Blood-Bought World: Jesus, Idols, and the Bible

Hello, World! Jesus bought this place with His blood. Deal with it.

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If the Church is to rise up full of people who don't give a damn about the fleeting pleasures of this life and who care only for the glory of Jesus and His Kingdom, we must once again grasp what made Jesus so eminently killable. If Jesus had been born in our day, the council that condemned Him would have included a couple of well-known evangelical pastors, a few outspoken pro-life leaders, a conservative-libertarian-leaning politician, and at least one Bible-thumping fundamentalist. Jesus was murdered by church people, for churchy reasons. In Blood-Bought World, Toby J. Sumpter pinpoints the raw spots where modern-day Christians have allowed respectability, comfort, fear, love, fitness, authenticity, or other idols to become "fig leaves" to shield us from the Persons of the Trinity. We have relegated God to Sunday school presentations instead of following Jesus on the path to real authority and power: the cross. God's undiluted sovereignty demolishes every false human claim of autonomy. Men and women who know Jesus have no patience for a polite social club with religious jargon. The real Christian faith, delivered to God's people and driven by the Holy Spirit, is a wild, rambunctious, healing force set on the redemption of the world. That is what "being Christian" means.

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From the Book:

"So what do we do? Where do we turn? We turn to Jesus. We cry out to our Savior, our God, our King. We ask Him to save us from ourselves, to save us from all our programs, all our fads, all our theologizing, and we ask Him to pour out the Holy Spirit on us. But we don’t need some kind of cheap spray-on revival. We don’t need some kind of dress-up, some kind of toupee of holiness. The Church is already full of enough clowns and cowards. We need the Holy Spirit to come and raise us from the dead. We need Jesus to breathe His life into us. And when this happens it will be unmistakable, because it will make lots of people really mad. It will turn the world upside again, like it did the Roman Empire centuries ago. And for the first time in a long time, we will hear men preaching all of Jesus, all of the Bible, and, for a change, they will speak clearly into the microphone, and people will actually listen because they have met the real Jesus. They won’t sell out for anyone, because now they have backbones. When people know the real Jesus they become real men and real women—really human—and that makes them bold, creative, fearless, compassionate, and glad. When people know Jesus, they know they have nothing to lose, nothing to fear, and the world is before them. And Jesus sends them out with His blessing to discover, invent, create, rule, bless, heal, explore, and die with smiles on their faces, because they know the Man who is truly Alive, and now they can’t stay dead anymore." -From the Introduction