Suffice to say, she actually lives out the Beatitudes, and each chapter is filled with accounts of miracles.   I’m not talking minor miracles like finding parking spaces during Christmastime at the mall.  I’m talking blind-seeing, deaf-hearing, food-multiplying, dead-being-raised kinds of miracles.  It is a short and easy book, 150 pages, big font.  Yet I cannot help but come back to it, over and over this week.  Ok, here are just two examples:

She talks about how she was compelled by God to witness to “Jane,” a woman in London who had been so abused that she was extremely hostile, and tried to beat Heidi to death.  During this time, a homeless man who she had been feeding (at times he would just spit in her face), saw the whole thing.  But because Heidi refused to let him call the police, and just kept loving Jane, telling her how much she is beautiful to Jesus, right when Jane was about to kill her, the homeless man dragged her away and said, “You’ve been telling me about Jesus’ love for 2 years, but tonight I finally saw it.  I want Jesus, too.”  Then, two weeks later, Jane also came to her and became a follower of Jesus.  I thought as I read this book, if I have the same Jesus in me, then who can’t I love?  I don’t even have anyone attacking me.  Christ love compels me.

Second– I would like to share some of the miraculous testimonies but I don’t want to spoil any of them, so I will just share this quote from the chapter on hunger and thirsting for righteousness:  “Even the poor do not like stale bread.  We cannot live on yesterday’s manna or old revelation.  Often in religious circles people are offered stale bread to eat, but no one wants it.  So we must press into His presence and be filled with His real, fresh food every day or we will grow stale.”  Amen!  Last year for a period of time, when I was really hearing from the Lord, I prayed every day, “Give us this day my daily bread, Lord, I need fresh manna!”   It’s been a while even since I prayed that because I hadn’t noticed how stale I was getting; it kind of crept in. Now, daily, I will also beg Him for fresh bread.

She says “Attending a conference is not enough.  You must eat and drink until you are dripping Jesus.  You must be so full of Him that you start leaking Jesus.  You must eat  alot– more than just twice a year.  You must eat enough for a nation. . . In order to function and make it through ond day, I have to spend hours every day alone with my Jesus.  I must have His presence or I cannot survive.  I am often on my face in His presence.  So I stay hidden in His heart, soaking in the secret place.”  She goes on to say, “Learn to eat and drink from the Word.  Fill your hunger and thirst with the Word.  Jesus is the Word– the Bread of LIfe.  See him in the Word, in the poor, and in the face of the hungry ones on the street.”  Amen!  I was rekindled in my heart to spend that precious, secret time with Him.  This sounded just like Paul in Ephesians:  “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.”  I believe this is the same process, eating the Bread of Life = strengthening our inner being, building up the inner man, so that Jesus shines, literally bursts, out from our hearts.   This is our only option as a church.  Otherwise, we find our hearts instead becoming hard, which then causes darkened understanding, separation from the life of God.  (Eph. 4:18)

I hope by this book review you don’t feel like I just introspectively got depressed that she is so spiritual and I am a blind, naked, poor mess.  That was not the only thing I took away from this book, and I hope you don’t, either.  Instead, the main point was  I felt overwhelmed at how much God is REAL, He is ALIVE, He loves us, He longs for us, He hungers and thirsts for us, and I can enter into His presence, and a life with Jesus is worth any sacrifice.  Life with Jesus is the most joyful life, because He is the most joyful person, “Thou hast annointed me with the oil of joy,” and “who for the joy set before Him, endured the cross.”

Next time, another fantastic book called Rules of Engagement, by Derek Prince.

Here is an article written by Tim Keller describing his latest book –

Just last fall I wrote an article in the newsletter telling you that “Yes, I wrote a book,” The Reason for God, which came out in February 2008. It has been bought and distributed much more widely than I had ever imagined it would be. This is to tell you that I’ve got another volume coming out this fall. (I’m not as prolific as that might seem; both manuscripts were finished at the same time, after years of work!)

The new book is entitled The Prodigal God and is available October 30th. It is an expansion of my sermon on the Prodigal Son parable in Luke 15. Kathy and I have long felt that this was the clearest and best single exposition of the gospel I’ve been able to do over the years. My interpretation of the parable was originally based on a sermon called “Sharing the Father’s Welcome” that I heard preached by Dr. Edmund P. Clowney over 35 years ago. That sermon had a profound impact on how I preached for the rest of my ministry. In some ways the teaching of this sermon is at the very foundation of Redeemer’s ministry. I have preached on the text three times at Redeemer over the years. The initial time was in the first several weeks of our church’s life in 1989.The second was about ten years later, and the last time was to start off the 2005 Vision Campaign. Each time I felt God helping me get deeper into the meaning of the story. .After the 2005 sermon, I began to turn it into a short book. 

What’s the book about? It’s about being ‘prodigal.’ The word ‘prodigal’ is an English word that means recklessly extravagant, spending to the point of poverty. The dictionaries tell us that the word can be understood in a more negative or a more positive sense. The more positive meaning is to be lavishly and sacrificially abundant in giving. The more negative sense is to be wasteful and irresponsible in one’s spending. (Some people think prodigal means ‘wayward,’ but there is no dictionary that indicates that the word means ‘immoral.’) The negative sense obviously applies to the actions of the younger brother in the Luke 15 parable. But is there any sense in which God can be called ‘prodigal’? I think so. 

First, the elder brother is offended by the father’s extravagant and (to him) irresponsible welcome of his younger brother. The father, of course, represents God, and legalists are always offended by the gospel of free grace. They see it as wasteful and unfair. After all, they worked for their acceptance. These are the people to whom Jesus was telling the parable in the first place—the Pharisees who objected to Jesus’ lavish grace to tax collectors and sinners. They certainly thought Jesus was being far too free and irresponsible with the love and favor he was promising them from God. Jesus depicts them in the parable as the elder brother upset with his father’s prodigality. 

Second, the positive meaning of the term ‘prodigal’ is definitely true of God. He spent himself to the uttermost on the Cross. He did so ‘recklessly’ in the sense that he did not reckon the cost to himself. Jesus was someone who spent himself into helpless poverty (2 Corinthians 8:9) and was ‘in want’ in the most extreme way. 

So the title ‘Prodigal God’ calls attention not only to the mistaken way that legalists regard God’s gospel of grace, but also to how Jesus, though he was rich, spent everything without thought for himself, that we might be saved. Charles Spurgeon’s sermon on this text was entitled ‘Prodigal Love for the Prodigal Son,’ which sums up well all the senses of the word in one sentence. 

During the years I was working on these two books, my provisional titles were “The Gospel for Non-believers” (The Reason for God) and “The Gospel for Believers” (The Prodigal God.) This second book is my way of doing what Martin Luther directed us Christian ministers to do. “This…truth of the gospel…is also the principal article of all Christian doctrine, wherein the knowledge of all godliness consists. Most necessary it is, therefore, that we should know this article well, teach it unto others, and beat it into their heads continually.”

“If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to be a worldly California academic curious enough to volunteer in Mother Teresa’s Calcutta Mission, prepare to be surprised. After struggling to translate her experience there for a secular audience, Dr. Poplin has ended by translating her readers into Mother Teresa’s own unfamiliar, spiritual dimension. Watch out–you will not be able to keep from meditating.” — –C. John Sommerville, author of The Decline of the Secular University

“In this poignant, elegant, humble memoir, Poplin gives us far more than Mother Teresa or even another Mother Teresa story. She gives us instead the Jesus and the Christianity that operated through Mother Teresa. Poplin’s experience of finding Calcutta irrevocably changed her soul. It will change yours as well.” — –Phyllis Tickle, former religion editor, Publishers Weekly, and compiler of The Divine Hours

“Mary Poplin seeks to integrate her experience with Mother Teresa into her work and life and to come together with others who hunger and thirst. This book can be a platform to gather those of us so disposed so that the flame is not lost and will continue to produce abundant fruit, fruits of eternal life.” — –Father Angelo Devananda Scolozzi, U.F.W., Centro de Espiritualidad Madre Teresa, Chihuahua, Mexico

“Mary Poplin takes us on a pilgrimage toward clarity about who we are and what our life amounts to. The pilgrimage is simultaneously through Calcutta and through the heart of the ‘sophisticated’ dynamics of university life in America. As it proceeds we gain a better understanding of the social forces that govern the university in the name of intellect–but falsely so. It will be of special help to those engaged in academic life, at whatever level. They will find here a guide who has been grasped by God and enabled to see that life and the surrounding cultural world for what they really are, and what under God they could be.” — –Dallas Willard, professor of philosophy, University of Southern California, and author of The Divine Conspiracy and Hearing God