Don Miller Snippets to Mention from "Searching for God Knows What"

Things I want to remember from this book before I give it back to my sister (and, by the way, i have given up on apologizing for long blogs. let's face it, i have a lot to say and it's important, so read every word because that is what you know you want to do):

1) Jesus was ugly....Isaiah 53:2-3, "He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not." I realize this isnt a lot to go on, but it is enough for us to know He wasn't exactly Brad Pitt. It seems odd to me that God would want us to know Jesus was unsightly. It was as though the way Christ looked was part of the message He was to communicate. I watched an interview with Mel Gibson recently about his film The Passion of the Christ. Gibson said it was important for Jesus to look very masculine in the film, and he wanted an actor who was good-looking. And I thought the movie was quite beautiful, but I wondered if very many people would go to see it if the guy who played Jesus in the movie were ugly. And that made me wonder how many people would follow Jesus today if, say, He showed up in American looking the way He looked thousands of years ago. I wondered if anybody would want to interview Jesus on television. I'll bet, if Jesus came to American and tried to do television interviews, the only people who would want to interview Him would be people on public television because on public television, they are not concerned about associating their television personalities with the commercial endorsement of products. (pg. 125)

2) Jesus liked to be with people...Christ calls us in the Bible to live our lives for two main things--loving the Lord with everything we have and loving people with everything we have. "Christ is saying that the two most important commandments of God are to have within us a relational commitment to God and to other people...It must have been wonderful to spend time with Christ, with Somebody who like you, loved you, believed in you, and sought closeness foreign to skin-bound man. A person would feel significant in His presence...It must have been thrilling to looking into the eyes of God and have Him look back and communicate that himan beings down to the individual, are of immense worth and beauty and worthy of intimacy with each other and the Godhead...People don't go out and get tortured and arrested for somebody who doesn't love them. If somebody loves us we will do all kinds of things in their name, for them, because of them. They will make us who we are." (pg. 128)

3) "The Gospel: A Relational Dynamic...It isn't exactly a scientific process. Perhaps the reason Scripture includes so much poetry in and outside the narrative, so many parables and stories, so many visions and emotional letters, is because it is attempting to describe a relational break man tragically experienced with God and a disturbed relational history man has had since then and, furthermore, a relational dynamic man must embrace in order to have relational intimacy with God once again, thus healing himself of all the crap he gets into while looking for a relationship that makes him feel whole...Becoming a Christian might look more like falling in love than baking cookies...But what I am suggesting is that, not unlike any other relationship, a person might need to understand that Jesus is alive, that He exists, that He is God, that He is in authority, that we need to submit to Him, that He has the power to save, and so on and so on, all of which are ideas, but ideas entangled in a kind of relational dynamic. This seems more logical to me because if God made us, wants to know us, then this would require a more mysterious interaction that what would be required by following a kind of recipe...It makes you wonder if we have fashioned a gospel around our culture and technology and social economy rather than around the person of Christ." (pg. 154-156)

4) Morality..."In my opinion, if you hate somebody because they are different from you, you'd best get on your knees and repent until you can say you love them, until you have gotten your soul right with Christ." (pg. 190)