I don't do this very often, but I am half-way through The Naked Gospel by Andrew Farley and I want to encourage everyone I know to go out and buy it.
It is honestly freeing me of years and years of religious baggage...pointing me to Scriptures that are opening me up even more so to the reality of the New Covenant.
Here are a few passages from the book:
"God never gave us permission to divide the law into our favorite pieces so that we could select how much we're under. He delivered us from the entirety of the law by fulfilling it through Jesus Christ. Now we don't have to fulfill any of the law.
But how do we live upright lives if we don't use the Ten Commandments as our guide? After hearing that believers have no need for the law, this is a natural question. The short answer is this: The Holy Spirit comes to live inside of us when we believe, and he is enough! The fruit that comes from the Holy Spirit within us is enough. And "against such things there is no law" (Galatians 5:23).
The New Testament teaches that those who are led by the Spirit are not under the law. The law is poor substitute for the counsel of the Holy Spirit. We may think that placing ourselves under the Ten Commandments is a good way to clean house. But law-directed living has the opposite effect. The only sensible choice is to allow Christ to be himself through us. This is God's way of impacting our lives and placing his life on display...choosing "morality" can even prevent a Christian from depending solely on Christ."
"Imagine encountering a man's body lying by the side of the road. You decide to pull over to check the man's condition. As your car comes to a stop, you jump out and run toward him. Reaching down to check his pulse, you realize he has none. He's dead and gone, perhaps due to a heart attack. What can you do? Based on his appearance, you deduce that the man may have suffered heart failure due to a lifetime of poor eating habits. Instantly, you leap to your feet, rush to your car, pull out a diet book, and begin screaming important information from its pages as you head back toward him: "Chapter 1: Eating for Health and Heart!"
Stop to examine the absurdity of this situation. No amount of information on eating habits is going to resurrect this man. He's already dead. The only real solution would be for him to somehow obtain a new lease on life. In the same way, no amount of education will change the heart of a spiritually dead person. Life is the only solution to death:
When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature (flesh), God made you alive with Christ. - Colossians 2:13
Because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions- it is by grace that you have been saved. - Ephesians 2:4-5
God knew our real need. And through Christ he met that need by offering us life. The law or any other system of morality could never offer us this life. Although some may think the law solves their problems, realistically it only brings more awareness of death."
"It appears that the only people who angered Jesus were the religious rulers of his day. Why? Because the law teachers were not being honest with themselves or others. First, after watering down the potency of the law so as to concoct a palatable mixture, they painted the illusion of spiritual success under law. Second, they added in their own regulations and beat their chests as they touted themselves as the spiritually elite. Jesus hated hypocrisy, and the law only breeds two things: defeat if you're honest and hypocrisy if you're not.
Through his resurrection, Jesus would eventually offer his Jewish contemporaries genuine life. The religious zealots of his day were working against him as they pretended to already possess life.
The source of life himself saw right through their charades."
And for those of you who are offended by the fact that naked is in the title of the book...you are exactly the person who needs to read this.
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