The Reason for God...an excerpt

My dad recommended I read "The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism" by Timothy Keller. It is awesome and something I'd strongly suggest to every believer and those who are searching or "checking out" Christianity. I got this excerpt from The LPM Blog.

"The doctrine of the Trinity overloads our mental circuits. Despite its cognitive difficulty, however, this astonishing, dynamic conception of the triune God is bristling with profound, wonderful, life-shaping, world-changing implications... Ultimate reality is a community of persons who know and love one another. That is what the universe, God, history, and life is all about. If you favor money, power, and accomplishment over human relationships, you will dash yourself on the rocks of reality. When Jesus said you must lose yourself in service to find yourself (Mark 8:35), he was recounting what the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have been doing throughout eternity. You will, then, never get a sense of self by standing still, as it were, and making everything revolve around your needs and interests. Unless you are willing to experience the loss of options and the individual limitations that comes from being in committed relationships, you will remain out of touch with your own nature and the nature of things. In many other places in this volume, I've traced out how impossible it is to stay fully human if you refuse the cost of forgiveness, the substitutional exchange of love, and the confinements of community... this world was not created by a God who is only an individual, nor is it the emanation of an impersonal force... We believe the world was made by a God who is a community of persons who have loved each other for all eternity. You were made for mutually self-giving, other-directed love. Self-centeredness destroys the fabric of what God has made... The universe is understood as a dance of beings united by energies binding yet distinct, like planets orbiting stars, like tides and seasons, "like atoms in a molecule, like the tones in a chord, like the living organisms on this earth, like the mother with the baby stirring in her body." The love of the inner life of the Trinity is written all through it. Creation is a dance!" (selected from pages 215-217, 219 of "The Reason for God").

Another book I'll suggest if I haven't already on this blog..."Searching for God Knows What" by Donald Miller! It's amazing! (For those of you who have read "Blue Like Jazz," this is 10 times better!