Our Real Life in Christ

A passionate series of chapter-long reflections on the true nature of the Christian calling.

In his nonfiction debut, Aragon continues a long Christian tradition that began with the epistles of St. Paul. He transforms a series of Scripture lessons, originally designed for use in prisons, into a handbook for an intense, renewed personal faith, rather than “passive fellowship,” which he warns is the false premise of too much major-denomination Christianity. The Christian faith, he says, is not, in fact, a religion, but rather a “bona fide intimate relationship with the Godhead.” In order to experience it, he asserts, the faithful must be willing to “exchange the worldly things that hold the affections of life” for a straightforward, wholesale life of faith. He deals with the subject of prisoners, who have, in many cases, faced the rock bottom of their lives; to these and other readers, he offers kindly but hard-line testimony about what true, nondogmatic Christianity requires from those who seek its mercy: total surrender. “Let’s get rid of that religious pacifier that has put the body of Christ into a deep sleep…and get the courage to make the choice to return to the true teacher and tutor, the Holy Spirit,” he writes. He earnestly calls for Christians to “imitate and duplicate” the union that Jesus Christ had with his Father, and stresses that all the faithful need to do so is to hold the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit inside their own hearts. To help that process, Aragon provides a great many learned, readable scriptural analyses throughout this book, including “Dispelling Religious Myths about the Kingdom” and “Removing the Hurdles of Entering the Kingdom.” These textual lessons will be valuable to Bible study groups, and Aragon’s frank, searching account of his own personal interpretations of Christianity’s heart will interest all other believers.

A stern but friendly treatise on the obligations of faith.