Sometimes I read a book and can later point to a page or a chapter and a specific idea I drew from it. When I later write a review of these books I can usually point to that idea and say, “Here is what I learned; here is what the author taught me.” I love those books and in many ways can chart my spiritual growth through them. But these are not the only books that are valuable to me. There are also the books that that evoke wonder or worship even when I cannot later go back and point to that specific truth that resonated in my mind and heart. Such is the case with Jon Bloom’s Not By Sight.

Not By Sight is a book about walking by faith. It is a fresh look at familiar old stories drawn mostly from the New Testament but occasionally from the Old as well. Bloom says, “The purpose of this little book is to imaginatively reflect on the real experiences of real people in the Bible in order to help you grasp and live what it means to ‘trust in the LORD with all your heart, and … not lean on your own understanding’ (Prov. 3:5). Its goal is to help you believe in Jesus while living in a very confusing and painful world.”

In thirty-five short chapters he goes to stories like Jesus calming the storm-tossed seas, Joseph receiving the news of his fiancee’s pregnancy, the leper being healed, the disabled woman made to stand straight, and he tells them again. Sometimes he speculates a little bit, wondering how Pilate and his wife received the news that the innocent man who had been condemned was now alive again or what it was like for Andrew to live in the shadow of his brother Simon Peter. He tells of David’s regret over his affair with Bathsheba and Joseph’s prayer and praise during those long years locked away in an Egyptian prison. And always he looks for faith. When he spots that faith he calls on the reader to identify with it and to emulate it.

Chapters seventeen and eighteen were highlights for me. Though sequential they are unrelated except for the common thread of faith. One tells of the humility of the Apostle Paul. This was a humility he was forced to learn when he prayed not once, not twice, but three times to have the Lord remove that thorn from his flesh, only to learn that it was to be a continual reminder to him to trust in the Lord. This thorn in the flesh, this messenger of Satan, was actually a gift of God. Will I have faith to see the weaknesses God has assigned to me as blessings? Or will I resent them? The second tells of a leper who wanted what only God could give—deliverance from his disfiguring disease. He asked and he received. Do I have the faith, the confidence, to ask God for the things he wishes for me to ask him? How might he display his power to me or through me if only I would ask?

This is a book to savor, and I read far too quickly. I enjoyed it so much I just couldn’t help it! I couldn’t read it as slowly as it deserves, and for that reason will need to read again. It is a book I will ask my son to read this summer along with his devotions; he, at thirteen, will be able to read and understand it and will certainly benefit from it. It is a book you should consider reading as well; I have every confidence that you will enjoy it too.

Not By Sight is available at Amazon and Westminster Books.

I am sure that almost every homemaker, every mother, every woman, has experienced the disconnect between what she knows and what she feels, between knowing that her calling is good and the reality that it can be exasperating and so often feels unfulfilling. In Glimpses of Grace Gloria Furman brings the gospel to bear on a woman’s distinct calling and calls her to treasure the gospel in her home. Speaking on behalf of Christian women she says,

We need to know: What does the gospel have to do with our everyday lives in the home? How does the gospel impact our dish washing, floor mopping, bill paying, friend making, guest hosting, and dinner cooking? How does the fact that Jesus himself bore our sins in his body on the tree so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness make a difference in my mundane life today?

The big question she explores is simply this: How does the gospel change the way a woman lives out her calling as a homemaker?

In the first section of the book she looks at the gospel, saying "Theology is for homemakers who need to know who God is, who they are, and what this mundane life is all about." My favorite chapter here is "Don't Smurf the Gospel." Furman is both amusing and convicting as she writes about the importance of properly defining the gospel and properly distinguishing between the gospel itself and its many implications and applications. If "smurf" is a word the Smurfs used when they didn't know what else to say, "gospel" is a word many Christians use whether they really meant it or not. It’s a word that may mean very different things to different people, so Furman calls for clarity and precision in its use.

The second section, the bulk of the book, looks at a homemaker's many callings and shows how the gospel speaks to each of them. The chapter titles give a sense of the subjects and the tone: "Divine Power and Precious Promises for the 2 a.m. Feeding," "All Grace and All Sufficiency for Every Dinner Guest," "Treasures In Jars of Clay, Not in Fine Bone China." One of the stronger chapters in this section is "The Idol of a Picture-Perfect Home." I appreciated this chapter because there is such a clear gospel remedy and gospel application to the kind of heart idolatry that desires and demands the illusion of a picture-perfect home.

I didn't know what The Circle Maker was about until I began to read it. Neither did I know anything about Mark Batterson, its author. I knew the book only as a Christian bestseller and its author only as a name that often appears in my inbox as people ask if I know anything about him or have read his books. "My pastor gave everyone in the church a copy of this book. Have you reviewed it?" Finally I read it.

Mark Batterson is lead pastor of National Community Church in Washington, D.C., a church regarded as one of the most innovative and influential in the country. He made his debut in Christian publishing with In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day and followed that up with several other titles, including The Circle Maker.

The Circle Maker finds its title and inspiration in Honi Ha-Ma’agel, a Jewish scholar who lived in the first century B.C. and who is described in the Talmud. He is remembered as a miracle-worker in the tradition of Elijah and Elisha. Wikipedia provides a condensed version of his most famous miracle:

On one occasion when God did not send rain well into the winter (in the geographic regions of Israel, it rains mainly in the winter), he drew a circle in the dust, stood inside it, and informed God that he would not move until it rained. When it began to drizzle, Honi told God that he was not satisfied and expected more rain; it then began to pour. He explained that he wanted a calm rain, at which point the rain calmed to a normal rain.

Batterson says, "The prayer that saved a generation was deemed one of the most significant prayers in the history of Israel. The circle he drew in the sand became a sacred symbol. And the legend of Honi the circle maker stands forever as a testament to the power of a single prayer to change the course of history." From Honi he has learned the value of big, bold, audacious prayers. On a very practical level, he has learned the value of drawing figurative (and sometimes literal) circles. The promise of his book is that it "will show you how to claim God-given promises, pursue God-sized dreams, and seize God-ordained opportunities. You'll learn how to draw prayer circles around your family, your job, your problems, and your goals."

You may be one of those Christians who serves. And serves. And serves some more. When you head to church on Sunday you are preparing yourself to serve and when you return home you are exhausted. And if you are one of those servant-hearted Christians it may just be that the more you serve, the more you see how so many other Christians serve sparingly and half-heartedly. You may find that it is a challenge to serve Christ and to keep your joy.

Enter Serving Without Sinking by John Hindley. This is a book about happens inside our minds and hearts as we do our acts of Christian service. It is a call away from weariness, discouragement, bitterness and joylessness as we serve. And it does that by pointing us to the greatest Servant of all--the one who came to us not to be served but to serve. "This book isn't primarily about our service. It's mainly about Jesus Christ, and about His service. ... Jesus does not want you to measure your life by your service of Him. He does not want your service to get in the way of your love for Him. He did not come to be served by you--He came to serve you." This one truth is remarkably freeing. It frees us from service done to earn or impress or compare and instead allows us to enjoy the ways in which he serves us. But, of course, when we are so loved and so served, we will long to joyfully serve in return.

"When it comes to Christian service, the first place to look is at what is going on in our hearts, not what we are doing with our hands." For this reason Hindley invests some time in exploring heart motivations that guide our service. He encourages the reader to see that God cares far more about the love behind our deeds than the deeds themselves. And yet we can so often serve out of a wrong view of God or a wrong view of people. We can serve to win God's favor or we can serve to be seen and praised by men.

Perhaps the book's most unusual but most helpful application is for the servant-hearted Christian to consider serving less. Some of us serve as if our service is a pillar that holds up the church and as if God's kingdom is dependent upon our shift in the nursery or our crock pot full of meatballs.

Last night my wife and I sat and did a rough tally of the number of couples we have known as they have gone through dating and engagement. It's a pretty good number of friends, family, and fellow church members. Then we thought about how many of them maintained healthy and God-glorifying physical boundaries and how many had confessed that they had not. The numbers were suddenly not looking nearly so good. This is one of those areas where contemporary Christians so often do very poorly and this is exactly why there have been so many recent books on dating, courtship, purity and all the rest. Christians are failing and desperately looking for a better way.

It has been some time since I have read a book on dating and relationships, probably because it has been some time since the subject has seemed urgent to me. But recently a local pastor told me that as he pastors young adults toward marriage, he has been helped by Sex, Dating, and Relationships by Gerald Hiestand and Jay Thomas. I decided to check it out and I am glad I did so.

Hiestand and Thomas call their approach to relationships "a fresh approach" and this is an accurate way of describing it. They don't kiss dating goodbye and they don't advocate a return to the courtship of years gone by. Instead they encourage Christians to form "dating friendships." In this little phrase "dating" is the activity and "friendship" is the relational category. You are not boyfriend and girlfriend, but friends, and you spend time together (i.e. date) as friends for the purpose of seeing if there is mutual interest and compatibility. Romance and sexual activity and commitment can wait; for now, it is simply "two friends getting to know each other with a view toward marriage."

Think of a dating friendship as a precursor to a marriage proposal but without all the romantic, sexual overtones that so often accompany a dating relationship. A couple in a dating friendship, regardless of their attraction to each other, doesn't pretend there is more to the relationship than is warranted. They consciously refrain from sexual and overtly romantic activity and don't become naively optimistic about the commitment level of their friendship. Thus, the main goal of a dating friendship is to explore the viability of marriage while preserving the guidelines of sexual and romantic purity required by the neighbor relationship.

Integral to the argument is an understanding of how the Bible guides and restricts sexual activity. God gives us clear sexual boundaries to guide marriage relationships (sex is required), neighbor relationships (sex is forbidden) and family relationships (sex is forbidden). The authors want dating couples to understand that until they are married, their relationship to the person they are pursuing is a neighbor relationship in which any sexual activity or even the awakening of sexual desire is inappropriate. What is conspicuously absent from the Bible is a category that falls between neighbor and spouse. Yet this is where so much of our relationship confusion comes from--an invented category that is more than one but less than the other and lacking any clear biblical guidelines.

No one could possibly claim that the Beatitudes (see Matthew 5:1-12) are overlooked or underappreciated. They have been the subject of countless books and sermon series. But this is not to say that the Beatitudes have been widely understood and properly taught. As often as not they have suffered from moralization, reduced to the level of the fortune cookie and with all the spiritual power of a fortune cookie.

In Crucifying Morality, R.W. Glenn takes a new look at the Beatitudes saying, Maybe you “were taught that the Beatitudes were the highest form of morality that anyone could live by, and you know now how impossible they are. Or maybe you experienced the flannelgraph version of the Beatitudes.” If that is the case, “maybe it is time to get unfamiliar. Maybe you need to read these verses with fresh eyes for the first time. Whatever your exposure to the Beatitudes has been, you probably think of them as less powerful and captivating and helpful than they are. Take a step back to see how breathtakingly radical their real message is.”

The fact is that

the flannelgraph and the saccharine tone of those reductionist Sunday school lessons can’t get the job done. Jesus’ teaching is too radical to be stuck on felt. He uses counterintuitive gospel logic to show us that life in the kingdom of God is completely contrary to what we expect. In fact, we could not have predicted it. Kingdom blessing looks like the opposite of everything we value. So don’t moralize the Beatitudes, sterilizing the gospel as though it is primarily or even only a rule book for nicer living. You cannot put the mind-altering, world-shattering nature of the Beatitudes into neat categories. Jesus won’t let you.

Glenn wants the reader to contemplate this: “It is no accident that the Beatitudes contain no imperatives whatsoever. Because we are wired for performance and have an insatiable hunger to turn Christianity into a system of dos and don’ts to earn a spot at the table of grace, we feel almost irresistibly inclined to turn them into commandments. Instead, they are the qualities that begin to characterize sinners who encounter God’s grace in the gospel.” We need to be careful not to read the Beatitudes as a series of commandments because when we do that we empty them of their true power.

In 2010 Josh Harris released Dug Down Deep, a book concerned with sound doctrine. He encouraged the reader to unashamedly embrace that much-maligned word theology and to “dig deep into a faith so solid you can build your life on it.” In the final chaper he called Christians to a “humble orthodoxy” and many considered this the book’s greatest strength.

Today’s marks the release of Harris’ new book Humble Orthodoxy. This is a short volume that takes the content of that final chapter and expands on it. Though there is a good bit of overlap between the two, Humble Orthodoxy stands on its own merit.

Harris’ desire in this book is to encourage Christians to hold the truth high without putting people down. He calls for Christians to be guided by both truth and love, to be guided in equal measure by orthodoxy and humility, qualities that are complementary, not in opposition to one another. As J.D. Greear says in his foreword, “Getting doctrine right is a matter of life and dead, but holding that doctrine in the right spirit is essential too. A great deal of damage is done by those who hold the truth of Christ with the spirit of Satan.”

The book begins by setting the context and explaining the dilemma. “One of the problems with the word orthodoxy is that it is usually brought up when someone is being reprimanded. So it has gotten a bad reputation, like an older sibling who is always peeking around the corner, trying to catch you doing something wrong. … I don’t know any other way to say this: it seems like a lot of the people who care about orthdoxy are jerks.” And here he begins to suggest the solution: a humble orthodoxy, caring deeply about truth, but defending and sharing this truth with compassion and humility. “Whether our theological knowledge is great or small, we all need to ask a vital question: What will we do with the knowledge of God that we have?” The Bible does not allow us to choose between orthodoxy and humility, but insists that we need both in equal measure, and assures us that through the Holy Spirit we can be humbly orthodox. I have always loved this quote from John Stott which speaks to this very thing:

Thank God there are those in the contemporary church who are determined at all costs to defend and uphold God's revealed truth. But sometimes they are conspicuously lacking in love. When they think they smell heresy, their nose begins to twitch, their muscles ripple, and the light of battle enters their eye. They seem to enjoy nothing more than a fight. Others make the opposite mistake. They are determined at all costs to maintain and exhibit brotherly love, but in order to do so are prepared even to sacrifice the central truths of revelation. Both these tendencies are unbalanced and unbiblical. Truth becomes hard if it is not softened by love; love becomes soft if it is not strengthened by truth. The apostle calls us to hold the two together, which should not be difficult for Spirit-filled believers, since the Holy Spirit is himself ‘the spirit of truth,’ and his first fruit is ‘love.” There is no other route than this to a fully mature Christian unity.

Harris lays out two alternatives to humble orthodoxy. The first is arrogant orthodoxy, where our doctrine is correct but we are unkind and unloving, where we are self-righteous and spiteful in our words, attitudes and behaviors. “If anyone thinks arrogant orthodoxy doesn’t exist, he’s never read the comments section of a Christian blog.” Touche. The other alternative is humble heterodoxy where a person abandons orthodox Christianity but does it very nicely. The temptation for Harris, for myself, and for most of those who will read this review is toward the first of these alternatives, to pursue orthodoxy at the expense of love. “You and I need to contend for the truth. But there’s a fine line between contending for truth and being contentious.”

The driving passion behind our pursuit of biblical orthdoxy is “not to prove ourselves more right or better than someone else but to better worship the holy God, the one who forgives and accepts us for Christ’s sake alone.” He looks to Tim Keller and says “if we make a good thing like correct theology the ultimate end--if being right becomes more important to us than worshiping God--then our theology is not really about God anymore. It’s about us. It becomes the source of our sense of worth and identity. And if theology becomes about us, then we’ll despise and demonize those who oppose us.”

Thus the solution to arrogant orthodoxy is not less orthodoxy, but more. The more we know of God, the more we love and trust him, the more humble we will be before him.

This is a book that I would love to put in the hands of a lot of people I have encountered over the years. First and foremost, though, it is a book I needed to read. It is a book I need to read again. It is a book I plan to read regularly. It rebuked, encouraged and challenged me in very helpful ways. If you have a blog or you regularly peruse blogs (especially if you comment on them), if you just plain love theology and desire to believe what is right and true, then do yourself a favor and read it as well.

Humble Orthodoxy is available at Amazon.

A couple of weeks ago I found myself in Nashville at the National Religious Broadcasters’ annual convention. I was there to lead a breakout session that would explain a biblically-based understanding of technology, but had almost a whole day to just wander the event. The exhibit hall was massive, though I heard it was actually smaller than in years past. It was a sight to behold, a mishmash of some of the best and some of the worst of Christian broadcasting.

George Washington was there with Martha (though I suspect it may actually have been people in costume) protesting gay marriage. Jesus and what appeared to be one of the high priests were walking the exhibit floor, looking like they were getting along surprisingly well, all things considered. I was not able to figure out why they were there, but my guess is they were connected to the TBN booth in some way and, if not that, one of the many (many!) Israeli travel companies advertising themselves there. Among the myriad displays and posters was one for Byron Yawn and his book Suburbianity. I enjoyed the irony because Suburbianity was written to take a wrecking ball to so much of what is celebrated at the NRB convention.

Byron Yawn is the pastor of Community Bible Church in Nashville, a church I have been to a couple of times and one I have very much enjoyed. He loves Christianity, the Christian faith, but despises Suburbianity, a contemporary perversion of that faith. Every person, every Christian, is to some degree a product of his environment. Yawn’s concern is that Christians have been unwittingly and unduly influenced by the values and ideals of suburbia. 

Suburbianity is the general conviction among professing evangelicals that the primary aim of Christ’s death was to provide us with a fulfilled life. We came to this perspective by persistently reading the mindset and aspirations of the suburbs into the biblical story. It relentlessly seeps into our Christianity. It comes through in nearly all forms of Christian media, including songs, books, movies, and sermons. God has big plans for you. You are important. You should not be discontented, There’s more out there for you. This is the suburban gospel. By it we’ve saved countless sinners from a poor self-image but not much else.

Of course the Christianity of the Bible is not about this at all. It is antithetical to this. “You can’t find it anywhere in the Bible. You may cite Moses, but he never meant that. Even if you make Jesus say it, He didn’t really. Jesus never commissioned anything close to this. We’ve made all this stuff up.” Powerful gospel-centered Christianity has been replaced by an impotent gospel-free suburbianity.

Most people who read this review will be like me in that they live in a culture of radical individualism. Where our identities were once inexorably wrapped up in a local community, today we are what one sociologist has referred to as networked individuals, people who are loosely bound together by interests, but each convinced that we are answerable ultimately, or perhaps only, to ourselves. Individualism reigns, solidarity is passe.

Contra this individualism comes Chris Brauns’ Bound Together: How We Are Tied to Others in Good and Bad Choices. Brauns wants Christians to understand that in God’s economy we are tied together through what he calls the “principle of the rope.” He holds that corporate solidarity is a key aspect of life as taught in the Bible. We are not meant to exist apart from fellowship and community.

Brauns looks to man’s fall into sin as the ultimate negative example of this principle and then looks to Christ’s work on the cross as the ultimate positive example. In the first case one man sinned and saw the effects of his action extend to all who would come after him. In the second case one Man died and now offers the benefits of his death and resurrection to all who will take hold of the grace he offers and, in so doing, be united to him. In this way Brauns provides a uniquely interesting take on two foundational but often misunderstood Christian doctrines: original sin and union with Christ. And as he does this he shows the beautiful gospel truth that this second rope is infinitely stronger than the first. 

The principle of the rope finds application in all areas of life, but Brauns focuses on just a few:

I am often asked to comment on Calvinistic theology and its impact on my life. I was raised in the Reformed tradition and continue to hold fast to the tenets of Calvinism, but always try to distinguish between Calvinism as a kind of theological shorthand, a means of summarizing a lot of theology under a single word, and Calvinism as a banner to rally around. I advocate the former and shy away from the latter.

Greg Dutcher is a Calvinist pastor who is concerned about some of what he sees in today’s New Calvinism. Calvinism is “in” today; this is a cause for joy for those who, like me, believe that Reformed theology is a pure and accurate expression of New Testament theology, but with Calvinism’s trendiness come certain dangers and challenges. Some time back Dutcher approached me to ask if Cruciform Press would be interested in publishing a book that would look at a series of ways that we, today’s Calvinists, might destroy what the Lord appears to be doing. His proposal was intriguing and I passed it to the decision-makers. Cruciform went on to publish Killing Calvinism: How to Destroy a Perfectly Good Theology from the Inside. Though I looked at the initial proposal I deliberately chose not to read it until several months after publication. In fact, I only read it in full yesterday. (A long-delayed flight gave me a lot of time.)

I am glad I waited and even more glad that I finally read it. Killing Calvinism is part confession, part teaching, part exhortation. Dutcher looks first to himself and his own propensity to be a Calvinist first and a Christian second, to be more concerned with a theological system than with the gospel itself. He offers eight different ways that we may just destroy what the Lord is doing.

• By loving Calvinism as an end in itself
• By becoming a theologian instead of a disciple
• By loving God’s sovereignty more than God himself
• By losing an urgency in evangelism
• By learning only from other Calvinists
• By tidying up the Bible’s “loose ends”
• By being an arrogant know-it-all
• By scoffing at the hang-ups others have with Calvinism