads to isolation or insulation is a biblical counterfeit. Religion without love has been responsible for most of the world's misery. A.W. Tozer said, "You can find more carnal, unregenerate, self centered characters in the church who have religion and are sensitive toward it than you can bury in the Grand Canyon." Separation that begets a spirit of superiority is a betrayal of Christ and His gospel."

"We need to testify to His redeeming hope, not the process of our sanctification."

(how I loooooove that. That says it all.)

"We Americans are so private in our paradigms and so "wounded" from, and resentful toward authority figures, that we are reluctant to reach out to others for help. Sometimes we are comfortable reaching out horizontally to peers when looking for comfort or help, but the real deliverance anointing comes when we reach "up", so to speak, to those who have oversight. We have to reach out to someone who values our future more than our friendship - someone who not only will provide comfort, but will also lead us to that place of discomfort, confrontation, and spiritual growth."

(My note - when a leader is accessible, and becomes a friend - and THEN there comes a time when they must assert their God-given role in a performance-based Christian's life, it often results in a great upset. The performance-based believer would much prefer to think of the leader as their peer...perhaps even their "student". They become offended - sometimes beyond their ability to deal with.)

"A salvation that only brings us to moral zero, moral neutrality, is insufficient. We will all be back in the red in no time. No, we are forever free from the creditor. The state of the New Covenant believer is one of the abundant life, an eternal credit....we are not moral debtors on spiritual probation, trying to earn enough credit to have our death sentence commuted. We are pardoned, not paroled. Our sentence has been done away with."

There is so much more in this book. Can't wait to share more with you!

3 comments:

MrsWendy said...

Can't wait to read more! Thanks for the recommendation!

Anonymous said...

When you become confident of the Love of God for you, not by mere knowledge, but by experience, you will love Him in return...and you will respond with willful, delightful obedience out of relationship not rules. The unconditional love of God must be the foundation for Grace.

Sheila Atchley said...

Dear Anonymous,

Thank you for taking time to comment! I agree...completely. "There is NO FEAR in love." Isn't it funny, how you can walk with God, even for years, and still not fully comprehend His great, great love?

I think the exhortation in the book of Jude to "keep yourselves in the love of God" is bigger than we realize.

Again, thank you so much for stopping by!