The Surprising Offense of God's Love - A New and Important Book

Jonathan Leeman has written a ground breaking book, The Church and the Surprising Offense of God's Love  that may serve to break up the fallow ground of churches that listen.  This book shows how the very structure and nature of the church promotes love, but not in the way we normally think of it. Click here to listen to a roundtable discussion with Mark Dever and others.  Leeman writes,

"The world thinks it understands love, just like it thinks it loves God. Yet it doesn’t. It only understands idolatrous phantoms or fabrications of them, shadows that bear some of the shape but little of the substance. The local church, therefore, is called to be a three-dimensional display of true love. And the practices of church membership and discipline are precisely what help to make the local church visible and clear. They demonstrate love’s demands. They help us to know, in the apostle John’s phrase, who are the children of God and who are the children of the Devil (see 1 John 3:10). "