Once Upon a Tree

by Calvin Miller

Book Overview

Miller examines the ten "fearsome doctrines of our lives" and finds all-encompassing answers in the pivotal point of eternity-the Cross of Christ. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1582292574
• ISBN13: 9781582292571
• Release Date: September 2002
• Publisher: Howard Books
• Length: 214 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

A wonderful book. A must read

I am a true Calvin Miller fan. I had the opportunity in London at the International Congress on Preaching to have dinner with him and at the time this review was written, he lives within 10 miles of my house. He is in my opinion, the mystic for our time. Someone who can look beyond and go into the depths of God and then be able to communicate it to those seeking the same wonder and awe. This book is no different.Dr. Miller looks at our life, at the heart cry of our life where we need a challenge and a touch and shows how the cross meets those challenges and needs.For instance, in one section he talks about the Apostolic Recipe for Life. He says:-------------------------------------For us a thin and needy light focuses on his cross. Like someone being wakened from a deep sleep, we ask, "What does this mean?" Oddly enough, the first to ask this question were fishermen, revenue collectors, peasants, and prosti­tutes, who had through his dying become respectable. These were the ones who wrote the Gospels-those all-inclusive biographies of Christ.It is right that we have trusted their report. In the first century the apostles were the needy who desired to know him. Now we are the needy whose greatest need is to know him. They were the old generation of beggars who packaged the bread of salvation for our generation. We now eat from their recipe of life.I have asked the Father that I might never forget that these who first wrote of the Cross were my brothers. They called him Lord in centuries gone by that I might call him Lord in mine. They stood at the Cross, drinking of its life. Now they crook their fingers to beckon me to a glorious altar-and there I am reborn. Now I can trade all my little reasons to live for one big one.Those souls of old had little status. Yet they began to insist very noisily that the eighteenth year of Emperor Tiberius was history's most important-for it was the Year of the Cross. It was God's year for answering our one simple ques­tion: "Why am I on this planet?" These followers of the Christ couldn't change their minds about the truth of the Cross, and they wouldn't change the subject. They got loud and stayed loud! They shouted it from dungeon windows and prison stocks. They were buried beneath piles of stones thrown in anger. Their heads rolled. Some were crucified in their defense of the crucifixion. And to what have these martyrs (or "wit­nesses," for that is what the word martyr means) called us? Have they called us to some Sunday, cafeteria-style church where we select the worship we want to hear, then castigate others with different tastes? Have we been summoned to com­mittee quarrels where our prosaic egos lobby for control within Christ's body of believers? God forbid!These who could not change their minds about the Cross have called us to their own private Calvary and, more important, to ours. Gradually they triumphed! Ever so slowly, as they convinced the world that the central event in time and eternity was