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The ordinary hero

Living the cross and resurrection

Servants or celebrities?

THE ORDINARY HERO
Living the cross and resurrection
By Tim Chester
IVP. 222 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978-1-84474-377-3

What do we expect of a ‘normal’ Christian life? In this book Tim Chester offers an extended exploration of the twin themes of death and resurrection from the New Testament Scriptures.

Contrary to so much off-beam contemporary teaching, the author consistently and practically unfolds the apostolic teaching. He summarises this as follows: ‘The Christian life is not a life of victory and power, nor is it a life of weakness. It’s a life of power in weakness. Through the Holy Spirit we experience the power of resurrection from the coming age, so that we might follow the way of the cross in the present age’ (p.170). A great strength of the book is the clarity with which Chester relates the eschatological significance of Christ’s death and resurrection to practical discipleship in these last days in which we live.

Once again we are indebted to the author for dealing in print with a vital area of Christian experience. When I began to read the earliest chapters of this latest title I thought, ‘This is good stuff, but it should be familiar to any well taught Christian’. However, as a skilled teacher, Chester allows the Scriptures to speak for themselves and it is the cumulative force of the message that makes this book powerful, in my opinion.

The book is well written and, in that sense, an easy read, but it is not a comfortable read. The theology of death and resurrection is consistently and practically applied to the Christian life and this is what makes the message of the book extremely challenging. For example, Chester says: ‘Why is the church in the West not growing rapidly? Perhaps one reason is that we haven’t made that decision to die’ (p.59).

Personality and self-fulfilment have trumped character and service in modern Western culture and we fool ourselves if we think the church is immune to the cult of self. This book recovers the radical biblical call to a theology of cross and resurrection, power in weakness. It is a book that will benefit new Christians needing a clear and sane guide to the Christian life, and older Christians like me who still have much to learn about the consistent application of these core principles to our lives.

Clive Bullock,
elder, Radcliffe Road Baptist Church, Bury, Lancashire