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    Dramatic Encounters with God: Seven Life-Changing Lessons of Love
    Dramatic Encounters with God: Seven Life-Changing Lessons of Love
    Dramatic Encounters with God: Seven Life-Changing Lessons of Love
    Ebook100 pages1 hour

    Dramatic Encounters with God: Seven Life-Changing Lessons of Love

    By Nicole Johnson

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    About this ebook

    Walk with Christ through ancient Jerusalem as he encounters the man with the withered hand, John the Baptist, Judas, and four other New Testament characters in this book of dramatic sketches by Nicole Johnson, the Women of Faith dramatist. Nicole uses her talent for storytelling to help us be there with Christ and see the scenes with new eyes and understanding, bringing to life lessons that apply to our modern lives.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThomas Nelson
    Release dateAug 22, 2011
    ISBN9781418554705
    Dramatic Encounters with God: Seven Life-Changing Lessons of Love
    Author

    Nicole Johnson

    Nicole Johnson, author of Fresh Brewed Life, has a uniquely creative voice. As an accomplished writer, speaker, and actor, Nicole has performed in thousands of churches and venues over the last twenty-five years, including more than a decade of touring with the national conference Women of Faith. Nicole lives in Santa Monica, CA with her husband and two children. Nicole writes regularly at www.nicolejohnson.org

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      Book preview

      Dramatic Encounters with God - Nicole Johnson

      dramatic

      Encounters

      with God

      Nicole Johnson

      Dramatic_Encounters_TXT_0001_001

      We'd love to hear from you about your experience with this book, Please go to

      www.thomasnelson.com/letusknow for a quick and easy way to give us your feedback,

      Love to read? Get excerpts from new books sent to you by email, Join Shelf Life, Thomas

      Nelson's FREE online book club, Go to www.thomasnelson.com/shelflife,

      © 2007 Nicole Johnson

      All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotation in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

      Published in Nashville, Tennessee by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

      Agent: Mel Berger

      All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Johnson, Nicole, 1966–

      Dramatic encounters with God / by Nicole Johnson.

      p. cm.

      ISBN-13: 978-0-8499-0357-1 (hardcover)

      ISBN-10: 0-8499-0357-2 (hardcover)

      1. Meditations. 2. Jesus Christ—Meditations. 3. Bible. N.T. Gospels— Meditations. 4. Love—Religious aspects—Christianity—Meditations. I. Title.

      BV4832.3.J65 2007

      242'.5—dc22

      2006038714

      Printed in the United States of America

      07 08 09 10 11 QW 5 4 3 2 1

      Also by

      Nicole Johnson

      Fresh Brewed Life

      Fresh Brewed Life Study Guide

      Keeping a Princess Heart

      Keeping a Princess Heart—A Conversation Guide for Women

      Raising the Sail

      Stepping into the Ring

      Dropping Your Rock

      The Invisible Woman

      www.nicolejohnson.net

      www.wpublishinggroup.com

      Contents

      Introduction: The Power of Love

      Chapter 1: Are you the One?

      Love can handle doubt

      Chapter 2: A Tale of Two Sisters

      Loves refuses to compare

      Chapter 3: The Girl of the Tombs

      Love can change your name

      Chapter 4: Stretch Out Your Hand

      Love goes deeper than religion

      Chapter 5: The Flat Thud of Grace

      Love can free us from judgment

      Chapter 6: The Kiss of Death

      Love can forgive betrayal

      Chapter 7: A Touch of Faith

      Love floods us with peace

      Epilogue: Taking a Walk in the Wheat Field

      Acknowledgments

      Introduction

      It was just a voice on a hot dusty road, asking a straightforward question, Saul, why are you persecuting me? . . . and a dramatic encounter with God changed the course of the world. From Adam in the Garden of Eden to Moses on Mt. Sinai to Saul on the road to Damascus, God has a history of interrupting our so-called everyday lives with his presence (and on rare occasions, with his voice). When he does, it’s a dramatic encounter like no other. Something happens that stops us in our tracks—it at once exposes us and embraces us. Something happens that reveals God in a new way and brings him near. Something happens that changes our direction or our perspective or our soul, and then the rest of our lives. It can happen anywhere. On a busy street, on a business trip overseas, or right in the middle of our morning coffee—whenever God grasps our human hearts and allows us to hear his voice, it is a dramatic encounter.

      What would it have been like to be there in the first century when Christ was interacting with people directly? In the days when the holy met the human face-to-face, when God walked among the people, captivating them with his message of love? It is hard to imagine all the encounters that took place in almost every footprint he made. Yet it is worth trying because of what we learn in the process. People matter so much more to God than we think and thus believe. It is easy and understandable to read first-century encounters with Jesus as just stories about other people—blind people, lame children, or religious leaders— who lived in another place and time. But when we take a closer look, we find that they are about us, here and now, and they are about love.

      The Power of Love

      Love is far and away the strongest power known to humankind. The power of love could eradicate the need for weapons of mass destruction. The power of love could change all that our prison system was designed to correct. So why doesn’t it? Sadly, love is an undervalued, often untapped resource. People underestimate its strength. But love reveals its power when we realize it can do something that nothing else on the face of the earth can do: love can change the human heart.

      You don’t need money

      Don’t take fame

      Don’t need no credit card to ride this train

      It’s strong and it’s sudden and it’s cruel sometimes

      But it might just save your life . . .

      That’s the power of love

      Huey Lewis might not have set out to write a gospel song, but he did just that. His lyrics captured an old truth in a new way when The Power of Love was recorded in 1985. That same year, the producers of a film called Back to the Future chose Lewis’ lyrics to underscore the film’s message: love has the power to change things even across time and space, which is why sometimes you have to revisit the past in order to change your future.

      That’s what this book is all about. We revisit the past—the Jerusalem of the ancient world where Christ walked as a man— so that his love can change our twenty-first-century futures. We meet him on that dusty road, or on the steps of the temple, or in the house of his friends, to listen in on his divine conversation. And as we watch his interactions and experience his love, our daily lives of car pools and time clocks and dishes and budgets are changed forever.

      By going back, we can discover for ourselves that divine love is strong enough to break destructive patterns. As God speaks to us from his Word, our hearts are transformed, our eyes are opened, our feet learn to walk in new paths, and our religion becomes a relationship.

      If you’ve ever doubted your faith, if you’ve ever done something wrong and desperately needed grace, if you’ve been betrayed by someone you loved, if you’ve struggled with issues of control, come walk by the Sea of Galilee, stand with Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, gather in the stony circle around the adulterous woman, and see what happens in your own heart.

      On our own, we do not have the ability to love like God does. But when we tap into his love, it makes our small amount of love more abundant and free. It transforms our little love into the kind of big love that can forgive betrayal—or lay down our blades of cutting, or smooth the wrinkles of our doubt—the kind of love that can change our lives. Really experiencing this book will require a good deal of honesty and courage.

      Can you look for yourself in every story—and admit when you find you? Rarely do we take the time to answer the kinds of questions that are included at the end of each chapter in this book. They provide an opportunity for a private self-inventory— one that can lead toward growth and change. We can make internal decisions about who we want to be . . . but never as strongly as when we are honest with ourselves about who we are. Only then can we know in what direction we have

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