Rick McKinley, A Kingdom Called Desire

In A Kingdom Called Desire, pastor Rick McKinley takes a look at the life of discipleship to Jesus through the lens of desire.In a culture keyed in on finding the thing that will make us the most happy, McKinley calls us to carefully search out our desires, first because God in fact created them, and second, so we can honestly face up to the question of whether we do in fact desire God the most. And it is in the latter, the deep and true desire for God, that McKinley develops his picture of kingdom living. And part of this involves recognizing honestly the desires God has placed within us and recognizing and developing the God-given desire for him that rests beneath them. In a key chapter, "Life and Death," McKinley gets to the heart of what this transformation of desire entails, as he reflects on the need to face our own mortality, and as we do this, to learn to cling to the cross. "I wanted to cling to one part of the gospel: his death for me. I don't want to grapple with the implications of my death in him" (53). Instead of making our own lives into idols, we must come to grips with our own death in Christ, and our new life as Christ lives in us. It is then that we learn to focus on Jesus and desire him and the coming of his kingdom. And key to this new life is that we no longer act out of duty, of a need to produce the life God can appreciate or that can make us worthy before God, we are no longer seeking to do the right thing to avoid negative consequences, but are instead living into the life God has for us, and sin begins to loose its attraction for us. This transformation of life then begins to work itself out in our lives as we begin to recognize the God-given desires that are unique to us, and we see the way God has made us to be, allowing us to seek out things that are God-glorifying and are at the same time fitting to the way God has made us to be, a deep freedom to become who God made us to be in him.

McKinley's book has a nice conversational quality that keeps it from becoming either too academic or to preachy. He also takes an honest tone that gives credibility to his discussion. And I found his discussion of the concept of desire to be overall a helpful one, as I think finding our fulfillment through the realization of our own personal desires is a key idea in our culture today, but also has some potential as an entry point for reimagining our relationship to God. The danger, of course, is of making the gospel a self-help program or a path to personal fulfillment, though I think McKinley is aware of these dangers and steers mostly clear of them. I may quibble with a few points, but overall found his approach to have some merit. I especially appreciated his call to honestly investigate our desires, to see if we truly are desiring God or if we are merely paying lip service to our faith. IN all, this book has some good things to say to those who want to desire God and live for him.  

Thanks to the publisher and Amazon.com Vine program for the review copy.

Glen Packiam, Lucky

In Lucky, Glenn Packiam, a pastor at New Life Church in Colorado Springs and a songwriter, takes a fresh look at the good news of the coming of God's kingdom through an exploration of the four beatitudes of Luke 6. His reflection, as the title makes plain, centers around rethinking the familiar (and probably too-familiar) term "blessed," instead asserting that those to whom the kingdom comes are "lucky" (he gets some impetus for this move from Eugene Peterson's effective use of the term in the Message). He nuances the term nicely, to point out that though it may have the connotations of a random chance occurrence, it also caries the sense in modern usage of one who is fortunate, one for whom good things have happened. And it makes for a powerful restatement of the beatitudes that helps to convey their sense.

So what is the sense of the beatitudes? Packiam briefly explores some of the historical approaches to what this list signifies, but spends the bulk of his time crafting an approach to the four beatitudes in Luke that focuses both on the sense in which Jesus is declaring that the unlikely and unlucky people described by them (the poor, the hungry, the mourning, the rejected) have become lucky precisely in the fact that the kingdom has come, and in the sense in which this goes beyond just the physical conditions described to the conditions of heart that these conditions may help to create. That means he constantly keeps his exposition tied to the historical setting of Jesus' address even as he allows for a fuller spiritualized sense that doesn't leave behind the concrete setting but works it out more fully.

I really enjoyed Packiam's approach to the beatitudes, and I think it does a great job of giving a readable and informed approach to this well-known but often-misunderstood passage of Scripture. He uses the metaphor of "luck" to great effect to explore the nature of the kingdom of God and its application in our lives, both as recipients of this overwhelming luck and as bearers of God's luck to an unlucky world. I have come to recognize afresh that I am lucky because of God's great work in Jesus Christ, and further, that I'm called to participate in spreading that luck to the world. I expect I will refer back to this book frequently when thinking about the kingdom of God or the beatitudes, and I also think the metaphor of "luck" is pregnant with possibilities for translating the Christian message to an unlucky world.

Thanks to Amazon's Vine Program and the publisher for the review copy.