Live Like You're Loved E-Book

Cecil Taylor

• Herausgeber: Inscript Books
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Despite Christianity’s message about who we are and what has been done for us, guilt, shame, and self-loathing can weigh us down. This book emphasizes four Biblical truths: You are loved, forgiven, sent, and eternal. Cecil Taylor walks through their scriptural basis, then illustrates a life lived in each truth.

More people than you might expect live their lives thinking they are worthless and not good enough for God. This book addresses a "pandemic" of not accepting that God can love and forgive us. For those who feel this way, the topics in this book will drive them in a new direction. The goal is to transform our lives as we trust in God's intention for us, deepening our relationships with God and with others.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Gratitude

About the Author

Introduction

Doubting God’s Love

The Twin Scepters

Balancing Love and Discipline: Peter

Balancing Judgment and Grace: Jonah

Focusing on Love and Grace

Two Keywords: Freedom and Daily

The Layout

Loved: The Biblical Truth

Whosoever

Verse upon Verse

The Manger and the Cross

God’s Waterfall of Love

Loved: The SAIL Steps

Step In: Believe

Accept: Value and Worth

Improve: Discard Baggage

Live It: Love Your Neighbor

Summary of “Live Like You’re Loved”

Forgiven: The Biblical Truth

How Can God Forgive Us?

Why Does God Forgive?

Do We Deserve Forgiveness?

Forgiven: SAIL Steps

Step In: The Daily Shower

Accept: Yes to Guilt, No to Shame

Improve: Loving Toward the Unlovely in Yourself

Live It: Loving Toward the Unlovely in Others

Summary of “Live Like You’re Forgiven”

Sent: Biblical Truths

Personally Sent

Commonly Sent

Sent: SAIL Steps

Step In: Plan A

Accept: Commonly and Personally Sent

Improve: Guided by the Holy Spirit

Live It: The One Who is Sent

Summary of “Live Like You’re Sent”

Eternal: Biblical Truth

The Past – and the Present

The Future – and the Present

Beyond Death – and the Present

The Wedding Reception

The Sea of Eternity

Eternal: SAIL Steps

Step In: Seek and Live

Accept: You’re Family and Friend

Improve: Connect the Present to the Eternal

Live It: Walk with God Daily

Summary of “Live Like You’re Eternal”

How to Go Forward

How Do I Change?

What Does It Look Like After I Change?

Pulling It All Together

Bladensburg, Maryland

Live Like You’re Loved

Copyright 2023 by Cecil Taylor

All rights reserved

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission can be addressed to Inscript Books, a division of Dove Christian Publishers, P.O. Box 611, Bladensburg, MD 20710-0611, https://www.inscriptpublishing.com.

eBook Edition

All Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™ Versions from 2022 and 1995 are used.

Inscript and the portrayal of a pen with script are trademarks of Dove Christian Publishers.

PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Gratitude

I am grateful for all the encouragers who helped me get to this point, either through their support of this book’s development and/or through their support of Cecil Taylor Ministries.

I thank the Discipling Parents class of St. Andrew United Methodist Church in Plano, TX. Theirs was the first and most influential of the dry runs of the video series that preceded this book. I learned from them how a video series and a book are two very different things! That lesson has sharpened my ability to produce in both formats.

Thanks as well to:

Connor Walden for his close collaboration in providing the artwork that expressed my themes so well and so beautifully. Austin Taylor for his tangible work and emotional support to help me live my dream.John Ayo for re-entering my life at the right time to remind me that my ship was designed for open water and risky adventures.

This book is a love letter to my wife, Sara Taylor.

About the Author

As the son of a preacher, Cecil Taylor understands the complexity of the word “call”.

A lifetime’s worth of “calls” has led Cecil to successful careers in software development, broadcast radio, and product management at the forefront of the telecom industry. And yet, despite the unique journey God has led him on, the struggle he has faced his entire life is one that is shared by most Christians:

How do you reconcile your call to ministry and call to Christ with the other directions God is leading you? How do you continue to grow closer to God in love and service when you’re dedicated to so many other pursuits, whether it’s a career or family or just the constant grind necessary in life?

Forty years of teaching adults and youth in church has allowed God to give some answers to Cecil and move his call to sharing it further. That’s what Cecil Taylor Ministries is all about: humbly passing on wisdom that God has used already to change one life, in the hopes that it changes the lives of many.

The foundation of Cecil’s experience is that every day of the week can be Sunday.

The feeling of intimacy, connection, growth, and love that we find in church and in communion with Christ isn’t limited to one day a week. In fact, the start of understanding your call to ministry as a Christian is learning that God is present in every direction He has called you. Your career, your family, the constant highs and lows of life, all of them hold meaning to God.

Cecil’s call and the main point of Cecil Taylor Ministries is to help you and others learn about a 7-day practical faith. Cecil Taylor Ministries offers video lessons, books, study materials, podcasts, devotionals and more to help churches, small groups and individual learners understand how to live a ٧-day practical faith.

Cecil is the author of The Next Thing: A Christian Model for Dealing with Crisis in Personal Life. Starting with the worst day of his life, Cecil takes readers on a journey through various crises in order to introduce the concept of “The Next Thing” and a four-part model for addressing crises. He offers the practical tools of Simplifying, Trusting, Resting, and Grieving during a crisis, along with the scriptural underpinning for each component.

The Next Thing is also a video series with a Participant’s Guide to help churches and small groups study together and individually.

A few reviews of The Next Thing:

Cecil’s incisive new book, The Next Thing, would be a beneficial read for everyone. What I particularly like about the book is that the soundness of the wisdom is laid out in simple, practical terms: Simplify. Trust. Rest. Grieve. Cecil skillfully weaves together biblical teachings with his own down-to-earth common sense and lived experience.

Dr. Scott Engle, Teaching Pastor, St. Andrew United Methodist Church, Plano, TX. Author of Restart: Getting Past Christianish and What Jesus Expects of Us

As I read through Cecil’s model, I saw how these simple steps could help anyone work through any crisis. Cecil touched my heart and soul as his experiences and Next Things hit close to home throughout the book.

Pat Warren, The Next Thing reader/reviewer

I appreciate Cecil Taylor’s use of authenticity and vulnerability to connect with the reader. This book has given me additional tools to draw upon as I journey alongside our patients.

Rev. Stacy L. Auld, System Director of Spiritual Care, Houston Methodist Hospital

Faith-filled, and intertwined with Scripture, The Next Thing can be used before, during or after a crisis. It can be applied on a personal level or as an aid for grief therapy. It can be read again and again as it is adaptable to multiple scenarios. I would recommend The Next Thing to anyone who is processing a crisis or struggling with grief.

Allison Lambert, LPC-S (Licensed Professional Counselor-Supervisor)

Original Intent Counseling Center, PLLC

For current information on the products and services available through Cecil Taylor Ministries, please visit CecilTaylorMinistries.com.

Introduction

Cecil Taylor Ministries is my ministry venture, dedicated to teaching Christians how to live a 7-day practical faith. Originally, my normal content delivery method was video lessons, and this topic of “Live Like You’re Loved” was firstly a video lesson series. The book version and its accompanying Participant’s Guide now join the video series in the collection.

Over time, I have changed to where I release new content in tandem as a book and a video series. I include a Participant’s Guide that pertains to either the book or the videos. For the videos, I include a Leader Guide to foster great discussions.

Both the video lessons and the book have their advantages and disadvantages. My video lessons are designed to fit into time periods typically used by small groups, accounting for discussion time as well. I consider that the discussions are the main part of the lesson rather than my videos. Because they are time-constrained, the video content must be rigorously edited and focused on topics that can be discussed by the class.

But there is a problem with video lessons. Typically, you watch them in a group, and then the lessons are gone. You probably don’t possess the videos themselves. Even if you do, there is little to remember them by, unless you watch the videos again. After a while, you may have embedded some ideas in your life, but you have no way to remember the details of what you learned or have the ability to review them again. This is somewhat addressed by having a Participant’s Guide and other reminder artifacts I offer.

On the other hand, a book is more lasting. A book can be accessed again and again. Plus, a book can expand on ideas in a way that a time-limited video lesson cannot. The content of this book would be very useful to review again and again. The layout and the summaries make it easy for this book to become a reference manual as you go through life. The Table of Contents of this book is lengthy, but I hope in presenting the sub-sections, it is easier to use this book as a reminder and a reference in the future.

I also appreciate that a book is great for an individual learner as well as for a group that prefers to study books. I hope that you who are focused only on the book, and not the video lessons, are equally enriched by what I have to share.

I should note that one of my frustrations with authors who write the book and then create videos based on the book is that they organize the videos and the book differently. It is frustrating to me to watch a video series, then buy the book, and have to hunt everywhere in the book for the different elements that were pulled into the video. Often the chapters are organized completely differently than the way the videos were organized.

Because I want to connect the book to the video lesson experience, this book is organized differently than it would be if I started with a book and then developed video lessons, or if I only wrote the book without videos. I’m grateful for feedback about my prior book, The Next Thing, that organizing in a connected way was even pleasing to book-only readers. You can certainly see my teacher’s heart in the way I present this book. It becomes more of an easily accessible and easily referenced textbook than what you find in your average book.

My overall goal is to make this an inviting book, an easy read, written in a style that makes it straightforward to comprehend and vibrant in the remembrance of it.

Doubting God’s Love

When I started sharing with people that I had the idea for a video series entitled, “Live Like You’re Loved,” the response was nearly the same every time:

First, a very wide-eyed look and a thoughtful pause.Then the person would say, “I would be interested in that!”Or “I want to know what it’s like to live like you’re loved!”

I knew I was onto something.

The need for love is universal. And the need to know that we’re loved, to feel that we’re loved, to experience love, is deep. And especially, to know that we are loved by our creator God.

In this series, I want to explore four truths – four things that we may have heard, may believe in our heads, but somehow doubt in our hearts. Yet they are true anyway, and I want to convince you that they are true.

Then I want to deep-think what your life would look like if you actually believed these truths, experienced these truths, and acted upon them.

The four scriptural truths I want to explore are:

You are lovedYou are forgivenYou are sentYou are eternal.

This book is organized around these four scriptural truths. I want to explain why these are true, based on sound Biblical understanding, then I want to delve into how your life would be different if these truths became embedded in your soul.

I don’t know exactly why, but I have been blessed to live a great deal of my life with this paradigm embedded in me. Therefore, along the way, I will share some of my own experiences in living these four truths. I want you to experience the same transformation in your life that I have felt in mine.

As a teacher, it’s common to come up with some theme, some clever line of thought and teach it, but then you might realize that you yourself don’t live your life this way. For example, when I developed the “Legacy Tree” video series, I wanted to live “Legacy Tree” principles myself for awhile before I assembled the information. It actually took me nearly 20 years to feel ready to write that series!

But it was different for “Live Like You’re Loved.” After months of experience and reflection, I realized that I had lived most of my life trusting in these beliefs and actually made lots of small and big decisions based on these four truths. I just didn’t have the structure before to realize that I was actually doing it.

As you get into this series, you may find that you are absolutely living at least one of these truths and have embedded it already into your life. But you may find that for at least one of these truths, you haven’t done it yet – you may have the head knowledge, but not the heart knowledge that causes a real change in your life. That’s a phrase you’ll see throughout this book: “Heart knowledge.”

Here’s an example. A friend was giving his testimony. For much of his life, he felt something was missing in his faith. He went to church. He knew that Jesus was the Savior of the world. He had all the head knowledge he needed. But still, something in him felt unfulfilled. When he discovered heart knowledge, his life changed.

This is the transformation I hope you will find as a result of this book.

The Twin Scepters

One of my favorite teaching paradigms is that we have to address the elephant in the room. That’s what I call it when I have set up a proposition that seems too neat and simple to some of my viewers or readers. I’m aware that there are objections that I need to address. Those are the elephants in the room.

And we have a gigantic elephant in the room this time.

The objection you may have is, “Wait! God is loving, yes, but He is also a disciplinarian. God is forgiving and full of grace, yes, but He also is the judge of all humans. We may be eternal creatures, but we’re not automatically guaranteed eternal life with God.”

1 You will have raised a good point. God is the Lord of humans, wielding the twin scepters of judgment and grace: judgment that comes because we are sinful, broken and separated from God; grace that comes because God is loving and wants relationship with us and wants to give us good things, including second chances.

God is also the perfect, loving-but-firm father, demanding accountability and showing mercy. He judges us yet also offers grace.

Before we can really get into the meat of this book, I need to address the elephant in the room.

This balance between parental-style love and discipline, and this balance between sovereign judgment and grace, are seen throughout the Bible.

Balancing Love and Discipline: Peter