Book Review: Honestly

I really enjoyed reading Honestly: Really Living What We Say We Believe by Johnnie Moore.  Johnnie is one of the vice presidents of Liberty University, where I earned my Masters in Christian Leadership and am finishing up my Doctorate in Educational Leadership.  Johnnie is a young leader that truly engages the heart of the Christ follower that wants to grow deeper.  One of my favorite parts of Honestly has to do with the idea of redeeming your imagination to have a more fulfilling relationship with the Lord.  Johnnie gives a very honest look into his own family struggles and the perspective that God has given him as he works with university students and serves different people groups around the world.

I would really encourage you to pick up a copy of this book right away.  It is currently available for $2.51 through Amazon for the Kindle copy.  I picked up the Kindle copy and assure you that I would gladly have paid much more for the book once I realized how God used this book to spark my passion for His glory and the good of others.

Here are some thoughts I highlighted while reading…

•  “Spiritually healthy people live what they believe to be true. They are not hypocritical and halfhearted; they are not uncommitted and in perpetual limbo. They have settled on a few overarching truths that govern their lives, and they let those truths serve their role. They might still have questions and unresolved issues, but they are at least firmly planted on a few things, and those few things influence the way they think, live, and love the world around them.”
• Again and again, people tell me that their biggest struggle with Christianity is that Christians’ beliefs and Christians’ lives are incongruent.
• Hypocrisy is the swine flu that threatens the livelihood of our faith, and it can be caused by all kinds of things, such as doubt, an unbalanced spiritual diet, an improper perspective on life’s problems, a lack of commitment to Jesus’ mission, or a small vision of what God could do and wants to do through his followers.
•  What if we lived what we say we believe?
• We worked so hard to look good that somehow we neglected to actually live what we believed to be true.
• Jesus is not just another story! He is the hinge upon which history swings. His story is epic, the source of what we’re looking for regardless of whether we know how desperately we need it. Jesus’ story reveals to us what we actually need even if we don’t want it or we think we need something else even more.
• No relationship grows without time, and your relationship with Jesus and the Bible will be immeasurably richer if you let your imagination help you witness the most important events of biblical history.
• God has done more than enough to deserve our belief.
• Your relationship with God will always be weak if you don’t regularly consume truth, or if you become distracted by lesser things, or if you choose to rebel against what God says is true.
• Dying relationships limp along on fading recollections of past joys. Healthy relationships are always creating new memories.
• Make space for God.
• Have regular examinations.
• Choose to change.
• Learn to listen to God.
• Eat well and eat regularly.
• Every moment, we’re enduring a 360-degree information assault.
• Here’s a 2000-year-old tip from Jesus: You have to shut the door and keep it shut. Linger there. Study, think, pray. No multitasking! Multitasking is like the Ebola virus to your soul.
• All the spiritual passion and activity we can muster will be totally useless if we never decide to submit to that truth and actually practice it in our daily lives.
• If Christianity is what we say it is, then it is at its most powerful when we are at the end of ourselves, when life is hard, when we realize how much we actually need God.
• Desperate moments can somehow solidify our faith—if we choose to run into faith for refuge.
• The seasons of life that are most likely to cause us to doubt and question God’s goodness can serve, in the end, to somehow solidify our belief. Life’s trials move us from secondhand faith to eyewitness faith.
• Most of us don’t take Jesus’ mission seriously because we simply do not value the gospel as we should. If we did value the gospel, we would willingly and regularly tell other people about what Jesus has done in our lives.
• Empathy catalyzes compassion, and compassion empowers a person to change the world.
• There are enough of us in the world to change things if we will just rise up from our indifference and choose to get into the fray.
• Early Christians were willing to die for what so few of us are willing to live for.
• Mission is the key that unlocks the door to radical commitment.
• What could happen if the world’s Christians awakened to their potential in Jesus Christ? What if a billion Christians dared to dream big dreams and started moving forward to achieve them? What could happen if the world’s followers of Jesus Christ awakened in a concert of action inspired by a deeply rooted, sacrificial commitment to Jesus Christ?
• Vision is the enemy of hopelessness and doubt. It is the enemy of the status quo, of pessimism, and of stagnation. Vision stirs the stale water of settled reality into things new and once unimaginable. Vision presses us on to better places, girds us up when our imagined goals suddenly seem possible, and builds scaffolding around weakened faith during seasons of doubt, trial, and frustration.
• Imagination becomes vision when our dreams reflect God’s will for our lives.
• What if you had the initiative to throw yourself into the fray, to imagine and to dream, to work and to pray, to serve and to live a radical life fueled by radical belief? There are challenges to be triumphed, diseases to be cured, lives to be saved, causes to be embraced, people groups to be reached, and ten million problems that might be opportunities to redefine the world.