impinged

I read a couple books a month and they are almost always books about God. Some of them are so inspiring I want to share them with everyone. So what better place to do that than to post my occasional book review as a new feature of this blog.

As the title indicates, recently I finished the second book by Rob Bell. I was excited to read this book after reading his first book, Velvet Elvis, last year. Bell is gifted as a scholar and theologian. He spends a lot of time breaking down text from the bible: providing the actual translations to words in the Greek and Hebrew, explaining the context in which the biblical events took place, and then relating it all back to today. He shows how “this is about that.”

So what is with the title - Sex God? I have to admit the title seems a bit salacious. In a way it kind of turned me off. Ultimately, though, I understand why he named it what he did. God created us, we are sexual beings, and sex is about God. When it is not about God is when sex becomes something dirty. When it is not about God is where people get used and our souls are tainted. How is that? Well I’m not going to attempt explain what Rob did such a great job of explaining.

One final thought on Sex God. I grew up being told that sex was for marriage both at home and in the church. There are a lot of us who were influenced by conservative Christian churches who told us that sex was taboo outside of marriage. Unfortunately, that is where the conversation stopped. We spent our first 20 years believing sex was wrong and that inevitably spilled over into some marriages. Personally, I threw it all away. I know a lot of my friends did too. I couldn’t find in the Bible where it said we couldn’t have sex until marriage. I saw it said to stay away from sexual immorality, but what is that? The conversation ended and I assumed the answer was that most Christians were wrong. Sex God is the conversation we should be having. In this book Rob Bell unwraps the mystery. He shows us how everything is related, how we are related to each other, and how our actions affect others as well as ourselves.

Read this book. Continue the conversation.