Book Review/Summary - Dying to Live (Harold Senkbeil)

The Problem

• We have lost the art of communication in the communication age. We just share information, impersonally. 
• When people worked, there used to be something to show for it, something we made. Now we spend more time working and only have money to show for it. We begin to think the reason we work is only for money.
• People are lonely, disenfranchised and looking for truth, substance, and real relationships.
• We are a dying people in a dying world

Quotes on the Solution

• "The problem isn't the godlessness of our age, but rather the gods of our age."
• "Our predicament is not the situation we are in, but what lives in us."
• "Asking me to try harder is like asking a sick person to feel well."
• "The Old Adam cannot be tamed, reformed, or disciplined. Only killed."
• "We don't need a new attitude, we need a new life"
• "Sin is not a blemish, but bondage and death."
• "When face to face with sin we need forgiveness, not advice"
• "Before we can reform our lives, we need rescue."
• "Christianity is not an idea, but The Reality. Christianity is not a way of life, but Life Itself."

Church as God's Hospital

• The church is God's hospital, where he gives us CPR.
• The Liturgy is breath.
• God's breath out is our breath in and is God's blessing to us that comes first to give us what we need.
• A consequence of that is our breath out, which is our praise and prayer. It is just giving back what he gave us.
• Faith is like lungs.
• You can't breath without it, so you can't worship without it.
• You can have lungs without breath, but that leads to death.  Having faith without ever worshiping also brings death.
• Worship and prayer are the language of life.
• The liturgy seems awkward and foreign to us
• Because we spend so much time in an alien land, living in a dying world.
• However, liturgy is our native tongue, we belong in the liturgy of the church.
• Prayer does not come naturally to us
• We must learn in like we learn to speak as children, through repeating what God has shown us
• Such as the Lord's prayer and the Psalms.
• Prayer is not a means of Grace
• It does not earn us any merit
• It does not bring us forgiveness
• It does not channel God's love to us.
• Prayer does not make us Christian
• Prayer is simply what Christians do
• When we don't feel like worship or praying, we should trust God over our feelings. "God loves us too much to abandon us to our inclinations."

Vocation and Good Works

• Thankfulness alone will not produce a holy life. Christ in us does that.
• Christian vocation is not the end goal of faith, but is an extension of faith.
• Works are not what you must do to be faithful, but what people of faith do.
• There is honor in work, no matter how menial or tedious.