Good News for Anxious Christians

I have yet to read this book.  It is on my list of books to go through.  From the look of it, it is going to be a wonderful read.  The following is an excerpt of an interview from Phillip Cary.  Enjoy the read.

Pastor Matt

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Interviewer:  

"Your book keeps calling us to shift our attention away from ourselves and towards Christ and what he’s done. Why is this so hard?"

Cary: 

"That’s a really interesting question. It seems you either “get it” or you don’t. People I talk to about this either see the point right away (they already “got it” a while ago) or they don’t know how to process what I’m saying. I think it requires a kind of intellectual conversion, where suddenly you understand everything differently. You start looking at things in a new way, and you wonder: why didn’t I see that before?

But then when you try to explain what you’re now seeing, it can come out sounding awfully complicated. At least that’s what I’ve found. And this is pretty frustrating, because the thing you’re seeing is really quite simple. You’re just looking in a different direction, is all. Instead of looking at your life to find God (asking, for example, “how is God working in my life?”) you look away from your life to see what the Gospel is saying about Jesus Christ. You don’t find Christ in your life; you find your life in Christ. You belong to his story, because you’re one of those for whom Christ came, one of the sinners for whom he offered himself on the cross. And that’s such good news that it changes your heart. But it gets into you not when you look at your heart, but when you look at Christ in his Word. 

Now here’s where it starts to sound really complicated. If you urge people to shift their attention away from their heart to Christ, that doesn’t help, because all you’ve done is give them one more thing they’re supposed to do–one more thing to be anxious about. It’s just one more way of focusing on dreary old ME and what I’m supposed to do to get God in my life. (We are so easily fascinated by talk about dear old ME–my heart, my life, etc.) The trick, if I can call it that, is just to talk about Christ, to tell his story, the Gospel–and then to notice that we too are part of his story.

What does that kind of talk sound like? Well, the creed gives us a good example when it says, “For us and our salvation, he came down from heaven…” and “He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate.” It locates us in Christ’s story, so we can find ourselves in him. It doesn’t tell us to turn away from ourselves and look at Christ (which is just one more way of talking about ourselves rather than Christ), but tells us about Christ in a way that turns our attention to him. And that’s what gets Christ into our hearts."

For the Remainder of the Article Go To:
http://www.dashhouse.com/2010/12/good-news-for-anxious-christians-an-interview-with-phillip-cary/

Get Your Copy On Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Good-News-Anxious-Christians-Practical/dp/1587432854

To Read An Excerpt:
http://pastormattrichard.webs.com/Excerpt_9781587432859.pdf