AT THE
NAME OF JESUS
MEDITATIONS ON THE EXALTED CHRIST
FORWARD
BY DAVID BRYANT
(President,
Proclaim Hope! Former Director of America's National Prayer Committee)
This is a book about
passion. About the resuscitation of passion. The kind of passion
Paul’s letters throbbed with, the kind that counts everything as
loss just to know Jesus. This is a book about awakening godly fervor
for Christ in light of all that He truly is. About igniting fresh
encounters with the exalted Christ. On page after page Tricia
challenges us with the reality that Christ exalted and spiritual
passion always go together.
Unfortunately,
this kind of passion is a missing dimension in many modern Christians.
Out of a stack of statistics documenting the Church's condition, Dr.
George Barna recently concluded: "Americans seem to have become almost
inoculated to spiritual events. Overall, Christian ministry is stuck in
a deep rut. Too many Christians and churches in America have traded
spiritual passion for empty rituals, clever methods and mindless
practices. The challenge to today's church is not methodological. It is
a challenge to resuscitate the spiritual passion and fervor of the
nation's Christians." (taken from The Second Coming of the Church).
Barna
uses the graphic word "resuscitate" which the dictionary defines as "to
set in motion; to stir; to revive from apparent death or from
unconsciousness." It is a word about passion. And, it is a word about
this book. Imagine, for
example, "mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. What do you envision? I see one
person flat on his back and another responding with urgency. One face
gets very close to another; one mouth is set on top of another; the air
from one set of lungs flows rapidly and repeatedly into the other. Then
there are groans, cries, and shouts of excitement as the victim sits
straight up and laughs. Alive! Revived! Restored to a passion for life!
In a real
sense, that's what Tricia Rhodes is looking for in At the Name of
Jesus. Why? Because it's what she has first experienced in her own walk
with Christ. This book is the effort of a woman of God to breathe new
life into a reader's soul. But she wants far more than this. Her
prayer (and mine) is that this book of meditations will provide our
supreme Savior an opportunity to do for you what he did in John 20:22.
Face-to-face with fear-paralyzed, despondent disciples, the resurrected
Lord breathed on them (think "resuscitation") and said, "Receive the
Holy Spirit." That set in motion a passion and a mission that changed
the world forever. It can happen
again. With you. With me. As the Spirit uses this book.
The first
time I read Tricia's manuscript I was on a transcontinental flight. And
it was a good thing I had those five uninterrupted hours, because I
simply couldn't put it down. You'll be blessed at the very outset by,
of all things, the table of contents! Look at the 31 titles there that
paint for us how exalted Christ is. Now, consider this: Tricia gives us
one attribute for each day of the month. Imagine how your life could be
positively altered if you simply spent 10-15 minutes each day
meditating on Christ's supremacy, using Tricia's compelling
meditations, and then asking the Father throughout the rest of the day
to breathe that specific reality of Christ into your heart and life.
What a prospect that offers!
For an
even greater impact I suggest that you do what I did a few days after
the flight: For each of the 31 days, read the meditation out loud.
Tricia Rhodes is a uniquely gifted author: her books read well
silently. But they make an even deeper impression when engaged audibly.
My family and I have used her other writings in evening devotions,
where I would read a short chapter to my wife Robyne and our three
teens, and watch how all of us were gripped by the power of Tricia's
words and phrases. Her way of writing almost creates a sense of the
presence of God! Try it.
At the
very least, I urge you to read out loud the prayer that concludes each
chapter. Make it your own. The prayers alone are worth the price of the
book.
The hour
has come for God to reawaken His people with nothing less than the
Supremacy of Christ. To reawaken us to hope and prayer and mission,
centered on the Lord Jesus Christ for all that He is. To reawaken us to
who our Redeemer is to us and for us, over us and within us, through us
and ahead of us. In other words, to reintroduce us to Christ the midst
of us, as the Hope of Glory (Col. 1:27).
At the
Name of Jesus is all about this. That's why it is genuinely prophetic.
It challenges the ruts in our thinking about Christ. But it also
summons us to match renewed minds with renewed passion. As Tricia
Rhodes writes here:
“Surely Christ beckons us to repent
of hearts that see Him so small we think our works enrich Him, our
programs support Him, and our lives are indispensable to His
plan…To see Him move and work in power for His name's sake must
become our consuming passion, deepening and intensifying as His Spirit
takes control of our hearts. Let us settle for nothing less than the
explosive inhabitation of the living Lord, that our children, our
neighbors, our coworkers and yes, the nations may know at last that
Immanuel has come.”
Thousands
across our nation are praying daily right now for this to happen.
This book can help fuel our praying. The meditations can clarify more
fully what we're actually praying toward. Namely. a Christ-initiated,
Christ-glorifying resuscitation.
