It’s the question I always get from the people who wanted to attend Together for the Gospel but weren’t able to: What books did they give away? Well, I’m glad you asked. Here is the list:

• The Cross and Christian Ministry by D.A. Carson (Amazon | Westminster)
• Fellowship with God by Martyn Lloyd-Jones (not available online; given in both book and CD format)
• Listen Up! by Christopher Ash (Amazon | Westminster)
• Gospel and Kingdom by Graeme Goldsworthy (Amazon | Westminster)
• Health, Wealth and Happiness by David Jones and Russell Woodbridge (Amazon)
• Reformation: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow by Carl Trueman (Amazon | Westminster)
• Turning to God by David Wells (Amazon)
• What Is the Mission of the Church? by Greg Gilbert and Kevin DeYoung (Amazon | Westminster)
• Preaching and Preachers: 40th Anniversary Edition by Martyn Lloyd-Jones (Amazon | Westminster)
• How the Gospel Brings Us All the Way Home by Derek Thomas (Amazon | Westminster)
• The Pleasures of God by John Piper (Amazon | Westminster)
• Church Membership: How the World Knows Who Represents Jesus by Jonathan Leeman (Amazon | Westminster)
• The Church: The Gospel Made Visible by Mark Dever (Amazon | Westminster)
• 1 Corinthians 1-9: Challenging Church by Mark Dever (The Good Book Company)
• A T4G special edition of the HCSB

Several of these were special editions created specifically for T4G (including, for example, the books from Piper and Carson).

The couple hundred people who attended Band of Bloggers also received these titles:

• On Earth As It Is In Heaven by Wyman Lewis Richardson (Amazon)
• Tribal Church: Lead Small, Impact BIG by Steve Stroope (Amazon)
• 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess by Jen Hatmaker (Amazon)
• Everyday Prayers by Scotty Smith (Amazon | Westminster)
• Who Am I?: Identity in Christ by Jerry Bridges (Amazon)
• A Holy Ambition by John Piper (Amazon)
• Red Like Blood: Confrontations With Grace by Joe Coffey and Bob Bevington (Amazon | Westminster)
• G.O.S.P.E.L. by D.A. Horton (Amazon)
• Test, Train, Affirm and Send Into Ministry by Brian Croft (Amazon | Westminster)
• Gospel: Recovering the Power that Made Christianity Revolutionary by J.D. Greear (Amazon | Westminster)
• Subversive: Living as Agents of Gospel Transformation by Ed Stetzer (Amazon)
• The World We All Want by Tim Chester (Amazon)

How many times have you come across this quote attributed to Mahatma Gandhi? "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." I must have read it a hundred times in books, magazines, articles, tweets. It is used by believers and unbelievers to point to the hypocrisy of Christians and to call us to more and to better. Our inability to live what we preach is driving the multitudes away. Or so we are told. After all, that’s what Gandhi said.

We need to stop using this quote and I'm going to give you two good reasons to do so. In the first place, Gandhi was hardly an authority on Jesus. When he says, "I like your Christ" he is referring to a Jesus of his own making, a Jesus plucked haphazardly from the pages of Scripture, a Jeffersonian kind of Jesus, picked and chosen from the accounts of his life. He certainly was not referring to the Jesus--the true and complete Jesus--revealed from the first page of Scripture to the last. He did not refer to the Jesus who stands reading with a sword of judgment, the Jesus who made unwavering claims of his own deity and eternality, who declared that he was and is the only way to be made right with God. Jesus the good man, Jesus the teacher, Jesus the moralist, perhaps, but never Jesus who was and is and is to come.

Whatever Jesus Gandhi liked was certainly not the Jesus of the Bible. Why then should we care if we do not attain to this falsified version of Jesus? I would be ashamed to have any appearance to the kind of Jesus that Gandhi would deem good and acceptable and worthy of emulation. That Jesus would, of course, have to look an awful lot like Gandhi. So there is one good reason to stop using this quote: because Gandhi fabricated a Jesus of his own making and declared his affection only for this fictional character. He never liked the real thing.

Here's a second reason. Gandhi had a fundamental misunderstanding of himself and of the rest of humanity.

Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games is all the rage today; had I known what a phenomenon it would become, I'm sure I would have read the books and prepared a review to coincide with the release of the films. Alas, it is too late for that. But with every twelve-year old I know either reading the books or begging to, and with many of the women I know also reading and enjoying them (along with more than a few men), I began to wonder, what is it that makes this story sell millions of books and 155 million dollars in movie tickets on opening weekend alone? So I read the The Hunger Games (the first book in the series, at least) and watched the movie. And I think I get it. Some of it, anyway.

Now I'll admit from the outset that I didn't enjoy the book as much as many others have. Aileen says I'm just a book snob. I'd tend to disagree, but I suppose I shouldn't just discount what she says. However, even though I wasn't as taken with the books as many others, I do think I see what the fuss is about and why they have such great appeal. 

But first, here in a hundred words or less, is a summary of the book: The United States has been very nearly destroyed and in the aftermath of the apocalypse the Capital holds all the power, utterly dominating the remainder of the country which has been divided into 12 districts. As a form of punishment and control, once per year each district has to send one teenaged boy and one teenaged girl to participate in The Hunger Games, a winner takes all fight to the death. Katniss Everdeen, the hero of the story, is one of those who must battle for her life.

Now here are some of the themes that I believe have contributed to the book's popularity. If you've read the story, I'd love to hear if you think I'm right or if I'm completely missing the point.

Good and Evil. The story clearly delineates between good and evil. There is no confusion about what is right and what is wrong, no difficult or confusing shades of gray. Collins makes it easy on the reader by making the participants in the games either all-good or all-evil. There is one character who may be a little less evil than the rest, but he dies at the hand of one of the bad guys; none of the good guys has to face an agonizing decision about whether or not to take his life. Katniss is good, Peeta is good, Rue is good, every other participant who is developed as a character is evil. We all love a story of good versus evil and this one follows a tried-and-true pattern.

Today is the 224th anniversary of the death of Charles Wesley, one of history’s most well-known and best-loved hymn writers. His contributions to the English-speaking church are remarkable, which becomes apparent when you read the introduction to his brief biography at ChristianHistory.net:

He was said to have averaged 10 poetic lines a day for 50 years. He wrote 8,989 hymns, 10 times the volume composed by the only other candidate (Isaac Watts) who could conceivably claim to be the world’s greatest hymn writer.

Of these nearly 9,000 hymns, you’ll likely recognize “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” and “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” along with many others.

Duke Divinity School has done the hard work of putting together an organized collection that provides a “standard for scholarly study and citation.” The collection is organized by date of publication in PDFs that seek to match the original published resources. Each PDF also includes an editorial introduction about the resource.

Another online source for Charles Wesley hymns is, of course, CyberHymnal.org. Though this site only lists 265 of his hymns, each page gives you the option of playing a MIDI file of the tune, which is nice if you’ve forgotten (or want to learn) the melody. Once you’ve done that, you may want to search iTunes or Amazon to find a better version of the song.

Here in Ontario there is a criminal trial taking place of the kind that is so disturbing that I cannot bear to read any details. It involves the taking, raping and killing of a young girl. The very few details I’ve seen in headlines and bylines have been more than enough to convince me that I cannot read any more. It’s just too much, too weighty, too awful.

A trial like this one is always accompanied by cries for justice. There are cries in the media and cries in casual conversation. There are cries in my own heart. When I think of a couple who brutally murder a young girl, my heart cries out for justice. This is a natural cry, I think, and a good one.

Yet so often it seems that the people who do such horrifying things get away with it, or at the very least, do not receive anything even approaching justice. Hitler, the man who sparked the Second World War, a war that took tens of millions of lives, died in 1945, but did so at his own hand. A self-inflicted bullet to the head hardly seems to satisfy the demands of justice based on the lives of millions of Jews and countless millions of other lives destroyed in the war he began. It almost seems that he got away with it. The couple that took the life of that little girl may spend the rest of their lives behind bars but this, too, hardly seems like true justice. I want justice!

When we read in the Bible that the law of God is written on our hearts, this must be some of what we mean--that we have a sense of justice and that we want this sense of justice to be served, to be satisfied. We also know from Scripture that justice will be served. Indeed, it must be served. And we want it to be served. Justice is "the quality of being just or fair;" it is "judgment involved in the determination of rights and the assignment of rewards and punishments." But it is more. A Christian definition of justice goes further. Justice is the due reward or punishment for an act. God must punish evil. We know this. We tremble at this thought. Or we ought to.

I think I knew more about preaching before I began to preach. At least I was more sure of the things I was sure of. Now that I preach on a regular basis I have a better assessment of how little I really know about the art or science or whatever it is of preaching God's Word. There is a mystery to preaching that makes it so very different from anything else I have attempted, succeeded at or failed at--and all three are descriptors of what I have done in the pulpit so far.

I know there have been times in the past that I've rolled my eyes at preachers who have tried to explain to me just how difficult it is to prepare and preach a sermon, but I guess I didn't take their word for it because they make it look so easy. Albert Pujols looks effortless when he smacks a baseball 387 feet over the left-center wall at Angel Stadium, so I probably won't believe him when he says it's tough, but after I take a turn at the plate and dribble a few ground balls down the third base line, I might start to get it. Now that I've taken a few turns in the metaphorical batter's box, I think I'm starting to understand what these preachers were saying. It's not about whining or crying or asking for sympathy, but just the plain truth. Preaching is really, really tough—far more difficult than it looks on a Sunday morning.

There is a lot I could say about lessons learned, some of the joyful variety and some of the painful, but just one thing I pondered this week was the strange interplay between freedom and burden, two things the preacher wants to have and wants to carry with him as he fulfills his ministry. I think I've come to understand at least a little bit of what these preachers were telling me.

I hadn’t even heard of Kony 2012 until my inbox started to be flooded with requests for me to say something about it. Interestingly, no one wrote to say, “You need to support this!” Rather, people wrote to say, “What are we supposed to think about this?” The campaign has exploded into the international consciousness and it is demanding of us some kind of response. So what do we do?

Here is my take on it: Just wait and catch your breath. Breathe. Count to 100. Or 100,000.

Kony 2012 is a campaign put together by Invisible Children, a social activisim organization that seeks to bring peace and stability to Uganda. They released a film in 2004 and just recently began this new campaign designed to destroy one of the worst criminals in the world. Wikipedia offers some useful background.

After the film, Invisible Children Inc initiated a successful campaign, petitioning the United States Government for support. Invisible Children Inc in 2012 started a social media campaign to garner support and awareness of the LRA and Joseph Kony. The campaign focuses on the website that features a roughly 30 minute video and sharing tools, and a plan for encouraging activism and bringing public awareness for the end goal of capturing Kony in 2012. The 30 minute video was uploaded to YouTube on the March 5, 2012 and went viral immediately. After three days, the video received over 38 million hits on YouTube. As part of the campaign, 20 celebrity “Culturemakers” and 12 Policy makers were targeted as individuals to pressure to publicize the campaign. Among those targeted were Mark Zuckerburg, Lady GaGa, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, and Harry Reid. The singer Rhianna has tweeted about the issue.

This is a campaign designed to take advantage of the power of social media. What’s more, it is working to perfection, at least when it comes to the way it is spreading. There are several terms related to this campaign that are trending on Twitter and the YouTube video has almost 53 million views so far, quickly making it one of their most popular videos of all-time. It is all over Facebook and now all over the mainstream media as well.

What is the book of Jeremiah all about? What does the Lord accomplish through 52 chapters that vary between biography, autobiography, history and prophecy, all focused on the impending punishment facing Judah. Those who have been enjoying The 3650 Challenge with me have just begun reading Jeremiah and I thought this would be an ideal time to try to understand what the book is all about. To that end I turned to Michael Williams’ new book How to Read the Bible Through the Jesus Lens. Zondervan was kind enough to allow me to post the entire chapter on Jeremiah; you can read it below or download it in PDF.

Things had become much worse in the southern kingdom of Judah since the time of Isaiah. The people of Judah had reverted quickly from the sweeping reforms of King Josiah (640 - 609 BC) to the moral decay that characterized the reigns of his sons and grandsons. Jeremiah was called to spend his adult life being the voice of God, the ignored relationship partner, to these people who refused to listen. No wonder he resisted his call! God's people seemed bent on rejecting their covenant, their special relationship, with him. How could God allow them to remain in the land that symbolized their relationship with him when it was clear they didn't want that relationship?

Though it grieved him, God would bring the Babylonians in 586 BC to take his beloved people away into exile, where they could reflect on what they had done and what they had lost. But, amazingly, God was not through with them. Through Jeremiah, God announced that he would arrange for there to be another relationship with his people, unlike the previous one that had proved impossible for them to maintain. This relationship, this covenant, was going to be something entirely new.

Jeremiah tried to get his countrymen to see that the things they were trusting in instead of God would ultimately fail them, but it was no use. For them, trusting in political and military allies, accommodating preachers, religious structures and routines, and even other gods all seemed so much more comfortable and expedient than reliance on the old-w fashioned God of their ancestors. But Jeremiah kept trying. He explained to them that in any healthy relationship, each of the parties needs to listen attentively and respond to the other. God had always listened and responded to them, but they had stopped listening and responding to him. The relationship was in a desperate place. Nevertheless, God's people refused counsel, and so the relationship would be dissolved due to "irreconcilable differences." God removed his people from his presence. But before doing so, he made a promise that was as incredibly gracious as it was impossible to comprehend. After the period of exile, he would somehow enter into a new relationship with his people that could never be broken.

Though by definition baptists agree that a person should be baptized only after confessing faith in Jesus Christ, there are several views on how old a believer must be, or should be, before such a confession can be trusted and acted upon. The views range, on the one end, from baptizing a confessing believer no matter how young to, on the other end, not baptizing them until they are practically independent from their parents.

I’ve linked to statements from solid churches that stand on opposite ends of this spectrum and to two other notable churches that fall more in the middle. There’s a summary of each view under the church’s name; you’ll want to follow the link to read more of their rationale.

“Any Age” View

Heritage Baptist Church, written by pastor Ted Christman:

For more than thirty years Heritage Baptist Church has been baptizing only those who give credible evidence of true conversion. There is nothing remarkable about that claim. It is simply a part of what it means to be a biblical Baptist church. What might be noteworthy, however, is the fact that for the same period of time we have been baptizing everyone who gives credible evidence of true conversion - including young people and children.

“Grown Up” View

Capitol Hill Baptist Church, written by the elders:

While it is difficult to set a certain number of years which are required for baptism, it is appropriate to consider the candidate's maturity. The kind of maturity that we feel it is wise to expect is the maturity which would allow that son or daughter to deal directly with the church as a whole, and not, fundamentally, to be under their parents' authority. As they assume adult responsibilities (sometime in late high school with driving, employment, non-Christian friends, voting, legality of marriage), then part of this, we would think, would be to declare publicly their allegiance to Christ by baptism.

“In Between” Views

Grace Community Church, compiled from material by pastor John MacArthur and others:

Here at Grace Community Church, our general practice is to wait until a professing child has reached the age of twelve. Because baptism is seen as something clear and final, our primary concern is that when a younger child is baptized he tends to look to that experience as proof that he was saved. Therefore, in the case of an unre- generate child who is baptized--which is not uncommon in the church at large--baptism actually does him a disservice. It is better to wait until the reality to which baptism testifies can be more easily discerned.

Bethlehem Baptist Church, written by pastor David Michael:

It is our practice to wait until a child is at least age eleven before considering him for baptism. More importantly it is our practice to wait until there is evidence of regeneration and enough maturity to articulate the Gospel and give a credible profession of faith. For further consideration of this topic see “Why Wait? Four Practical Reasons for Withholding Baptism Until Children Are Older” by Pastor David Michael.

Hannah is in college when she receives the shocking news her parents hadn’t ever shared with her--she is adopted. Not only is she adopted, but she is the survivor of a failed abortion. Angry, confused and upset, she turns to her oldest friend Jason to help her through this difficult time. Along with his friends she embarks on a Spring Break road trip that leads her to go looking for her roots. That's the plot of October Baby, a feature film set to hit theaters in March, and one inspired by the story of Gianna Jessen, an abortion survivor and advocate for the pro-life cause.

I received a screener of the film and was pleasantly surprised by it--pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Admittedly I love a good, heart-warming kind of story, but October Baby offers more than that. The acting is very good and Rachel Hendrix, who plays Hannah, does a fantastic job in a tough role. The more difficult and emotional the scene, the more she shines.

The message of the film is explicitly pro-life. It is pro-life in the big picture, telling the story of an ambitious, enjoyable, lovable character who is alive only because an attempt to murder her failed. It is pro-life in the details as well, such as when a nurse describes that failed abortion, contrasting Hannah with her brother who did not survive. It is also pro-adoption, highlighting the joy and value of adoption. "Thank you for wanting me," says the main character in a particularly emotional scene. To be wanted, to be loved--don’t be surprised if you find your eyes filling with tears.

With all of those positives--and again, October Baby truly is an enjoyable film--it also highlights some of the weaknesses I almost always find in Christian movies, and even good Christian movies.

Christian films too often seem to find themselves in a place of limbo, somewhere between moralism and preachiness, between downplaying or assuming the gospel by saying too little and appearing preachy by emphasizing or over-emphasizing the gospel. If a film only vaguely references faith--a Scripture passage here, the obligatory church scene there--we will complain that it says too little. If a film explicitly references the gospel--the whole gospel--we will say that it is too preachy.