Beautiful Outlaw: Experiencing the Playful, Disruptive, Extravagant Personality of Jesus

This is a well written book with keen insight into the nature and character of Jesus. It is a great book to read slowly and reflect upon!!!

This book was so enlightening and gave me so much more information about Jesus’ character. I loved him before and I love him even more. Thank you for writing it. Thank you for shining light on who he really is to us all. I look forward to watching a sunrise with Jesus. In that moment, I won’t be spending my quiet time in a book about him like I do each morning, face to face I’ll be sharing that sunrise with him and I’ll probably say, Jesus will you hold my hand as we watch it together.

I gave this book a five star rating because it addresses the most serious problem of the Church today: in the words of Jesus, "the love of many will wax cold", and also, "I have this against you, you have left your first love!" Of course this love, is all about loving Jesus, and I have become greatly concerned with my observation of this missing love for Jesus, and a missing love for others in the many churches I have visited in the past 20 years. The Church of today seems to be a blend of a business, a social club with varying rules, organizations for social justice, and doctrinal dissemination and protection of Church doctrine. Very few churches truly are functioning on the two Commandments of the New Covenant that Jesus gave of loving God with our entire being, and loving others like we would want to be loved ourselves! Jesus rocked my world when He began a conversation with me when I started genuinely seeking Him nearly twenty years ago, and my heart has been his ever since. This book stoked the fires of our relationship at just the right time, a time when I was feeling discouraged due to suffering and isolation. This book turned my heart back in the direction of Jesus once agsin, and I found Him running to me with arms wide open and his heart overflowing with amazing love that sent my spirit soaring! The Church desperately needs to grab hold of the teaching of this book, so that we can be a fully functional and dynamic Body of Christ that will transform the world through the love and power of Jesus Christ! This book is a must read for everyone!!!

Beautiful Outlaw made me realize that my life had been filled with a very sneaky idolatry. Jesus said "I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing." For most of my Christian life, my main goal has been to bear fruit. It wasn't until reading this book that I realized my main focus should be abiding in Christ. Bearing fruit is important, but is not the main focus. This would be like skydiving and focusing mainly on landing- the first and primary focus should be deploying the parachute. Once you get that going, landing becomes much easier.Elderedge does at times make some illogical claims unsupported by the Bible. They are nothing I would label as necessarily wrong, but they are assumptions made without evidence. One example is where he assuming an interesting mindset of Jesus relating to the rich man on p 103. He also uses the example of a seminary graduate who lost his faith and an attendee of Christian school who hated the Bible to claim that these institutions are negative by saying "you shall know them by their fruits." (p169) Maybe this is more true than I realize, but using an example of one person is not enough to throw out an entire institution. Also on p 170 he makes the claim that "religious talk is an immediate sign of religious infection." I see nothing wrong with using the words "quiet time" or "Praise the Lord." I do agree that around non-believers we should not annoyingly throw out Christian jargon all of the time, but it seems like he says we should not use them at all. I am confused by his heart on this issue.Do not let these mistakes keep you from the book though- I simply pointed these out to encourage readers to carefully analyze what he says. Remember that if a point is not Biblically supported it is not authoritative, and if it is not Biblically or evidently supported, it is just an opinion.Reading this book has opened my eyes to some lies I had been believing, and more importantly it has further opened my eyes to the beauty of Jesus Christ. I strongly recommend this book for anyone claiming to be a follower of Christ.

Great book, great shape. Exactly as described. Fast delivery.