Emotionally Healthy Spirituality: Unleash the Power of Life in Christ Buy Now

Scazzero seems to honestly want to walk with the Lord and be honest about his own failures. That is undoubtedly a good start. Yet Scazzero is not honest enough to completely see himself as God sees him ("For I know that in me [that is, in my flesh,] dwelleth no good thing." Romans, 7:18, King James Bible). Instead he wants "to hold myself in high regard despite my imperfections and limits" (page 54, edition of 2006) and seeks to develop his "true self", cp. page 35: "Anytime we can listen to true self and give it the care it requires..."; page 28: "We are not called by God to die to the parts of who we are. God never asked us to die to the healthy desires and pleasures of life." Yet he states on page 57: "The world is filled with illusions and pretense. We convince ourselves that we cannot live without certain earthly pleasures, accomplishments, and relationships. We become (or , to use a contemporary word). We attach our wills to the belief that something less than God will satisfy us." - And that is exactly, why God wants us to die to our whole self, in order that we might not only be 50 percent, but be 100 percent free from all our own desires and seek and find all we need in Him. Very often He than gives us family, friends and many good things, which we are grateful for, but first "We must die, in order to live", in order not to be "addicted" to theses things, but to receive them as a gift of our loving Father, who always supplies us with all we need in order to reach the great goal of our lives (Romans 8:28.29: "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.") - cp. John 12:24 "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."; Luke 14:26: "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." Cp. also the books by W. Ian Thomas The Indwelling Life of Christ: All of Him in All of Me and The Saving Life of Christ, which are very recommendable.

The good news is that there is nothing good in ourselves, and need not be! We are free to admit all our faults, we need not seek anything good in our old nature. The complete sinnfulness of man, who can only be safed by 100 % grace through faith was at the center of the teaching of the great reformers such as John Calvin and Martin Luther (see for example his lecture on the Epistle to the Romans Commentary on Romans, Commentary on Romans). So Scazzero fails to fulfill his wish made in the introduction "to make the ancient treasures of the church accessible" (page 1).
And the best news there is is: God still loves us! Knowing this our minds and thoughts are automatically drawn to this God, whose "mercy, is in the heavens; and" whose "faithfulness reacheth unto the clouds" (Psalm 36:5). We do not even want to be busy with ourselves anymore, but we want to know Him, our great Lord and Saviour more und more every day, be in His presence and see His light day and night (Psalm 42:2: "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?"). Scazzero rightly names this union with God as the center of christian life: "positioning ourselves to hear God and remember his presence in all we do; ... understanding our earthly life as a journey of transformation toward ever-increasing union with God." (page 45) He just misses one important point: The sooner we stop seeking anything good in ourselves, the sooner we start seeking everything in Him. In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "As long as I am still reflecting on myself in order to find Christ, he is not there. When he is really there, I see nobody else but him." (translated from German, DBW, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke, volume 4 "Nachfolge", page 107, footnote 36, Discipleship (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 4).
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