Passion & Fire is another book that the Lord is using to draw us into intimacy with Him. I have edited several books on this subject and written endorsements for more but, by far, this is the one I enjoyed the most.
All of these recent books call us to chase after God more fervently than ever before. This is the Holy Spirit’s clarion call, sounding throughout the Church at this time. Nathan Shaw lifts that call beyond personal quests into God’s greater purposes – for the work of ministry, for ushering in God’s Kingdom on earth.
Nathan, like his namesake in the Old Testament, gently exposes the reasons for our resistance to intimacy, and tells us how to overcome them. He lifts away shame and guilt, not by exhausting lists of ‘how to’s’ and ‘how not to’s’, but by taking us into the loving arms of the Father. He reveals the Father’s loving nature so that shame falls away like heavy frost melting off our stony hearts.
Other books in this field have left me feeling like I ought to try to find greater intimacy with God but not sure that I really wanted to. Perhaps it was just me, I don’t mean it critically of others. But Passion & Fire rekindled desire within me. It was as if that desire had somehow become banked, requiring bellows to pump it into flame again – and again and again. The strain that I once felt to keep the fire aglow is gone. I just know that the fire is there, resident and alive, and God will fan my sparks to bonfires whenever His purposes prompt. I look forward not to laborious questing, but to restful flaming.
I believe this book will do the same for others. Passion & Fire puts the emphasis on God’s desire to enter into relationship with us. The book also calls us to enter into more disciplined seeking. But Nathan makes the case for God’s grace so strongly that the onus of labor is lifted off us, and discipline and seeking become joyful and easy responses rather than stressful work.
A sense of joy undergirds the book. Not ecstatic peaks that pass and plunge into melancholy and despair, but a quiet river that you can step into at any time. This book leaves me resting in the biblical knowledge that the river is a bubbling stream that lives within me. I don’t have to refind it, I only need to rest in it and experience it.
In the end, it is simply all about God. God is the first Chaser, not us. The spring of joy bubbles up from that fact. For, ‘Herein is love, not that we first loved God, but that He first loved us.’
Superficiality seems to characterise most of the relationships we enjoy today. The danger is to carry that shallowness into our relationship with God. Nathan addresses a theme that is so relevant for the church today: going deeper with God. He faces with honesty and personal experience the hindrances that stop believers doing just that. This book will prove to be an encouragement to all believers seeking a more impacting and effective relationship with God.
Nathan Shaw’s text on passion and fire is a great challenge to all believers. It is a challenge to those who walk in the lowlands and the valleys of Christian living. It is a challenge to climb the mountain of God, to meet with God. The mountain is a place where there is no human fog or smog, where everything is clean, clear and the air is pure. Nathan’s book is a call to the Bride of Christ to really and truly enter into intimacy with the Bridegroom, our Lord Jesus Christ. May God bless the text to all who read.
Passion & Fire will encourage all those who yearn for greater intimacy with God, and particularly those who struggle to obtain it. I am glad that Nathan has shared some of his story and opened his life for those who want to learn from it. Daniel 11:32 says that those who truly know their God will be strong and do exploits. A lost world awaits such as these.
Nathan Shaw’s Passion & Fire fulfills its title. I was moved, stirred, challenged and filled with a sense of the awe of God as I read through its pages. Nathan’s clarion call for individuals to see the presence of God more than the gifts of God insures the gifts will always be present for those who are humble, hungry and thirsty. You should be prepared to be changed as you read through his book Passion & Fire.
Nathan Shaw has opened our eyes to a realm of God’s presence and intimate relationship with Christ Jesus. Thanks Nathan for sharing your personal experiences and challenging us to fulfill Father God’s heart by coming into a personal, committed relationship with Jesus Christ. The reading of this book should renew a passion for Jesus Christ and inflame the reader with the fire of the Holy Spirit.
God is calling us to be His friend. He is looking for men and women through whom His purposes in the earth can be birthed. Nathan’s book Passion & Fire will kindle the passion in you to be one in whom God can share His intimate secrets. Reading this book will cause a passion for intimacy to rise in you that will affect a hurting world.
Passion and fire is exactly what this challenging book is all about. Nathan Shaw bares his heart’s longing to see the church brought into a deeper intimacy with Christ. Unlike many who swing the pendulum for intimacy into a mystical and monastical extreme, Shaw brings a healthy balance with his emphasis on reaching the lost. May God use this book as a spiritual accelerant to ignite a fresh burden for intimacy and involvement. I commend it to you.
I read Nathan Shaw’s Passion & Fire with great interest. The book is about experiencing God, and Nathan explores this theme through many people throughout Scripture. He includes something of his own struggles to reach that intimacy. Some of these passages were to me redolent of the writings of some of my earlier godly models. But those men were all older, more mature. This is a book by a young man, eager to share with freshness and vitality the experience of closeness with God which he has come to have. The book, however, is not limited to any personal mystic experience. The last chapters of the book turn this intimacy into passion for Christ’s last Great Commission to make disciples.
Nathan asks the powerful question, ‘Where Are The People of Passion?’ I want to raise my hand in answer to that question and say, ‘Here I am.’ But is that an honest response or a desired one? This book makes clear the process of becoming a passionate and powerful person who knows his or her God intimately.
Passion & Fire is about pursuing intimacy with God. A young man’s desire and passion for intimacy with his Creator has been combined with truth from others to produce a work from which we can all learn and build. Nathan has a way of allowing the reality of his personal relationship with God to overflow and impact his readers. His heart to help others understand some of the key principles of knowing God for who He truly is will motivate and inspire you to press further into your own pursuit of God. The combination of an all-powerful God and a man who knows the power of his God are evident all through the pages of this book.