Books and Reading – Page 9

Book Review: Max On Life

I have been reading Max Lucado for fifteen years now and all his books that I read were good. He is a good writer with great imagination. He builds his ideas slowly and paints word pictures before finally unveiling his point. He has a knack of restating Bible passages without twisting them. He can dramatize a particular Bible scene and give it a 21st century backdrop.

His 2011 release, however, was a bit different. In Max on Life, Lucado deviates a little from his usual writing style. The book is a compilation of 172 questions sent to him by readers. The topics are varied and because the format of the book is meant to give short answers even to tough questions, the quality of the answers seemed to suffer. Questions about the existence of God, pain, loss and eternity in heaven and hell are just too broad to be addressed in a few paragraphs.

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Book Review: TITHING by Douglas Leblanc

Douglas Leblanc’s book called TITHING is one of Thomas Nelson’s Seven Ancient Practices Series. When I first saw the series title in 2011, I thought it was a great idea to get to know the practices of the early church and see how they could be translated into our modern times.

There are seven practices included in this series: Tithing, Sacred Meal, Fasting, Fixed Hour of Prayer, Hallowing of the Sabbath, Observance of the Liturgical Year and Doing a Pilgrimage. The first three disciplines (tithing, sacred meal and fasting) are related to the body, its product and its appetite. The remaining four have something to do with the way we spend our time.

I happen to read Scot McKnight’s book on Fasting in this series. While it did not overwhelm me, it was helpful to me in shaping my understanding about true fasting. Our church has an annual schedule of prayer and fasting every January and every year, I turn to John Piper and Scot McKnight to refresh my mind on biblical fasting.

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The Unity of the Bible

Graeme Goldsworthy on the unity of the Bible:

The unity of the Bible is matter of biblical revelation, not of empirical investigation. Put simply, I believe that the Bible gives me a single, accurate, and coherent picture of reality principally because Jesus tells me that it does. The unity of the Bible is an article of faith before ever it is arrived at empirically. The empirical discovery of the unity is governed by the presupposition of divine revelation. If I have difficulty in understanding how that unity exists in the face of certain phenomena, or apparent phenomena, that is a problem in my understanding, not in the biblical text.

How to Humble the Soul

There are two things that are suited to humble the souls of men– a due consideration of God, and then of ourselves. Of God, in His greatness, glory, holiness, power, majesty, and authority; of ourselves, in our mean, abject, and sinful condition. The man that understands the evil of his own heart, how vile it is, is the only useful, fruitful, and solidly believing and obedient person.

John Owen, Triumph Over Temptation

The Cause of Biblical Illiteracy

Dan Dumas on expository preaching:

Many churches aren’t getting expository preaching from the pulpit. This is a primary cause for the epidemic of biblical illiteracy in the pews. Preachers aren’t teaching the Bible, and they’re not teaching their people how to read it and study it for themselves. Not surprisingly, people grow disinterested in the Bible.

Faithful, expository preaching is instead being replaced with whatever scratches the itching ears of our self-centered, consumerist culture. Ironically, this pursuit of relevance has achieved just the opposite. People don’t see the immediate impact that the Bible has on their lives because preachers are too busy trying to chase the bankrupt idol that is relevance.

Why has expository preaching been exchanged for this pragmatism? Because it’s hard work. It takes serious commitment to spend time studying week in and week out, praying through the text, allowing it to marinate the preacher’s own soul, spending time in the original languages, trying to place himself in the first century and reading the insights of men past and present with more wisdom than he. Continue reading The Cause of Biblical Illiteracy

Robert Murray McCheyne

If you have not seen Christ, then you know nothing yet as you ought to know; all your knowledge is like a bridge without a keystone- like a system without a sun. What good will it do you in hell that you knew all the sciences in the world, all the events of history, and all the busy politics of your little day? Do you not know that your very knowledge will be turned into an instrument of torture in hell? Oh, how will you wish in that day that you had read your newspaper less and your Bible more- that with all your getting, you had got understanding- that with all your knowledge, you had known the Saviour, whom to know is life everlasting!