Dirty God

Foreword
Introduction

- GETTING GREACE
Chishti’s Roses
Talking Smack To Fake Gods
The Cof With Dirty Hands
Jesus Made A Mess Of Things
Jesus Aand The Rejects
Grace Sleeps With Rryth
Mayberry, Tsunamis And Clean Again
Christians Should Be Happy, For God’s Sake
How To Miss The Grace Of God

- GIVING GRACE
What’s Good About Death
What To Do When Terrorists Kill Your Spouse
Gladly Strange
God Might Wasn’t You To Fail Your Test
Cracking Pandora's Box
A Grace Starved Planet
Grace In The Trenches
How To Perform Miracles
What Could Happen If Grace Covered The Earth
Afterword
About The Author
Acknowledgements
Notes

Johnnie Moore is the twenty-something campus pastor, teacher, vice president of Liberty University, and author of Honestly. In this book ‘Dirty God’ he explores the vast potential for good that could become a reality if Christians would only stop trying to be religious people and start being people of grace. With near unbelievable true stories and penetrating insight, Moore dismantles the misguided structures of today’s Western Christianity and instead proposes a rebuilding of our whole outlook and purpose on the message of the Jesus of the Gospels.

This Jesus, he reveals, isn’t a man who demands his followers first clean up their act before they turn to him. Instead he gets himself dirty with them – down in their world of mud and messiness, of chaos and confusion. This Jesus has dust on his feet and dirt under his fingernails because he’s down here in the trenches of the battle alongside us and transforming us.

Moore tells his embattled readers that God isn’t here to punish his people because their mired in the moral mayhem. In fact the opposite, his compassion is such that he sent Jesus to spread not judgement, but joy; and still does. A show of divinely regal power, says ‘Moore, isn’t the answer. Only grace can set people free – grace given by God, and grace enacted by his followers.

With stories and personal experience from as far away as the Dadaab refugee camp, home to 500,000 desperate Somalis, to a leper colony in India, Moore shows how every person and every situation is an opportunity waiting to receive and reveal the life-changing grace of God.

Meet a God with dirt under his fingernails, unafraid of reaching into “the mud and muck of humanity” to extend grace to the children he loves.

In Dirty God: Jesus in the Trenches, Johnnie Moore draws on both Scripture and his extensive experience with other cultures and religions to show how the God of the Bible is unique in his willingness to be near us in all of our messiness. Moore outlines the central importance of the doctrine of grace while introducing readers to a humble and human Jesus who reaches out to us at our worst and pulls us up to our best.

Grace, Moore argues, is something that is both gotten and given, and the two-part structure of the book allows readers to explore both of these dynamics. By offering hope rather than condemnation and showing the practical applications of grace in today’s world, Dirty God will appeal to both the committed Christian and the spiritual seeker looking for a more authentic faith. Challenging and engaging, Dirty God is sure to establish Johnnie Moore as an emerging voice for Millennial and Gen-X evangelicals for years to come.

About the Author:

Johnnie Moore is an author, pastor, advisor, professor of religion, and a vice president of Liberty University, the world's largest Christian university. He serves on the board of World Help, leads North America's largest weekly gathering of Christian young people, and has worked in more than two dozen nations, effecting change in some of the world's most desperate places. He and his wife, Andrea, reside in Virginia.