Picturing the Gospel - by Neil Livingstone (Paperback)

About the Book

Neil Livingstone provides a guided tour of biblical images of the gospel and shows how each offers fresh insight into God's saving work. Walking through Scripture's gallery of pictures of salvation from new life to deliverance, from justification to adoption, he invites us to deepen our understanding of the gospel.

Book Synopsis

In our image-based culture, people need to visualize something to understand it. This has never been more true about our communication of the gospel. But sometimes our understanding of the gospel gets stuck in a rut, and all we know is a particular outline or one-size-fits-all formula. While we hold to only one gospel, the New Testament uses a wealth of dynamic, compelling images for explaining the good news of Jesus, each of which connects with different people at different points of need. Neil Livingstone provides a guided tour of biblical images of the gospel and shows how each offers fresh insight into God's saving work. Walking through Scripture's gallery of pictures of salvation from new life to deliverance, from justification to adoption, Livingstone invites us to deepen our understanding of the gospel. By letting the truth and power of each permeate our lives, we will be better able to articluate the life-changing gospel of Christ to a world that needs to taste--and see--that the Lord is good.

Review Quotes

I'm particularly impressed with how Livingstone is able to tie these images and themes together throughout the Bible rather than simply list verses. At the same time he is exploring the imagery, he is mining the Biblical resources and making application to real persons. . . . Above all, Livingstone never loses sight of another set of images: people who need the Gospel in different ways.

Livingstone uses narrative to enliven afresh those biblical word pictures that repetition has sucked day.

Livingstone's aim is to open up the true nature of the Gospel to us so that it can change the way we do Christianity. Yet his vision of the Gospel is 3-dimensional and only an aesthetic journey into the intersection of heaven and earth can help us begin to grasp its contours.

About the Author

Neil Livingstone (M.A., Fuller Theological Seminary) is the area director for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in metropolitan Washington, D.C.

Brian McLaren is founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in the Baltimore-Washington region. He is the author of numerous books including A New Kind of Christian, A Generous Orthodoxy and Finding Our Way Again.