Books like The Yoga of Jesus - Understanding the Hidden Teachings of the Gospels — picked by fans

Few books have reminded me more powerfully that our circumstances and our inner life are not the same thing.

I first read Man's Search for Meaning years ago, and its impact has only deepened over time. Frankl's willingness to look directly at suffering without becoming defined by it challenged many of the assumptions I carried about happiness, success, and what it takes to live a meaningful life.

I return to this book because it continually reminds me that meaning is not something life hands us once everything finally goes our way. It is something we discover in how we meet what life places before us.

During difficult seasons of my own life, Frankl's perspective helped me remember that even when we cannot control our circumstances, we still have a relationship with how we respond to them. Few books have given me more courage, perspective, and hope.

I recommend this book because it shook something loose in me, the idea that consciousness might not come from the universe, but might actually come before it.

That possibility filled me with wonder, and it stayed with me long after I closed the book. I loved how Lanza’s ideas didn’t fight against a God-based faith but seemed to sit comfortably beside it, almost whispering, “Why not? Consciousness could have been God’s.” This book inspired several of my own short stories, pieces that may find their way into my next book.

Readers who enjoy big questions about life, reality, and the unseen architecture of existence will feel right at home here. And it fits my theme because it explores the mystery behind everything, the same mystery I try to touch in my own writing.

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. 

Hawkins is my favorite scientist-spiritualist—and the only writer I’ve found who succeeds at being both at once.

This is the most powerful book I have ever read—and that includes the Bible. When I first read it, it was too much. Too dense, too confronting, too world-changing to absorb and apply. I could grasp it conceptually, but couldn’t live it yet.

It took becoming ill and turning to consciousness growth as a path toward healing before I picked it up again. That second reading changed everything. The Map of Consciousness became my most important tool for understanding human behavior—mine and everyone else’s. 

As an applied behavioral scientist, I have since become deeply versed in his body of work and feel compelled to teach it. I have never found a more complete explanation of why humans do what we do.

My autistic grandson, as a teenager, read this book to me aloud twice; and now, at twenty, he is reading it to me, at my request, but once again with gusto, for the third time.

It is a meticulous and loving chronicle of Jesus’ life, his doings and sayings. I have read many “biographies” of Jesus, but, along with Aleksander Men’s The Son of Man, this is my favourite. The reading of this long book aloud, chapter by chapter, is a joy.

It is dramatic in style, very reliable in details, and sound and insightful in their interpretation. At the same time, the author’s heart is in it, and so is the reader’s. It is nourishment for the soul, as well as for the mind. A splendid book.

This book was suggested to me by a professor of New Testament studies at Cambridge University as his most highly recommended book for the historicity and preservation of the New Testament Gospels. I would heartily agree.

It is rigorously pedantic and thorough—which is exactly what I require on a topic like this. It is work to read this book, but very satisfying. It may be one of the most heavily underlined books I own, and I see it as a valuable resource that sits in a bookshelf beside my desk, where it can be immediately consulted.

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.

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.

I loved the book because it went in a direction, humorously describing the teen-age years of Jesus Christ, that no book had gone before.

Not only is the storyline clever and the dialogue sharp and humorous, but it also forces you to think critically about the origin stories that are handed down through centuries and millennia.