I guess we need to get this out of the way right off the top—A Place of Quiet Rest is a book by women and targeted squarely at women (as if the cover art and font didn’t already tip you off!). It is written by Nancy Leigh DeMoss and includes contributions from twelve other authors and speakers, all of whom are likewise women. Though I knew all of this going in, I read the book without any compulsion and for my own benefit. And it really did benefit me. Let me explain.

Because personal devotions are a daily (or near-daily) part of my life, I try to ensure that I am doing them well, that I am not simply going through the motions, but making my times with the Lord a real and vital part of my life. To help me in this, I regularly read books on Scripture, prayer or the spiritual disciplines. Most of the books I have read in recent years have been written by men. Well and good. However, a few weeks ago I stumbled across this book on Aileen’s shelf and began to read it. I’m glad I did.

A Place of Quiet Rest is meant to lead the reader toward finding intimacy with God through a daily devotional life. In a friendly and personal way, DeMoss shares many of the lessons she has learned as she has sought the Lord day-by-day and year-by-year. What she longs for, and what she longs for her readers to experience, is not merely knowledge of God—the facts of who God is and what he has done—but true relationship with him. This, more than anything else, is what makes her book different from so many others. It is not about the technique, but about the goal at the end of it all—a growing delight in God himself.

Have you ever read one of those books that is so strange, so unbelievable, that you are just waiting for the author to admit that she has just been making it all up? On more than one occasion I found myself waiting for that kind of a punchline while reading The Devil in Pew Number Seven. A recent addition to the New York Times list of non-fiction bestsellers, the book tells the sad, tragic and yet remarkably stirring story of Robert Nichols, a old-fashioned revival preacher who moved to Sellerstown, North Carolina, to serve as pastor.

I hesitate to say too much about the story because, well, the Devil (in Pew Number Seven) is in the detail. To say too much, would be to give it all away. Let me stick with the publisher’s carefully-chosen description:

Rebecca never felt safe as a child. In 1969, her father, Robert Nichols, moved to Sellerstown, North Carolina, to serve as a pastor. There he found a small community eager to welcome him--with one exception. Glaring at him from pew number seven was a man obsessed with controlling the church. Determined to get rid of anyone who stood in his way, he unleashed a plan of terror that was more devastating and violent than the Nichols family could have ever imagined. Refusing to be driven away by acts of intimidation, Rebecca's father stood his ground until one night when an armed man walked into the family's kitchen … And Rebecca's life was shattered. If anyone had a reason to harbor hatred and seek personal revenge, it would be Rebecca. Yet The Devil in Pew Number Seven tells a different story. It is the amazing true saga of relentless persecution, one family's faith and courage in the face of it, and a daughter whose parents taught her the power of forgiveness.

That is detailed enough to give a sense of the book’s content, yet vague enough not reveal the strange twists and turns. At heart the book describes a real-life fight of good versus evil and it is never certain who will triumph and how victory will come. Even now it is hard to say.

Part one of my review of Debi Pearl’s Created To Be His Help Meet showed that even though I agree with the broadly complementarian thrust of the book, it is marked by a harsh and critical spirit and offers far too much foolish counsel. Today I want to point to three more concerns: poor theology, poor use of Scripture and far too little gospel. If you have not yet read the first part of the review, I’d recommend doing that before reading what follows.

Poor Theology

Throughout the book, Pearl teaches poor theology, especially when it comes to her understanding of how a husband and wife are to relate within their God-given roles. Here are a few representative quotes:

• “If you are a wife, you were created to fill a need, and in that capacity you are a ‘good thing,’ a helper suited to the needs of a man. This is how God created you and it is your purpose for existing.”
• “The only position where you will find real fulfillment as a woman is as a help meet to your husband.” 
• “God’s ultimate goal for you is to meet your man’s needs.”
• “God has provided for your husband’s complete sanctification and deliverance from temptation through you, his wife.”
• “No single man completely expresses the well-rounded image of God.”

Though she affirms a broadly complementarian position, Pearl goes much too far when she says that a woman’s deepest purpose and deepest meaning is bound up in her husband and that she is “good” only in relation to her husband. This would mean that a single woman has no purpose and meaning, even though the New Testament extols the single life when that singleness is offered to the Lord. Similarly, it is audacious, and just plain wrong, to say that no single man can adequately express the image of God. Was Jesus then an inadequate expression of manhood? If our unmarried Lord was less than “a well-rounded image of God” we are without hope and without a Savior. She far overstates a biblically-consistent complementarian understanding of the purpose for which God created men and women and the nature of the relationship between them. As she does this, she undermines the very position she seeks to affirm.

When Pearl describes how authority and submission work themselves out within marriage, she often makes broad statements that are entirely lacking in nuance. “A husband has authority to tell his wife what to wear, where to go, whom to talk to, how to spend her time, when to speak and when not to, even if he is unreasonable and insensitive, but he does not have authority to command her to view pornography with him or to assist him in the commission of a crime. ... Wives are to obey an unreasonable and surly husband, unless he were to command his wife to lie to the Holy Ghost.” Such statements are far too broad to be helpful. As it is, they are lacking in nuance and torn from any useful context.

There are parts of the Christian life that can be easier caught than taught. A godly mentor is able to serve as a powerful display of the way truth works itself out in a life. The second chapter of Paul’s letter to Titus commands older women to take an active role in mentoring those who are younger and Debi Pearl steps into the role of mentor in Created To Be His Help Meet. At the time of writing this review, it has been on the market for 8 years, yet it is still ranked inside the top 3,000 books on Amazon and sit at #35 on the list of marriage books. It is selling well and is gaining influence.

Pearl seeks to be the Titus 2 woman, sharing with her readers wisdom that she has accumulated in many years of being a Christian, of being a wife, of raising a family. But there is a serious problem. Throughout the book, Pearl shows that she is a poor and unwise mentor. In place of the wisdom and the fruit of the Spirit that ought to mark a mentor, she displays a harsh and critical spirit, she offers foolish counsel, she teaches poor theology, she misuses Scripture, and she utterly misses the centrality of the gospel.

(Note: I am familiar with some of the controversy surrounding the Pearls and what they teach regarding disciplining children. To keep this review focused, I will not discuss their child-raising techniques.)

Areas of Agreement

Created To Be His Help Meet is not entirely bad, of course, and Pearl offers several valuable insights. She and I agree that the Lord has created women to be distinct from men not only in body, but also in role. In his wisdom, the Lord has given to men the position of leadership in the home and he has given women the complementary, helping role. She says, “When you are a help meet to your husband, you are a helper to Christ, for God commissioned man for a purpose and gave him a woman to assist in fulfilling that divine calling. ... As we serve our husbands, we serve God.” Pointing to the Trinity, she shows that there is nothing inherently undignified in a helping role: “Men are created to be helpers of God. Jesus willingly became a helper to the Father. The Holy Spirit became a helper to the Son.” She shows that a husband and wife who embrace these roles are able to be a display of Christ and his church. “Knowing that my role as a wife typifies the Church’s relationship to Christ has molded my life. As I reverence my husband, I am creating a picture of how we, the Church, should reverence Christ.”

That broad theology of complementarity is a consistent thread from the first chapter to the last and, when combined with some wise and clever insights, assures that there is some value in this book. Alas, these nuggets of gold are surrounded by too much waste, too much folly masquerading as biblical wisdom.

Critical Spirit

Perhaps most troubling and most noticeable of all the book’s weaknesses is the anger and harshness that pervades and influences so much of what Pearl says. This is one of the harshest, angriest books I have read on this side of Richard Dawkins and this critical spirit is displayed in insulting language, in lack of sympathy, and in the passing of harsh judgments.

Here is an example from early in the book: “A few years back, there was an overweight hillbilly woman who worked in the local store in our hometown ... this woman was ugly, I mean hillbilly ugly, which is worse than regular ugly.” Not surprisingly, this woman does not end up being the hero of the short story Pearl tells of her. First she mocks her ugly appearance, and then her ugly demeanor.

If there is something you do that consumes a lot of your waking hours, it makes good sense to read at least the occasional book that will challenge you to do that thing better. A preacher will read books on preaching, a hobbyist will read books about how to grow in skill at his hobby, one hopes that his doctor reads updated medical journals—you get the idea. I spend a lot of my life with a nose in a book and have found it helpful to read at least the occasional work on the skill of reading.

Recently I re-read Tony Reinke’s Lit!: A Christian Guide to Reading Books, having first read it as a manuscript quite some time ago. I’m glad I did. Lit! is a comfortable read in that it reminds me a little bit of The Next Story. In some ways Reinke does with literature what I sought to do with technology. He has taken a subject that has received more attention in the mainstream than in the Christian world, he has read those books and then distilled their wisdom, passed it through a biblical lens, and crafted a theology of literature. In doing so he has created a very useful book.

Here are five good reasons to give it a read.

To Gain a Theology of Books and Reading

I know in the abstract that there is a theology of everything, a way of thinking Christianly about everything we do and everything we experience in this life. Somehow, though, it had escaped me that there is a distinctly Christian way to think about books and reading. In Lit’s first few chapters Reinke provides that theology, beginning with the Bible, the world’s greatest work of literature and the only one that has been divinely inspired, and proceeding from there. He shows that the Bible is the book through which we understand and interpret all other books which in turn leads to discussions of the Christian worldview and the benefits of reading non-Christian works. This is just the right place to begin.

To Understand the Benefits of Reading Non-Christian Books

There are some non-Christian books that no one should read; there are some books that are morally abhorrent or otherwise entirely inappropriate. But many non-Christian books are genuinely helpful and continue very valuable insights, whether those are insights into the world or insights into the non-Christian mind or human experience. Reinke looks to the doctrine of common grace and on that basis points out seven benefits of reading in the mainstream. I can attest from personal experience that I have benefitted tremendously from reading outside the Christian world and that I continually encourage other Christians to do the same. Lit! puts biblical reasoning to this and encourages Christians to maintain a varied reading diet.

To See the Importance of Imagination

Humans are uniquely gifted by God in having been given an imagination. God has given us this ability “to enable us to create art, make scientific discoveries, further technological progress, and write poetry. And God has given us an imagination so our book reading will be more effective.” I have come to realize in the past little while that I have a tendency to downplay the value and the sheer blessing of imagination. This has been brought home to me by a sermon series. At church we are currently progressing through the book of Revelation verse-by-verse and this apocalyptic literature has highlighted to me the beauty of imagination and even the need for it. The imagination is what enables us to understand and enjoy this kind of writing (and many other kinds of writing). Reinke is very helpful in highlighting the importance and the blessing of imagination.

There is always a hot market for books on marriage, even among men. Every husband is aware of his inadequacies and every husband is genuinely eager to find solutions, especially if the solutions are simple and step-by-step (just like laying laminate flooring or changing oil). Writing a good and biblical book on marriage--now there is a challenge. Few have done it with excellence. Stepping into the fray is Justin Buzzard with his new book Date Your Wife. It's a great title, a good idea, and a helpful imperative that is, unfortunately, substantially flawed.

The book’s greatest strength is drawn straight from its title: Buzzard wants men to build dating into their marriage; he wants men to continue to romance their wives throughout marriage. Any man who reads this book will come away with a greater desire to pursue his wife and greater conviction of the inherent goodness of doing so. The book’s foremost application is valid and good, but there is quite a lot of weakness along the way.

The book is fueled by one core conviction: If you want to change a marriage, change the man. Looking first at the sexual relationship and then widening the scope to all of marriage Buzzard says this: "Your wife isn't the problem. You're the problem. I'm the problem. Men are the problem. If you want to change a marriage, change the man. If you want to change your marriage, you must first see that you are the main problem in your marriage." He goes on: "You are the husband. You are the man. And God has given the man the ability to be the best thing or the worst thing that ever happened to a marriage. Before you can be the best thing that ever happened to your marriage, you need to see that you have always been the worst thing that happened to your marriage."

These are strong and near-universal statements for which he allows no meaningful exceptions. To prove them he goes in an unexpected direction: Genesis 2:15. "The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it." He says this:

Fundamental to his manhood, God gave Adam this double calling: work and keep. These Hebrew verbs can be better translated: cultivate and guard. God commissioned the first man to cultivate the garden and guard the garden. God gave the first man immense responsibility, immense power, to cause the garden to flourish or to fade. ... God gave Adam a job before he gave him a wife. So, when God presented Adam with his bride, what did Adam know he was called to do as a husband? If you had to summarize it in a sentence, what was Adam called to do for his marriage and for his wife? Cultivate and guard it. ... After giving Adam a calling, God gave Adam a wife—the crown jewel of his calling. "Cultivate and protect this woman I've given you; cause life to flourish. Take the raw materials of this marriage and develop them—build, invent, create—so that your wife will flourish and thrive in this environment. Develop and protect what I'm entrusting to you," God said to Adam.

This is an unusual interpretation and application of Genesis 2:15. Certainly this is a text that gives man his job description in this world, but it is quite a stretch to take that same description verbatim into the marriage relationship. It would have been far more helpful, I think, to look to Ephesians 5 where a husband is told to nourish and cherish his wife and where he is told to wash her in the water of God’s word. What Buzzard wants the husband to see is that if your wife is not flourishing, it must be because you, the husband, are not cultivating and guarding her. The key to fulfilling your mandate as a husband is an ongoing dating relationship that continues well past the wedding day.

Is Ben Witherington’s A Week in the Life of Corinth fiction or nonfiction? I suppose it’s a little bit of both. In 150 pages he takes a could-be-true look at ancient Corinth, focusing on a cast of characters that includes Paul, Priscilla, Aquila, and the lesser-known Erastos (known as Erastus in the ESV), who is mentioned in Acts, Romans and 2 Timothy.

To give you a sense of what it is all about, I doubt I can do a whole lot better than quoting the back cover:

Intrigue is in the air as Nicanor returns to Corinth and reports to his patron Erastos on recent business dealings in Rome. Nicanor, a former slave, is a man on the make. But surprises keep springing up in his path. A political rival of Erastos is laying a plot, and a new religion from the east keeps pressing in on his life.

Spend an imaginary week in Paul’s Corinth as the story of Nicanor winds through street and forum, marketplace and baths, taking us into shop, villa and apartment, where we meet friends new and old. From our observing a dinner in the temple of Aesclepius to Christian worship in the home of Erastos, Paul’s dealings with the Corinthians in his letters take on focused relevance and social clarity.

The story is interspersed with helpful little sidebars—most of which contain photographs—providing the kind of context that cannot be explained within the story itself. These sidebars range from explanations of political figures to coinage to medicine to social conventions.

Witherington’s regular context is academia—he has written an extensive list of commentaries and scholarly works with titles like Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on Titus, 1-2 Timothy And 1-3 John—so fiction is a little bit off the beaten path for him. While this work is not going to add a Pulitzer to his list of achievements, neither is it meant to. The plot simply gives enough intrigue to carry the characters along for one week and thus provide an interesting setting for this little glimpse of history culled from a lifetime of biblical studies. I found it particularly helpful to see Paul’s teaching in context, whether he is leading the Lord’s Supper or reciting a letter to the church in Thessalonica. Similarly, it is helpful to see the early church worshiping in a home and Greeks wrestling through the implications of converting to a strange, new religion centered around a resurrected Jewish carpenter. In this story Witherington brings us a little bit closer to a culture that is increasingly foreign.

Adam Brown was one of the elite of the elite, a member of SEAL Team SIX, the counterterrorism unit that has among its accomplishments the capture of Osama bin Laden. Brown was also a man with a history of addiction and all that attends it—theft and broken relationships and devastation. Most important of all, Brown was a man who had experienced grace and forgiveness through a relationship with Jesus Christ. His story, told by Eric Blehm in the book Fearless, is making waves today, having established itself on the New York Times list of bestsellers.

In many ways Fearless is typical for the biography of a warrior. It tracks Brown through his childhood and then, once he had made up his mind to join the Navy, through bootcamps, other forms of training, and eventually, through deployment in South America, Afghanistan and Iraq. Along the way we read of his brutal battle with addiction to crack cocaine, an addiction that followed him and haunted him even years after he had been through recovery. We also read of how he came to faith, eventually following the example of his parents and mentors, giving his life in service to Jesus Christ.

Brown’s life came to an end on March 17, 2010, the day he was gunned down in the mountains of Afghanistan, losing his life in service to his country while destroying a dangerous terrorist cell. Of course his story continues in this book and in the lives of his wife and children and friends.

Eric Blehm has penned a powerful book in Fearless. It is well-written and tells an intriguing story of a fascinating individual. I would suggest that the main reason for the book’s appeal is in Brown’s quirky character. He was a fearless warrior and one with an impossibly high pain threshhold. He was one of those people who seemed to live his life in overdrive, doing things that appear to be fool-hardy or near-impossible or, in all likelihood, both. He was an eminently likeable guy.

When Abby Johnson quit her job in 2009, it became national news. Johnson was director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas and did not merely quit her job, but also changed sides in the abortion battle. Formerly an employee of the organization that performs more abortions than any other, she had come to believe that abortion was morally offensive. What was it that caused her to change sides? She witnessed an abortion. On the screen of an ultrasound machine, she witnessed human life being dismembered and destroyed, and in an instant she saw what she had denied for so long—what was being aborted was a baby, not just a potential baby or a blob of tissue. She had been an eyewitness to murder and not only that, but she had been complicit in countless other murders.

Unplanned tells Johnson’s story, from being recruited by Planned Parenthood while she was a college student, to rising through the ranks and eventually becoming the director of a clinic. She also tells of her own history of abortion and how she found forgiveness for the sins of her youth.

This book has several strengths to commend it—several reasons you may want to read it.

First, it comes from an insider’s perspective, clearly describing the arguments, verbiage and subtleties used by Planned Parenthood and similiar organizations as they promote their pro-choice agenda. They weigh every word and their every action represents a careful strategy. Johnson proves what pro-life advocates have been saying all along, that although Planned Parenthood does provide some valid and valuable services for women, it is at heart an abortion provider.

As Christians we make a big deal of the death of Jesus and rightly so because it is only through his death that we can be saved from our sin. But if all Jesus needed to accomplish before God was his death on the cross, he could have come to earth as an adult on the evening of Good Friday, he could have died, and still be the one to save us from our sin. But had he done all of this, we would still have a problem. There is a reason that before Christ died he had to truly live. This is the subject of R.C. Sproul’s new book The Work of Christ.

Sproul says: “In order for [Jesus] to qualify as our Redeemer, it was not enough for Him simply to go to the cross and be crucified. If Jesus had only paid for our sins, He would have succeeded only in taking us back to square one. We would no longer be guilty, but we still would have absolutely no righteousness to bring before God.” We would be free of guilt before God, but we would have no righteousness. This is what Christ merited for us in his life.

Our Redeemer needed not only to die, but also to live a life of perfect obedience. The righteousness that He manifested could then be transferred to all who put their trust in Him. Just as my sin is transferred to Him on the cross when I trust in Him, His righteousness is transferred to my account in the sight of God. So, when I stand before God on the judgment day, God is going to see Jesus and His righeousness, which will be my cover.

The purpose of this book is to give a brief overview of the time Christ spent in this world to show that he was here to fulfill a mission. Sproul looks at the incarnation, the infancy hymns, Jesus in the temple, baptism, and so on, in each case showing that all along the way Jesus was executing a mission. This book bears all the marks of R.C. Sproul, from careful teaching to wise application to theological nuance to a remark or two on the Pittsburgh Steelers. Though Sproul has elsewhere written extensively about the life and death of Jesus Christ, this book focuses narrowly on this one area of the theological implications of Christ’s life.

Let me say a word about the book’s format. The Work of Christ is the first of several books that will be released in a new partnership between Sproul, Ligonier Ministries and David C. Cook Publishers and this partnership has resulted in a unique format. Each of the book’s eleven chapters is about ten pages or so and then followed by an extensive study guide. The study guide for each chapter contains an introduction, learning objectives, quotations, a thorough outline of the chapter’s contents, Bible study questions, a discussion guide, a couple of points of application, and some suggested reading for further study. All told, the study guides are just about the same length as the chapters. This brings a lot of value to those who appreciate assistance in understanding and applying a book; this kind of a thorough companion to a book usually comes with an extra cost. Those who do not enjoy study guides will want to be aware that only about half of this book’s pages are actual content.

The Work of Christ is a powerful book that can serve as an ideal companion to The Truth of the Cross—one book to focus on Christ’s active obedience in living a sinless life, and one book to focus on Christ’s passive obedience in facing the Father’s wrath on the cross. I highly recommend it.

It is available from Westminster Books ($13.11), Amazon ($13.04) and Ligonier Ministries ($12.80).