Grace Remix – out today!

 

My new book, Grace Remix, comes out today. This is the fourth and final book in my Greatest Hits series. It follows Grace Disco, Grace Classics, and Grace Party.

You may be wondering why I called this one Grace Remix. This is from the book:

God has given me a new song and it is a remix. It’s the timeless truths of scripture as seen through the lens of the new covenant. It’s the ancient and eternal gospel of grace as seen through the eyes of the new man.

I’m no historian, but I understand that the remix movement was driven in part by DJs who put dance beats on top of old tunes. You would be sitting in a club and you would recognize a tune, but it sounded different. It was both familiar and fresh, and it made you want to dance.

Like those DJs in the remix movement, grace preachers are taking the old tunes of scripture and mixing them with the rhythms of the new creation. This is what Jesus did. He took old scriptures about loving thy neighbor and mixed it into a story about a priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan. It was old, it was new, and it was good. It filled people with joy. It changed the way they thought about God and his kingdom.

I wrote Grace Remix to help you renew your mind, which is something we need to do if we want to discover all that God has in store for us (Rom 12:1-2). In the book I talk about how my own grace awakening changed the way I read the Bible:

I had read it cover to cover, but much of it made little sense to me. The problem was I saw the Bible as an instruction manual when I should have been reading it to learn about Jesus (see Luke 24:27).

But after my grace awakening, everything came into sharp focus. I began to see Jesus on every page and in every chapter. Old, boring scriptures became new and full of life. The words hadn’t changed but their meaning had. Obscure stories that I had dismissed as ancient history, sprang to life. Archaic laws, ancient proverbs, even the long lists of who begat who, came alive with fresh significance. “This is talking about Jesus!” I realized. “Every word of it points to him!”

A good example of how the Bible changed for me is the Parable of the Good Samaritan:

At one level the Good Samaritan is a good story about a good man doing a good deed. But at another level it’s a great story because it’s really about Jesus, whom we did not know, finding us and caring for us after we had been robbed and left for dead. Religion (represented by the Levite and the priest) did nothing to help, but Jesus bound up our wounds and paid our expenses because he is the true friend who loves us.

Do you see? Absent grace and the Good Samaritan is merely a good story. It might inspire you to be good to strangers, but that’s about it. But read that story through the lens of grace and it becomes a great story of a great Savior. Now we are moved. Now we are inspired. Now we are asking, “Who is this Jesus who loves me so? I want to know him more.”

When told with grace, the stories, proverbs, poems, and even the commands of the Bible, lead us to new revelation. They lift us to heaven and lead us to Jesus.

Grace Remix is out today. Get the paperback from Amazon and you can get the Kindle version thrown in for free (through Amazon’s Kindle-matching program). Or get it from the Book Depository or Wordery.com and they’ll ship it free just about anywhere in the world.

Other purchase options, including PDFs and bulk discounts from the publisher, can be found here.

I hope you enjoy the new book!