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Speaking of Jesus

Have you heard the one about Jesus? According to Carl Medearis, author of Speaking of Jesus, you'd like that one. No joke.

I just finished Carl's book in less than a week, and I'm not the fastest reader. The sub-title, The Art of Not-Evangelism, says it all. This was a refreshing conversation that ended with me face-to-palm saying, 'of course, it is that simple!'

At under 200 pages, Carl pounds the point home that Jesus is what we should be talking about, not religion. Jesus is what attracts people, not our explanations of how our denominations began or even why our non-denominations began. He walks us through his experiences, his conversations and through the Gospel accounts of Jesus and points out the simplicity of living like this.

At the same time, he naturally points out the need and his belief that doctrine is important. He's not about to start denying basic truths about Jesus, God, the Bible, or anything else that we defend. He just says we don't need to defend them when we're talking to people.

I think he may be on to something here. If you knew the end of your conversation wasn't going to end with 'I guess we'll have to agree to disagree' but instead 'I'd like to know more about a guy like that', wouldn't you want to change what you talk about? If our whole purpose is supposed to be about pointing people to Jesus, shouldn't we spend more time pointing people to Jesus?

I received this book for free from my friends at Speak Easy. They ask me to say what I think, but they don't tell me what to think. I think this book is a very good, and important, piece of conversation we should be having. Here's some more you can check out from Carl.

Carl’s blog: http://www.carlmedearis.com/blog/

Book excerpt from Speaking of Jesus read by Carl Medearis (seriously, give this a listen: this will either make you fall in love with the book or decide it isn’t for you): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfgk1sTJGYU

Please tag your posts for this book as #SpeakingOfJesus
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