Beautiful Outlaw

Experiencing the Playful, Disruptive, Extravagant Personality of Jesus

by John Eldredge

**Summary**

John Eldredge talks about how he has come to know Jesus personally, finding Him to be a beautiful mixture of playfulness and humor, kindness, humility, and whole-hearted fierceness. He argues that the ‘religious fog' present in so many of our churches portrays a falsely bland version of Jesus and sells a cheap substitute for the intimate relationship God intends to have with us.
Eldredge offers these signs and symptoms of religious fog in a church. Teaching, serving, rule-keeping, and participating in church activities become the main focus. Fear of other people’s disapproval becomes a major motivation for determining our behavior.
But Eldredge reminds us that God has placed eternity in our hearts, and our deepest longings will never be satisfied apart from Him. So, he encourages us to get to know Jesus for who He really is, as He is actually portrayed in the scriptures. Assuring us that if we do, we will fall ever deeper in love with our playful, disruptive, extravagant Savior.
**Author’s Website:** Beautiful Outlaw - Book by John Eldredge

Favorite Quotes

“…religion gives the impression of having Christ, while it inoculates you from experiencing the real thing. Most wicked. If you want to destroy an economy, flood the market with counterfeit bills.”

“If you do not experience Jesus intimately, daily, in these very ways, if you do not know the comfort of his actual presence, do not hear his voice speaking to you personally—you have been robbed.

If you do not know the power of his indwelling life in you, shaping your personality, healing your brokenness, enabling you to live as he did—you have been plundered.”

“Honestly, friends, we have been a little naive. We thought knowing God would come easily. We didn’t account for the fact that we still live behind enemy lines. If knowing Jesus is the single most important thing that could ever happen to a person, then would it not follow that our enemy would have a very strong investment in keeping this from happening?”

“The religious fog uses sanctified words and activities, things that look and sound very Sunday school to distort our perceptions of God and our experience of him. It is cunning as a snake and adaptive as the flu, infiltrating our practices to make them ever so false.”

“By the way, this is the bottom-line test of anything claiming to be of Jesus: Does it bring life? If it doesn’t, drop it like a rattlesnake. And you will find that the religious never, ever brings life. Ever. That is its greatest exposure.”