Shane Hipps

Work , sex, ice cream, religion—they all promise fulfillment.

But what they deliver is fleeting.

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A fundamental quest drives us; baked into every human being is a longing for peace, joy, fulfillment, heaven—different names for the same reality. We want something that lasts, that doesn’t rise and fall with the fate of the stock market. We search for it in all that we do.

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Jesus understood this quest. He came to show us that peace is possible in this life, not just the next one. Yet Christianity, the very religion that claims Jesus as its own, has often built the biggest barriers to him and the life he promised.

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Shane Hipps revives the faith with a fresh understanding of the message of Jesus and a persuasive argument that what we are looking for, we already have. The shocking truth is that Jesus proclaimed “eternal life” as a present reality that dwells within each of us.

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A transformative breakthrough, this book goes beyond “religion” or “spirituality” and cuts to the heart of our humanity and existence. It’s about realizing that we already possess what we are searching for, and that the heaven we long for isn’t just a gift when we die, but a gift while we live.

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Endorsements

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“The unique thing I’ve seen Shane do time and time again is take a truth with all of its complexity and edges and implications and capture it in a metaphor . . . it’s really, really profound and really helpful and really inspiring.”
—Rob Bell, author of Love Wins

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“The humblest, clearest, most comfortably compelling statement yet of the difference between ‘religious Christianity’ and the Jesus way. In sum, this is one of the most instructive and pastoral books I have read in the last ten years and, Lord knows, one of the most needed.”
—Phyllis Tickle , lecturer on religion in America and author of Emergence Christianity

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“This book not only offers us this good news with great clarity and delight; it also helps us—gently, wisely, simply, and profoundly—to be roused and raised into that blessed state of awe and awakening.”
—Brian D. McLaren, author of Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?