Let me recommend a book for you: I AM SECOND, by Doug Bender and Dave Sterrett. I remember the first thing I thought when I unwrapped it last Christmas was, “What kind of a title is that?” Followed by, “I wonder what it MEANS?”
Well, what it means is, that Jesus is First, and I’m not. In a nutshell.
It goes about making that point in a very interesting fashion. It is not a long (or short) theological treatise. Instead, it is filled with many real-life stories of people — some famous, some not — who discovered that their lives worked better when they did not try to be first.
Here’s an example. I just opened the book at random (not true — I have a special place in my heart for hurting marriages, so I “randomly” selected the 17-page chapter titled THE AFFAIR) and found a story of two people whose lives fell apart, who wounded each other, who, when they let Jesus be Number One were able to function again as He designed. It sounds a little trite when reduced to 2 or 3 lines, but their story was not trite at all. Like I mentione earlier, I am really sensitive, or empathetic, or something like that, in the area of struggling or broken marriages, and I was having to wipe my eyes after that chapter so I could provide this little glimpse into the book for you.
Sample:
But our family was still broken. The holidays were particularly difficult. If Lauren and Brittany were with me, they wanted to be with Cheryl. If they were with Cheryl, they missed me. Eventually, our fractured mess became too much for Lauren. There was an outfit she wanted to wear for school one day, and the top was at Cheryl’s house and the bottom was at my house. She broke down and started crying and there was no consoling her. One of her friends was over and saw the whole thing.
“Mr. Scruggs!” her friend said with all the sternness her ten-year-old body could muster. Her arms hiked up on her hips and her face scrunched to a scowl. “This is rediculous. You two get along better than my parents and they’re still together. Why don’t you just get remarried!”
Wow! Could God use a ten-year-old to speak to me? he though in the wake of this young prophet’s scolding Pride was indeed what held him back…
Another (besides the CONTENT being great) thing that is really nice about this book is that at the end of each chapter there is a 2d barcode your iPhone (or iPhone-equivalent) can scan to see video on the real people in the book, as well as some others with similar stories. If you don’t have a smart phone/scanner, it also has the web address listed there so you can just type it in if you would like to do it the old(?)-fashioned way. Here is the code from the chapter I just mentioned; see if you can make it work for you! I used a program called SCANLIFE, but there are several QR code scanner apps that work just fine. I just pointed my iPhone at the computer screen you see before you now, started SCANLIFE, let it see the barcode on the screen, and it went right to the video! How slick is that?
Scan barcode with iPHone or euivalent