Jesus I Never Knew, The

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Yancey begins his book with a look at the Jesus he learned about in church in his childhood years. He then describes how his view of Jesus changes over the years as he matures and as he has different experiences with Jesus and the people who claim to be Jesus' followers. It is a result of these confusing experiences that Yancey decides to try to strip away all the layers of bias that the church and the followers of Jesus add to His life and message. Goodness cannot be imposed externally, but most grow internally, bottom up. God’s power is internal, non-coercive. He is not a Nazi. He does not force himself on those who are unwilling, haughty, skeptical.

In a final section Yancey looks at what it means that Jesus left his followers to carry out his ministry on earth. He knew many would not believe in him—even believers might forget him or behave as if he were never present—and he foresaw that the world would be left in a dire state while believers awaited his return. The modern church sometimes fails to follow through on Jesus’ ministries to the outcast and oppressed and just as often distorts the biblical portrait of Jesus. In his final chapter Yancey sums up Jesus as a healer, holy yet a friend to sinners, and a God who yearned to love humankind. Christian Themes Jesus had not come primarily to heal bodies, but souls. When it came to miracles, Jesus priorities were different than ours. Miracles rarely encouraged long-term repentance, faith, obedience, but gawkers and sensation seekers. Messiah was not going to save the world by Band-aid solutions, but by a “deeper, darker, left-handed mystery, at the center of which lay his own death.” (Written by …). Jesus stressed the infrequency of miracles. Death, decay and entropy and destruction are the true suspension of God’s laws; miracles are the early glimpses of the restoration…Jesus miracles are the only truly ‘natural’ things in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded. The Jesus I Never Knew is a work of Christian nonfiction by Philip Yancey. First published in 1995, and nominated for the 1996 ECPA Christian Book Award, the book offers readers a new perspective on Jesus and his teachings. The book received widespread critical acclaim from Christian readers, and critics praise it for encouraging readers to let go of preconceived ideas and examine Jesus in new ways. Yancey is a prolific, award-winning author who specializes in Christian nonfiction. Before working on full-length books, Yancey worked as a journalist for numerous publications, including religious, natural, and historical journals.

Whatever activism I get involved in, it must not drive out love and humility. Whenever Church intermingles with State, the appeal of the faith suffers as well. Our mission is to communicate God’s reconciling love, which is what Christ came to demonstrate. I've found this method is really just cover to justify rejecting unpopular Biblical truth. Specific to this approach is an agenda against a subset of the church simply because it teaches holy living and is audacious enough to call sin what it is; he expresses this philosophy implicitly and explicitly in his writings. In this regard, his misuse of scripture is egregious - he either selectively quotes out of context or completely ignores scripture that contradicts his points. And using secular films as the basis for teaching the sermon on the mount in a college course? people be as perfect as God. His standards seem impossible for humans to uphold: An angry thought is as sinful as murder, and a lustful look the same as an adulterous act. Yancey briefly surveys how theologians over the centuries have interpreted the sermon in ways that made human failure acceptable.

Yancey surveys the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ miracles and compares his own childhood view of miracles (magical signs proving Jesus’ deity, promising personal safety, and calling him to greater faith) with his adult view (miracles can be naturally explained, believers often come to harm, and miracles rarely build faith). Yancey believes miracles show how God will one day restore the world to a natural, undamaged state. Jesus learned about poverty, family squabbles, social rejection, verbal abuse, betrayal, pain, unanswered prayer. Gethsemane is the story of an unanswered prayer. Yancey, Philip. Church, Why Bother? My Personal Pilgrimage. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1998. Yancey examines his own experiences at church and how he came to view church as a place of community.

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I found it interesting how Yancey shows how Jesus was not really forceful, not on the surface at least. His power lay in His quiet confidence. He tells how the Sermon on the Mount and the words spoken by Jesus are impossible to live by—He set the bar very high. From it, I found that Jesus was perhaps setting us goals to live by, proving He was the Greatest Negotiator of all! These goals are out of our reach. They were targets to aim for and we shouldn’t feel bad when we fail, Yancey says. In 2021 Philip released two new books: A Companion in Crisis and his long-awaited memoir, Where the Light Fell. Other favorites included in his more than twenty-five titles are: Where Is God When It Hurts, The Student Bible, and Disappointment with God. Philip's books have won thirteen Gold Medallion Awards from the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, have sold more than seventeen million copies, and have been published in over 50 languages. Christian bookstore managers selected The Jesus I Never Knew as the 1996 Book of the Year, and in 1998 What’s So Amazing About Grace? won the same award. His other recent books are Fearfully and Wonderfully: The Marvel of Bearing God’s Image; Vanishing Grace: Bringing Good News to a Deeply Divided World; The Question that Never Goes Away; What Good Is God?; Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?; Soul Survivor; and Reaching for the Invisible God. In 2009 a daily reader was published, compiled from excerpts of his work: Grace Notes.