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.

There are some books on preaching that are meant for preachers. These are books that teach the nuts and bolts of preaching, that are full of practical tips and illustration. There is a place for such works. There are other books on preaching that are meant for all Christians. These are books that describe the power and priority of preaching in the Christian church and in the Christian life. Steven Lawson's The Kind of Preaching God Blesses falls squarely in the second category. This is a book for all of us whether we preach weekly, preach occasionally or never preach at all.

The book has an interesting story behind it. In May of 2011, Lawson was to speak at the annual Pastors' Conference at Moody Bible Institute. He decided to do an exposition of 1 Corinthians 2:1-9 and titled it "The Kind of Preaching God Blesses." That message resounded with the men who attended the conference and Lawson himself experienced an unusually tangible sense of the Lord's assistance and pleasure in preaching it. He carried that message with him to Russia, to California and Orlando, and when he preached it, the Lord stirred his people. After all, every Christian knows, or ought to know, that "as the pulpit goes, so goes the church. Never has this been more true than it is in this present hour. The fact remains, no church can rise any higher than its pulpit. The spiritual life of any congregation and its growth in grace will never exceed the high-water mark set by its pulpit." That message is at the very heart of this book.

In classic Lawson fashion, he writes with a clear and alliterated structure. Drawing from 1 Corinthians 2:1-9 he looks to the poverty of modern teaching, the prohibition of worldly preaching, the preeminence of Christ in preaching, the power of the Spirit in preaching, the predestination of the Father in preaching, and the parade of faithful preachers. He writes not only to pastors, but to all Christians, to those who preach and to those who listen to preaching.

The week-to-week carrying out of the preaching ministry is the responsibility of the pastor. He is the one who must dedicate himself to studying and understanding and explaining the Word of God. Lawson is right that "as the pulpit goes, so goes the church." A pastor must understand what preaching is and why it matters and how to do it to the best of his ability. Lawson has penned a book that will challenge the pastor anew to dedicate himself to this most urgent of callings.

As is the case with so many Christians I speak to, my theology of prayer is much stronger than my practice of prayer. I know so much of what the Bible says about the privilege, priority and practice of prayer, yet struggle mightily to pray fervently and consistently. Putting that theology into practice remains a daily battle.

For this reason I make books on prayer a regular part of my reading diet. While I have read enough books on the subject that I do not always find new ground, I always benefit from an author's excitement and always learn from his experiences. Reading a book on prayer renews my confidence in prayer and sparks a renewed desire to do the hard work of praying.

I first encountered H.B. Charles Jr. through his blog and quickly became a regular reader. I have since benefited from many of his articles and especially those that deal with preaching. In a recent post he mentioned the publication of a new book, his first book, and I quickly grabbed a copy. It Happens After Prayer is (obviously) a book on prayer. Another book on prayer. It is one I enjoyed. In fact, I sat down on my day off to read a chapter or two and a few hours later had read to the end, pausing only to throw together a quick lunch.

The book's great strength is in drawing upon the passages in Scripture that show God's people praying. Charles throws down a major challenge right from the earliest pages:

Prayer is our Christian duty. It is an expression of submission to God and dependence upon Him. For that matter, prayer is arguably the most objective measurement of our dependence upon God. Think of it this way. The things you pray about are the things you trust God to handle. The things you neglect to pray about are the things you trust you can handle on your own.

If this is true, and I believe it is, he has just exposed a lot of self-dependence in me. Not only that, but where I continually slip into the mode of viewing prayer as a duty, a necessity, Charles allowed me to see it again as a privilege and an honor.

Christianity is a bloody faith. It is a bloody faith because it is the faith of sinful people and the Bible tells us that sin requires blood. For sin to be forgiven, for sinful people to be made right with God, there must be a payment of blood. That payment was made by Jesus Christ on a blood-soaked cross and through the centuries Christians have been praising God for providing the one thing they need most that they cannot do themselves. So Christians speak of the blood of Jesus Christ, they thank God for accepting the bloody sacrifice of Jesus Christ, they sing of that blood, they praise God for it. This is an unashamedly bloody faith.

We can see the significance of blood in the pages of the Old Testament, where from the earliest verses there are bloody footprints leading away from the perfection of the Garden of Eden. The blood of millions of animals brings temporary peace between sinful people and a sinned-against God. We see the significance of blood in how frequently the New Testament mentions it--nearly three times as often as “the cross” of Christ and five times as often as the “death” of Christ. Says Richard Phillips, “At the very heart of our Christian faith is a precious red substance; the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

In his new book Blood Work, Anthony Carter, pastor of East Point Church in East Point, Georgia, describes how the blood of Christ accomplishes the Christian’s salvation. Through 140 pages that are equally descriptive and meditative, he traces the New Testament’s blood motif and finds that blood is necessary for purchasing, propitiating, justifying, redeeming, cleansing, sanctifying, electing, freeing and so much else. Almost every benefit that is ours in Christ Jesus is explicitly connected to us through this trail of blood.

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.

Poor Eutychus. He had an opportunity and privilege we’ve all wished for at one time or another: an evening with the world’s foremost theologian. But it didn’t go exactly the way he had imagined (or, to be fair, how the theologian had imagined). Eutychus perched himself in the coolest part of the room—right up there in the window—and listened as this man preached about Jesus Christ. And preached. And preached some more. The evening turned to night. His eyes got heavy. He drifted to sleep. He slipped right out of that window. The next thing he knew he was all dead and it was only some well-timed apostolic first aid that let him see the sunrise.

Of course we’ve all wished death upon ourselves somewhere in the second hour of a particularly disjointed and interminable sermon. The occasional bad sermon is an inevitability to all of us who attend church week after week. The occasional dud is equally inevitable to those of us called to preach. Gary Millar and Phil Campbell are concerned with boring preaching, or just plain bad preaching, and to war against it they teamed up to write Saving Eutychus. An Aussie and an Irishman, each lifelong preachers, they have written book on preaching that is uniquely practical and uniquely quirky. It’s a great combination.

While they position the book as an antidote to boring and ineffective sermons, it is actually far more positive than defensive in its tone. Their great desire is to equip men for the kind of preaching that changes the heart. They say,

We all know good preaching when we hear it. We may not be able to explain why it is so good. We may not know why the sermon enthralled and challenged us this Sunday, or why this time last week we were counting the bricks in the wall behind the pulpit. But we know there is a difference, and all of us can feel that difference.

I hope you’ve heard the Bible taught in such a way that you simply could not miss the fact that God was in the room addressing his people through his word. I hope you’ve felt that strange combination of fear and comfort as you suspect that the preacher wrote the sermon just for you (and as you wonder whether the speaker has been secretly interviewing your parents, spouse, children, workmates and neighbors again). That’s the kind of preaching that changes the heart…

Indeed. We may not be able to easily define that kind of preaching, but we can all remember occasions when we have experienced it, whether we were in the pews or the pulpit at the time. And whether we deliver a sermon or hear a sermon, this is our desire, to experience preaching that changes us from the inside out. But how do we do that? What are the characteristics of this preaching?

Many years ago my grandmother succumbed to cancer and went to be with Jesus. Among the things she left behind, buried among other personal effects, was a long, handwritten letter from Joni Eareckson Tada. My grandmother had experienced excruciating pain in her life, losing both a daughter and her husband to suicide. As a new Christian she had written to Joni to share her grief, believing that perhaps in Joni there would be someone who might understand and who might give her hope. And she did. In this letter she mourned with one who was mourning and shared hope grounded in the gospel.

Joni is one of those entirely unique Christian personalities and one who is universally loved and admired. Her ministry has continued for decades, and through conferences and radio and music and books and every other media she has been sharing encouragement and hope. I have seen Joni speak a few times and off to the side I’ve always spotted her husband, Ken. So much has been said about her, but so little about him. He is content to love and serve his wife and to allow her to be center-stage. But I’ve wondered who he is and what his role has been in Joni’s life and ministry. Their story is finally being told in Joni & Ken: An Untold Love Story. 

This is an honest book that tells the story of what has not always been an easy marriage. Though Ken married Joni after her accident and after she had become a renowned Christian personality, neither of them was prepared for all the challenges that marriage would bring. What started as a great love story soon began to lose some of its lustre. While the love remained, the romance and respect faded. But the Lord was not done with them and sparked a great renewal of love and romance. Their story is not one of unfading, unattainable marital bliss, but one that is so very real, and one that went through difficult valleys. Though it is unique in many of its particulars, in other ways it looks like so many other marriages. 

As I read about Joni and Ken I found myself growing in my love for Aileen. Isn’t it funny that reading about another couple’s marriage can do this? Yet their love for one another is contagious, the way they pray and laugh and sing together is admirable, and the way Ken has sacrificed so much for Joni is Ephesians 5:25 in action. I learned about love and sacrifice and deep intimacy from this portrait of their marriage.

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.