Gary Thomas - Holy Available: What If Holiness is About More Than What We Dont Do?

Praise for

HOLY AVAILABLE

This wide-ranging survey looks shrewdly and realistically at the incarnational life whereby Christ is formed in Christians. It confirms Thomass well-deserved reputation for authenticity, acuteness, and indeed authority on transformational Christian living.

JAMES I. PACKER, board of governors professor of theology, Regent College, and author of Knowing God

The first chapter alone is worth reading many times. This is beauty and struggle. This is the death that leads to life.

JOHN ORTBERG, author of Faith and Doubt and If You Want to Walk on Water, Youve Got to Get Out of the Boat

Once again, Gary Thomas challenges me to live passionately for God and to apply his transforming power to my daily decisions.

KAY WARREN, executive director, HIV/AIDS Initiative, Saddleback Church, and author of Dangerous Surrender

Set this book down slowly turn around and run awayunless you hunger for a deeper vision of faith and thirst for genuine life transformation. If you do, read on!

KEVIN HARNEY, author of Seismic Shifts

Gary Thomas has written some of the deepest, most biblically based books, including Sacred Marriage and Authentic Faith. Holy Available is another blessed gift on surrendering to the transforming power and presence of God in daily life. Read it! It will help transform your life into deeper Christlikeness.

SIANG-YANG TAN, professor of psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary, and author of Disciplines of the Holy Spirit

Also by Gary Thomas

Authentic Faith
Devotions for a Sacred Marriage
Devotions for Sacred Parenting
The Glorious Pursuit
Holy Available
Not the End but the Road
Sacred Influence
Sacred Marriage
Sacred Parenting
Sacred Pathways
Seeking the Face of God

ZONDERVAN

Holy Available

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Thomas

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Zondervan.

ePub Edition August 2009 ISBN: 978-0-310-86626-8

Previously published as The Beautiful Fight

Copyright 2007 by Gary L. Thomas

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thomas, Gary (Gary Lee)

[Beautiful fight]

Holy available : what if holiness is about more than what we dont do? / Gary Thomas.

p. cm.

Originally published: The beautiful fight. c2007.

Includes bibliographical references ().

ISBN 978-0-310-29200-5 (softcover)

1. Christian life. I. Title.

BV4501.3.T47153 2009

248.4dc22 2009003008

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version. NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked MSG are taken from The Message. Copyright by Eugene H. Peterson 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published in association with Yates & Yates, www.yates2.com.

To Dr. J. I. Packer, in honor of his eightieth birthday

I was greatly honored and blessed to have been a student of the esteemed Dr. Packer. Long before he was my teacher and adviser at Regent College in the mid-1980s, I gained insight from his classic works such as Knowing God and Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God. At Regent, in addition to attending as many of his classes as I could fit into my schedule, I benefited from his guiding me through my masters thesis and enjoyed being part of the faculty/student advisory group that occasionally met in his home.

To recount all that Dr. Packer taught me would require a book in itself, but a few things stand out: his love for the Puritans (John Owens work in particular), his faithfulness to the authority of Scripture, and his passion for the gospelall combined with a refreshing and delightful generosity of spirit. He has a unique gift for building up and encouraging a person while dismantling his or her logic with his superior intellect. He modeled how to disagree and still maintain a godly spirit and how to garner bits of truth from other traditions while taking exception to many of their points. His example opened the door for me to read widely, and the benefits have been invaluable.

Dr. Packer is now entering his ninth decade of life and service. It is with great appreciation and respect that I dedicate this book to him.

I am very grateful to a faithful cadre of readers who helped refine and critique this book. They include Dr. Randy Roberts, Dina Horne, Todd Fetters, Mary Kay Smith, Dr. Rebecca Wilke, Deb Steinkamp, Laurie Prall, Mark Grambo, Jerry Thomas, and Dan Little. I am also very thankful for the day-to-day administration provided by my assistant, Laura Thompson, whose gentle spirit and competency bless my wife and me on a daily basis.

Everyone reading this book has been well served through the editing expertise of John Sloan and Dirk Buursma. I would also like to thank Michael Ranville, Leslie Speyers, and the marketing team at Zondervan for their commitment and labor on behalf of this work, as well as Curtis Yates and the entire Yates and Yates team.

The grand point is not to wear the garb, nor use the brogue of religion, but to possess the life of God within, and feel and think as Jesus would have done because of that inner life. Small is the value of external religion unless it is the outcome of a life within.