The Three Hardest Words in the World to Get Right

The three simple words "I love you" capture the heart of Jesus' life and ministry. They form the bottom line and top drawer of all his teachings. And they remain the three hardest words in the world to get right. Two pronouns and a verb have never been so difficult to grasp, much less to practice.
Popular culture has ruined love's reputation by redefining it first as romance, and then as lust. But it's not just the meaning of the word love that causes so much confusion. To fully understand love, we also need to find out who we are in God's eyes and whom we are commanded to love. Following Jesus can be described as the daily practice of all three words: I. Love. You. Join Sweet in this eye-opening, life-altering exploration of three simple, one-syllable words. After all, the lifestyle of love is the only life that Jesus calls you to live.
 

How did we get the point, but miss the Person? Christianity wasn’t founded on a proposition. God sent Jesus to deliver a proposal: “Will you love me? Will you let me love you?” Propositions inform us, but God’s proposal of love in Jesus transforms us. God doesn’t answer every question, God invites us into a mystery. God’s proposal of love is truly Out of the Question…Into the Mystery. “Faith is not simply a decision that is made or a commitment that is promised… Rather, faith is a new life that we practice. And that life is practiced in the context of relationship.”

God made us for relationship. For up-close engagement. For the give-and-take that unfolds when two beings interact on a deeper level.
God wants to be known, not just known about. Jesus invites you to follow him, not simply study him. God reaches out to you, tirelessly pursuing you–not because God is fact or doctrine or proposition, but because God is Love.
And when you discover the authentic life of trusting God and living in love–the GodLife relationship, as Leonard Sweet calls it–your priorities will shift from trying to nail down just the right doctrine to following the living Jesus every moment of every day.
When you follow Jesus, you will learn how to love your enemies, care for the earth, relate to one another, and understand theinvisible spiritual realm. In following Jesus, you will appreciate the bigger picture of God’s truth and you’ll be able to witness to your faith more powerfully. The daily practice of faith–versus the settledness of mere belief–will open your life to unimagined possibilities.
God’s chief desire is to enjoy an honest, open-access relationship with you. In this fresh and provocative book, you will be introduced to the mystery and adventure of this GodLife relationship.

The Church in Emerging Culture: Five Perspectives

What happens when five noted Christian thinkers/writers tackle questions concerning the church's role in this pivotal postmodern era? Pull up a seat and join in the lively roundtable discussion! This stimulating and intriguing book offers individual essays into which the other four authors interject their comments and critique. Foundational reading for today's church leaders.

  Jesus Drives Me Crazy

There is the World According to Normal where most Christians currently live, and then there is the World According to NUTS, an acronym for Never Underestimate The Spirit. Creative author and speaker Leonard Sweet believes that Christians should never be considered normal members of society.

 

Must Christianity adapt its message to make it attractive to the postmodern generation? Or is it simply the medium of the message which must change? In Postmodern Pilgrims, Leonard Sweet argues that a better understanding of the first century church will allow the twenty-first century church to truly reach and affect the postmodern world. Sweet deals effectively with the tension between tradition and innovation, proving that a strong historical foundation is the best way to propel the church into the future, the postmodern future.

 SoulSalsa

While everyone else talks about their "worldview," Leonard Sweet tells believers to get a "world life." He says Christians who want to have an impact in the 21st century must ditch life as an agenda, and take up life as an adventure. They need to perform the ancient dance of faith in front of a postmodern world that desperately needs to learn the steps. In his witty, enigmatic way, Sweet offers concepts and practices covering all aspects of life, including education, friendship, family, marriage, leadership, finances, personal health, aging, conserving creation, ministry, and service.
 

  Carpe Manana: Is Your Church Ready to Seize Tomorrow?

If God so loved the world . . . then we ought to as well. But how? While the church dreams of old wineskins, the future is already upon us, and the world around us has undergone a radical transformation. Those of us over thirty are no longer natives of a modern culture, but immigrants in a postmodern society that speaks the language of cyberspace while grappling with the implications of robotics, nanotechnology, and bioengineering. We look to everything but the church for spiritual and moral guidance. In Carpe Mañana Leonard Sweet helps us speed toward being influential in our postmodern world, by using nine "naturalization classes," designed to help Christians find a true sense of belonging in our culture.

 

In his first book conceived and acquired specifically to be delivered electronically, Leonard Sweet contends that the church is blind to the changes that are dragging us into the future. Therefore, it is losing its influence as an agent of change and grace in the world. "There are now some companies who absolutely want to change the world more than the church," writes Sweet. He sees the church at a crossroads. It will either see the future as a new dawn and therefore embrace it as opportunity. Or, it will see the future as dusk and therefore hide from the darkness.
 

Leonard Sweet contends that the church is blind to the changes that are dragging us into the future. Therefore, it is losing its influence as an agent of change and grace in the world. "There are now some companies who absolutely want to change the world more than the church," writes Sweet. He sees the church at a crossroads. It will either see the future as a new dawn and therefore embrace it as opportunity. Or, it will see the future as dusk and therefore hide from the darkness of the world. Sweet believes that God will be in the future, with or without us, and that an "Acts 27" movement is afoot. This book serves as a "naturalization manual" to help Christians achieve full citizenship in the new, postmodern world. It will teach them how to go from being immigrants to natives. From foreigners in a strange land to people of God, confident and at home in a rapidly changing world.

  Soul Tsunami

Leonard Sweet--cultural historian, futurist, preacher, and preeminent thinker--firmly believes we live in a postmodern, pre-Christian society fraught with challenges, dangers, critical choices, and above all, tremendous potential for the church. The outcome will depend on our response to today's flood of change that threatens to sweep us away. Soul Tsunami outlines ten cultural changes that are already happening around us and suggests practical ways to communicate God's unchanging truth to our changing world.
 

In 11 Genetic Gateways to Spiritual Awakening the reader will discover how the core themes of the Wesleyan revival hold the key to reinvigorated mission and ministry for the church today. Sweet points out that many of the essential practices and emphases of that revival (such as the innovative use of new communication technologies) may be even more appropriate to the century we are entering than the one in which they began. The point is that Wesleyans and non-Wesleyans alike can find irreplaceable tools for the church's ministry to the world. Take this opportunity to learn how the church can spark renewal and transformation within the body of Christ!

  The Jesus Prescription for a Healthy Life

Leonard Sweet, with his profound insight and humor examines how Jesus laughed, hung out with friends, played with children, walked, enjoyed the good times at social gatherings, moodled, and poked fun at pious pretensions. By examining the life of Jesus, this prescription for health and well-being details the ways and habits through which Jesus lived a disciplined life and healthy existence during his ministry among us. The self-help advice is linked directly to stories about or by Jesus in the Gospels. You are sure to sharpen spiritually and hone your life physically while learning things about Jesus that you have never heard before.

Jesus wasn't a stand-up comic, but his hearers would have laughed occasionally and smiled knowingly. The more scholars know about the times in which Jesus lived, the more they appreciated Jesus' taste for visual wit and teasing irony. Jesus loved to pun and poke fun. He also enjoyed poking holes in the spiritual balloons of the "super-righteous", especially the Pharisees, people whose serious spirituality Jesus deemed too humorless. In The Jesus Prescription For A Healthy Life, Leonard Sweet, with quirky insight and humor, examines how Jesus laughed, hung out with friends, played with children, walked, enjoyed good times at social gathers, ate, and poked fun at pious pretensions. Using as its hook the life of Jesus, Sweet details the ways (habits) in which Jesus lived a disciplined life and healthy existence, and illustrate the ancient truth: Being cheerful is like a medicine that keeps you healthy. It is slow death to be gloomy all the time. (Proverbs 17:22). The Jesus Prescription For A Healthy Life is a wonderful contribution to Christian studies and would serve well as the basis for many a lecture, sermon, and Sunday School lesson!

  Health and Medicine in the Evangelical Tradition

This is the first extensive study of evangelicalism in the context of health and modern medicine. The book, like the others in the series, has two purposes. One purpose is to help health care professionals, who themselves come from various religious traditions or perhaps none, to understand how the evangelical tradition is related to issues of health and medicine so that they can serve their evangelical patients with greater sensitivity. The book is also written to help evangelicals understand more fully the relation of their tradition to the issues of health and medicine, as well as for those with a general interest in this rather widespread  spirit or mood that has swept across American religious life. Leonard Sweet assigns four specific characteristics to evangelicalism. First and foremost is a biblical faith, a belief in the binding and bonding authority of the Bible. "Evangelicals," he says, "spend their time discussing not who wrote the Bible but what in the Bible is being written in their hearts; not whether the Bible is true, but whether they are true to the Bible." Second, evangelicals stress a personal relationship with God through faith in the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This does not mean that evangelicals are therefore strictly doctrinal. Their doctrines, in fact, have usually been ones in which believers could move with some degree of freedom. Evangelicals trust that people's hearts tend to be nearer right than their heads. Third, evangelicals value conversion, that is, they assign a high priority to the evangelization of the gospel - to being born again. Conversion is for them a spiritual decision to "follow Jesus" and to participate in the mission of God in the world. Finally, evangelicals strongly believe that moral absolutes exist and that truth is more than private meaning. Evangelicals do not consider health an end in itself, nor do they consider ill health something to be avoided or ashamed of. Sweet quotes a

  New Life in the Spirit

New Life in the Spirit is published in both English and Chinese editions. This was Len's first attempt at writing a book for a non-scholarly audience. Len kids his Princeton-educated brother John that the Presbyterians had to find a Methodist to write a book on the Holy Spirit.

 Communication and Change

Communication and Change is a Lilly-funded collection of essays that Len put together and wrote to explore the role of technology in the cultural and religious interplay between continuity and change. Anyone interested in the history of the book, religious publishing, and the impact of technology on the church from colonial times to the present will find themselves immersed in this book some time or another. 

  A Cup of Coffee at the SoulCafe

Savor a satisfying cup of wisdom at the Soul Cafe.  The world is becoming increasingly complicated; technology, terrorism, and disease are just some of the dangers threatening the physical and spiritual health of our modern society. For years, Leonard Sweet has been confronting these common fears in his profound and insightful series of publications, Sweet's Soul Cafe. Now, in his newest book, Sweet carries the readers on a journey into the heart of spirituality, teaching Christians how to be more susceptible to God's shaping hand. Filled with inspiring messages from the greatest thinkers in human history as well as Sweet's own philosophical observations, Soul Cafe nourishes our thirsting souls with wisdom, gently reminding us of our divine purpose.
 

The essays collected in The Evangelical Tradition in America range over a vast plain of historical inquiry. Yet they are linked by a common purpose and vision of the exploration through ever-widening avenues of research into one of the most important movements in American culture, and the uncovering of forgotten, ill-conceived, or half-perceived features of the Evangelical tradition. This volume opens up new territory, recharts the old, and challenges and corrects several gaps in the historical topography of American Evangelicalism.

Emerging from the Charles G. Finney Historical Conference at Colgate Rochester Divinity School/Bexley Hall/Crozer Theological Seminary in October 1981, these essays offer exciting interdisciplinary insights into the role of Evangelical religion in American society. As major contributions to scholarship in American religion, these investigations forge beyond the borders of Evangelicalism's role in issues now being explored by many American historians on the South, blacks, women, urban centers, millennialism, and organizational structures. They also provide directions from which to view Evangelicalism's impact on American history from the perspective of Southern popular religion, the psychological aspects of black evangelicalism, the stream of intellectual history, and the Enlightenment and evangelical roots of millenarian ideology.

  Faith Quakes

In this book Leonard Sweet invites the church to take more than a stand, but to begin to take an active role in compliance with the time we live in. With up-to-the-minute monitoring of changes and trends that affect our lives, Sweet provides refreshingly unconventional glimpses into the future that must be grasped by church leaders. We learn: how to pursue a more effective, "go and tell" evangelism that reaches the "cocooning" culture; how to rekindle Christian imagination through sensuality, virtual reality, and energized prayer, music, or spiritual experience; how the church can open house for all of God's people, and more!
 

  Strong In Broken Places 

Who was George Everett Ross, and why is his story worth telling? Rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Akron, Ohio, the largest congregation in the state’s diocese, Ross was at once a brilliant preacher who could move his listeners with the gospel of transfiguring grace and a deeply flawed human being who stirred controversy among his parishioners. Not only a crusader for the addicted and the homeless, but also an alcoholic who presided over the church where Alcoholics Anonymous was founded, Ross was both revered for his good works and reviled for his personal failings. In a book that is part biography, part a sampler of his sermons, and part a theological meditation on the five wounds of Christ, George Ross comes to stand for all of us who have suffered some injury of the soul, and who hope to find in the healing example of Christ a way to use our broken parts as a source of spiritual strength and creative energy. Strong in the Broken Places is a portrait of ministry at its most gifted and most wounded, as well as a story of faith shining more brightly because of the constant darkness that threatens it.

  Quantum Spirituality: A Postmodern Apologetic

Quantum Spirituality: A Postmodern Apologetic is the book that launched what today is called "postmodern publishing" as well as Len's ministry to postmodern culture. A book written in a circle, the reader is invited to begin anywhere, stop anytime, and end wherever. This was Len's "coming out" book as a postmodern disciple after his 1987 knockdown, drag-out Damascus Road encounter with God, who (as he describes it) "knocked me off my high academic horse and said, 'Sweet, are you going to get a mission for the world you wish you had or the world that's actually out there.

   The Lion's Pride

In The Lion's Pride, Leonard I. Sweet focuses on the sometimes all-too-cozy relationship in America between religion and war. Sweet takes a close look at America's "with God on our side" militarism, examining its historical origins and consequences.

  Black Images of America 1784-1870

Throughout the nineteenth century most black leaders were convinced that they had a particular role to play in American history, especially in testing America's commitment to freedom and equality. This book examines what black leaders felt about themselves, about their identity, about their relationship to America, and about their involvement in American history

  The minister's wife: Her role in nineteenth-century American Evangelicalism

Probably the hardest to find of all Len's early books. A study of women's leadership patterns in American religious history, using as a template of analysis the three wives of Charles G. Finney, the father of mass urban evangelism. In some way, Finney and Graham are bookends.

  Postmodern and Wesleyan?: Exploring the Boundaries and Possibilities 

Postmodern and Wesleyan? is both an exploration and an internal dialogue. Essays written by differing voices explore various dimensions of postmodernism as they relate to theology, church, practices, communities, and missions. Each section includes a critical response by a respected Wesleyan leader to the ideas expressed. Dr. Leonard Sweet concludes each section with comments to continue the conversation. This important conversation piece invites churches, pastors, and laity to explore together how the Christian faith might shape both the present and the future. By providing a forum for engaging issues, both important and difficult, Postmodern and Wesleyan? offers a voice to some of the most creative thinkers in the movement and a help to Christians deciding the direction they must go in order to share the good news of God s love.
Postmodern and Wesleyan? is both an exploration and an internal dialogue. Essays written by differing voices explore various dimensions of postmodernism as they relate to theology, church, practices, communities, and missions. Each section includes a critical response by a respected Wesleyan leader to the ideas expressed. Dr. Leonard Sweet concludes each section with comments to continue the conversation. This important conversation piece invites churches, pastors, and laity to explore together how the Christian faith might shape both the present and the future. By providing a forum for engaging issues, both important and difficult, Postmodern and Wesleyan? offers a voice to some of the most creative thinkers in the movement and a help to Christians deciding the direction they must go in order to share the good news of God s love.
 

"Into a troubled world and to a nation oppressed on all sides, God sent hope in this one solitary life. The Jews had looked for some twenty decades for a king to liberate them from their oppressors. Their prophecies spoke of a great warrior and also of a gentle lamb. The story of the Messiah, or the great Liberating King, is found throughout the Bible. This enthralling story starts with creation and then juxtaposes the prophecies of the Old Testament with the various stories from the Gospels. The Liberating King is the central concept of Scripture that unites it into one grand narrative."