A Sacrifice of Obedience was written through the years 2002 and 2003 as an intended sequel to Make Me Like Jesus. It was never published.
Fifteen years have now passed. As I look at the world around me, it seems less likely than ever that Christians in very large numbers will be drawn to a message about sacrifice or obedience. And I am no different. I resist both imperatives just like everyone else. I had hoped by this time in my life to be a little further along.
But obedience remains the bull’s eye of the Christian faith, and the very personal bull’s eye of my own life. Thus, the time at last seems right to revisit this manuscript and share it with whatever fellow pilgrims there may be on that isolated and occasionally lonely path.
You who read these words may be few. Even in Christendom, where the image of the cross looms large in the imaginations and theologies of its many churches and their members, the actual cross-life of sacrifice and obedience is not so well known.
Yet to such a life we are called. It is the only life to which we are called.
Let us, then, courageously explore together a few high points along the Lord’s earthly Calvary road to see what they have to reveal about that life.
The place: A European center of power in the emerging New World Order.
The event: An international conference plotting the strategy for evangelism in the post-Cold War era.
Jackson Maxwell, Christian journalist, travels to Berlin intent upon capturing the spirit of this historic gathering. But behind the scenes, a much more crucial chain of events is about to take shape.
As high-tech churchmen plan a big-money conversation of the East, Jackson is suddenly faced with the life-or-death struggle of one solitary Christian. He is Andrassy Galanov, a former KGB spy, whom aspiring leaders of the New Order want dead as soon as possible.
When Jackson and leading evangelist Jacob Michaels make the decision to help, they are plunged into a hidden world of political intrigue…phony coups d’état…plans for a one-world currency…and a sinister religious vision for the globe.In their race against time, Jackson and Jacob also run headlong into their most surprising find—the rethinking of the very nature of Christian conversion itself.
