100 books like The Yoga of Jesus - Understanding the Hidden Teachings of the Gospels

Frankl’s concept of finding meaning in suffering and the idea that our primary drive in life is not pleasure but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful deeply resonates with me.

The book underscores the belief that even in the most difficult of circumstances, we have the freedom to choose our attitudes and responses, a concept that is central to high-performance psychology.

This book was a game-changer in helping to understand how quantum physics interacts with human behavior. It is a dense book with a great amount of research and science. That said, the point of the book is to explain, in an easily understandable way, how the practice of applied kinesiology can help guide us through life’s journey to discover simple truths.

I was introduced to this book back in 2009, and it started me on an incredible journey toward a better understanding of how the world works. It was instrumental in helping me to develop a Leadership Model in my 3rd book.  

Okay, you got me. This is not a book of fiction, although cynics may disagree. It’s a book of quantum possibility based on hard science and evolved visionary theory.

Like all of my stories, Biocentrism places consciousness at the center of its premise, presenting an important new human/world/cosmic view of well, everything. Like its author, Robert Lanza, I believe that consciousness is the essential fabric of mind, soul, and matter. Everything arises from it. Nothing is conceived without it.

The characters in my stories are always guided toward the higher aspects of their awareness in order to create new realities. Waking up to the understanding of a consciousness-centric existence changes not only us, but everything we know. Everything we thought we knew. And most importantly, forms the basis of everything we do from this point forward.

Biocentrism, as well as Lanza’s other books, provide a scientific foundation for what… show more.

In this book, author Neale Donald Walsch, at the lowest point of his life, picks up pen and paper one night and begins an interesting and quite intimate conversation with God.

The conversation becomes a daily routine and helps him get past his fears and challenges. Walsch asks questions I think many people, including myself, want to ask God, and God (the author’s higher consciousness) provides answers that really make you think and look at things through a different perspective.

This conversation ends up changing Walsh’s life, as well as the reader’s. 

Written at a much more basic level than the first three books on my list, Roberts boils the issues down into easy-to-read, bite-size chunks that any thoughtful layperson can digest. After my own book on the historical reliability of the Gospels, it’s the next one I would hand to anyone ‘off the street’ and the first one I would give to someone ‘on the street’! Mark is an apologist with the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, who has remained a person of impeccable integrity during their recent rough waters. While many writers tackle Matthew, Mark and Luke together, because they are more similar than different, Roberts includes John, who is more different than similar. A great read.

In the 1950s, Robert Coleman, then a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary, was assigned to teach a class on evangelism. But he had a problem: he had no idea what to say. So he decided to pore over the four Gospels to discern Jesus’ strategy for winning people to his message. His lecture notes became The Master Plan of Evangelism.

The reach of The Master Plan since its publication in 1963 has been enormous. Billy Graham even wrote the foreword. But Jesus’ model of training a few was so alien to the operating systems of 20th-century churches and traveling evangelists that generations had no idea how to implement it. Not many books have been so widely read and so little applied. Yet if you only read one book on this subject, make this the one. And if you’ve already read it long ago, read it again.

Bauckham is a world-leading Biblical scholar who shows in this ground-breaking book how direct eye-witness testimony underlies what we read about Jesus in the gospels, which should therefore be treated with the utmost seriousness. Particularly significant for Bauckham is the witness of the early second-century writer Papias, who had known and interacted with persons very close to the gospel events in his youth and explains how and by whom the gospels were put together. Eyewitness testimony is fundamental to forming our beliefs and can make the seemingly incredible totally credible. Bauckham draws a startling comparison with the Holocaust. We are convinced it happened only because we have eyewitness reports. Likewise with the resurrection of Jesus.

Keener is one of the few living scholars who has actually read cover-to-cover all of the most relevant Jewish and Greco-Roman background literature to the New Testament and can speak with authority about the way the Gospels are similar to and different from other ancient biographies and histories. He addresses virtually every skeptical question, is abreast of all the scholarly trends, including those that get little press because they actually support the reliability of the Gospels. But he is no fundamentalist, insisting that we evaluate the ancient books of Scriptures by the standards of writing of their day and not ours. A soft-spoken man, who has overcome personal tragedy more than once, Keener is a good friend and amazing Christian gentleman.

According to the gospels, Jesus had 4 brothers – James, Jose, Simon, Judas – and at least two sisters (who are not named). What happened to these individuals after Jesus’ crucifixion? Butz explores the Jewish movement that stemmed from Jesus’ brother, James. James led Jesus’ followers from the time of Jesus’ death up until his own death in 62 CE. A leader who knew Jesus his whole life, James regarded Jesus as a Jewish teacher. He differed radically from Paul, who never met the Jesus of history. This book explores the original movement that originated from Jesus.

If you’ve browsed my list this far, maybe you’re curious enough to peek into Mennonite theology, which truly is upside-down from the world we live in. Even though I’d been Mennonite all my life, this book, which I read decades ago, explained what radical Christian discipleship meant in a way I’d never fully understood. All those things that make the theology challenging—choosing pacifism, taking care of the least in society, living humbly instead of seeking power, turning the other cheek, forgiving when it’s easier to seek revenge—are also what make it transformative. If only living it were that easy.