Selling Water By The River (A sentence-per-chapter summary)

by Jas Gray

Books are too long.

I tend to read reviews instead of books. More out of laziness than anything else.

So if you’re like me, maybe you’ll appreciate this.

Below is a summary of the last book I finished (subtitled “A book about the life Jesus promised and the religion that gets in the way”), with one sentence dedicated to each chapter.

Because no one needs to read an entire book when they can read 14 sentences.

The Bible is a 3-D object that needs to be viewed from different angles. If we live our lives with the same, flat-like people, opinions and beliefs, it’s kind of like holding a house together with sticky tape. We need to remember that although Christianity as a religion is one way to experience Christ, it is possible to experience one without the other. Experience trumps opinion and our beliefs should always be open to change when life finds them lacking.

While beliefs do have a function as helpful tools for life, they should never be seen as the point. This is true of a belief in fear, which should journey towards a better belief in Love. We don’t need to fear being wrong through this journey, because Grace will be there whenever needed. Like a living, ever-growing garden, Jesus’ message of grace should be nurtured, but it cannot be contained. It crosses all boundaries put around it and is on the inside of everyone, right now. Experiencing this message is about having the desire, not the detail. It’s about knowing the difference between the temporal and the unchangeable. Jesus is hear to lead us to that experience, whether he gets the credit or not.

Death is coming and that fact should make us all the more urgent to experience eternal life in the here and now. We are nothing apart from dirt with breath and yet the Mystery hidden within that breath can only be described as Divine.