Category Archives: Books

A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Your Study Guide for 01/03/10

December 23, 2009 By in Books, Sunday Morning Tags: , Leave a comment

CarsonAnyone who has hung around our Oxford Club for Men group knows I believe in study guides big time for working our way through books in a way that facilitates critical thinking.

For our equipping hour emphasis in the New Year I plan to do this for D. A. Carson’s book which we will focus on in a church-wide effort to transfrom our knowledge of God in prayer.

Here is the guide for the preface and introduction. I am now working on my second read of this great tool. I trust you will get into it soon and use these questions as an aid to your learning and transformation process.

  1. What are some of the reasons for which you find it difficult to pray?
  2. How do you react to the author’s allegation regarding “the sheer prayerlessness that characterizes so much of the Western church?” What are some passages of Scripture that you can think of or find that paint a picture of prayerfulness among God’s people? List two or three insights you gain from these passages.
  3. What is Carson’s aim in this book (pp. 9-10)? How do you react to his purpose and approach?
  4. What do you believe is the most urgent need in the church of the Western world today? What things does Carson hypothesize for answers and what thoughts and feelings does your reading generate?
  5. Where does Carson finally land on the question of most urgent need in the church and why?
  6. How does prayer fit into addressing this need according to the author?
  7. How do you react to the quote by R. M. M’Cheyene, “What a man is alone on his knees before God, that he is, and no more” and/or the quote by J. I. Packer, “I believe that prayer is the measure of the man, spiritually, in a way that nothing else is, so that how we pray is as important a question as we can ever face”?
  8. How would you evaluate the “delight quotient” of your own praying and why?
  9. What are you prepared to do in light of this introduction and your understanding of Carson’s aim in writing this book (see pp. 17-18)?

A Particularly Disturbing Question

December 22, 2009 By in Books Tags: , , , 4 Comments

ProdigalI have just finished reading Tim Keller’s book, The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith (Dutton, 2008, 138 pages).

In it he presents a treatment of the familiar story of the prodigal son in Luke 15. He is inclined to rename the parable The Two Lost Sons. He believes that Jesus takes aim in the story at both irreligious outsiders and moralistic insiders. Both, Keller claims, are lost and in need of salvation. Jesus, in particular, he argues, targets moralists in telling the story to show them their need for the gospel as much as the younger brother types who give themselves to profligate waste.

Early on Keller tips his hand where he is headed with all this by offering his answer to the question why people like Jesus but not the church.

Jesus’ teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsider Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did. If our churches aren’t appealing to younger brothers, they must be more full of elder brothers than we’d like to think (p. 15-16).

When I first read that I put a question mark in the margin. I am not entirely sure I agree with the logic behind Keller’s argument. I’ve learned to do that over time rather than just take everything that comes down the pike from a respected author (and make no mistake, I highly respect him – I just purchased copies of his book The Reason for God for several members of my family for Christmas).

My question to his question is does the conclusion in the last sentence from that quote hold water? I’ve been thinking about it on and off ever since. Is the church in corporate worship as an entity of God’s called out ones supposed to be inherently attractional to either kind of brother? It seems to me that rightly done the church gathered may be offensive to either crowd and only attractive to the gospel enthralled given its unique purposes.

I haven’t come near to the end of my reflections on this question but I wonder if we simply need to be more concerned with taking the gospel of our extravagantly gracious God “without” to the lost (that seems to me to be the thrust of the story in Luke 15 as far as Jesus’ aim is concerned) and “within” the church more consistently rebuke both the wayward and the legalistic who think they know Jesus but deny hin by their actions until they do come to grips with the heart of the Christian faith which is gazing upon the glory of the grace of Jesus.

What do you think?

By the way, I recommend the book. Definitely a worthwhile read.

Many Ways to Destroy a Church

December 20, 2009 By in Books, Personal Reflection Tags: , , 2 Comments

Carson crossMore than once recently I have come across this quote from D.A. Carson (in his book The Cross and Christian Ministry).

At first I wasn’t inclined to post it. But something happened to me during the silent communion time this morning that changed that.

During the fourth movement of the communion we prayed through the flock. My pastoral role means I know more about everybody on the list than almost anyone else in the church. While I pray through parts of the flock every day, I don’t often pray through it in its entirety. As I worked my way quickly through the list it dawned on me how many issues I prayed for related to peacemaking in troubled relationships of all kinds. No surprise that Dr. Carson includes such things in his list of ways to destroy a church.

The ways of destroying the church are many and colorful. Raw factionalism will do it. Rank heresy will do it. Taking your eyes off the cross and letting other, more peripheral matters dominate the agenda will do it-admittedly more slowly than frank heresy, but just as effectively over the long haul. Building the church with superficial ‘conversions’ and wonderful programs that rarely bring people into a deepening knowledge of the living God will do it. Entertaining people to death but never fostering the beauty of holiness or the centrality of self-crucifying love will build an assembling of religious people, but it will destroy the church of the living God. Gossip, prayerlessness, bitterness, sustained biblical illiteracy, self-promotion, materialism-all of these things, and many more, can destroy a church. And to do so is dangerous: ‘If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple (1 Cor. 3:17).” It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

During this holiday season, when relationships can be strained by expectations and disappointments galore, may we be a peacemaking people in our homes and in our church that the enemy not have his way in destroying either.

More Fuel on the Carson Prayer Book Fire

December 15, 2009 By in Books, prayer, Sunday Morning Tags: , , Leave a comment

Carson

I really do hope that as many of our adults as possible take advantage of our church-wide  9:30 hour equipping emphasis on prayer starting January 3, 2010.

To throw more fuel on the fire of your motivation I offer an online review by Chris Bruce. Here is how he begins:

Take yourself back almost 2000 years and imagine that you are Luke, Barnabas, or another of Paul’s companions. Imagine spending days and nights in lent homes or on the road, sharing Paul’s concern for the churches, and his joy in hearing of new life and growth among his spiritual children. Now imagine again that you were there when Paul took all of these things to God in prayer. How much would you know about how Paul prayed, and how would that knowledge affect your prayer life?

You might know more than Don Carson, Professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and you might even be able to communicate it more effectively. But that would be some feat. Carson’s A Call to Spiritual Reformation,a study of Paul’s prayers, is a book worthy of reading and re-reading on an annual basis. Carson’s goal is “to work through several of Paul’s prayers in such a way that we hear God speak to us today, and to find strength and direction to improve our praying, both for God’s glory and for our good.” The need is dire, he says, noting “the sheer prayerlessness that characterizes so much of the Western church.”

You can read the entire article here.

Copies of Dr. Carson’s book are available at our resource table on Sundays for $13 or whatever you can afford. Pick up your copy soon and begin reading.

What a way to start the new year! Let us set our sights high for spiritual reformation in our personal lives and in the life our church.

With Whom Are You Fighting?

December 8, 2009 By in Books Tags: , , , Leave a comment

The apostle Paul calls the Christian life a fight in places like 1 Tim. 6:12.

J. C. Ryle devotes chapter four of his book Holiness to this notion.  You can read an online version of the book here.

HolinessEarly on he asks a crucial question that reminds us of the paramount importance of practicing biblical peacemaking in the local church.

With whom is the Christian soldier meant to fight? Not with other Christians. Wretched indeed is that man’s idea of religion who fancies that it consists in perpetual controversy! He who is never satisfied unless he is engaged in some strife between church and church, chapel and chapel, sect and sect, faction and faction, party and party, knows nothing yet as he ought to know. No doubt it may be absolutely needful sometimes to appeal to law courts in order to ascertain the right interpretation of a church’s articles and rubrics and formularies. But, as a general rule, the cause of sin is never so much helped as when Christians waste their strength in quarreling with one another and spend their time in petty squabbles.

Let us fight the good fight with our mortal enemies the world, the flesh, and the devil (1 John 2:15-16; Eph. 6:11) but let us eschew any strife among one another in the family of God.

A Call to Spiritual Reformation

December 7, 2009 By in Books Tags: , , , Leave a comment

CarsonI have multiple aims in this post. First, I want to review D. A. Carson’s book by the same title (Baker, 1992, 230 pages). Second, I want to introduce our 9:30 equipping hour curriculum focus for the first quarter of the New Year. The two go hand-in-hand as you will quickly see.

At first glance of the title, you wouldn’t guess the book had much to do with prayer. You have to proceed further to the subtitle for this clarification: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers. This work comes from a series of sermons Dr. Carson once preached on the subject of prayer. Baker then took them and edited them into book form for the greater public.

In the preface, the author lays out this lament:

I doubt if there is any Christian who has not sometimes found it difficult to pray. In itself this is neither surprising, nor depressing; it is not surprising, because we are still pilgrims with many lessons to learn; it is not depressing, because struggling with such matters is part of the way we learn.

What is both surprising and depressing is the sheer prayerlessness that characterizes so much of the Western church. It is surprising, because it is out of step with the Bible that portrays what Christian living should be; it is depressing because it frequently coexists with abounding Christian activity that somehow seems hollow, frivolous, and superficial. Scarcely less disturbing is the enthusiastic praying in some circles that overflows with emotional release but is utterly uncontrolled by any thoughtful reflection on the prayers of Scripture (p. 9).

Carson, as would I, admits that he is part of what he condemns. Who hasn’t struggled with the means of grace called prayer in terms of pursuing it with the passion and consistency Scripture commends to us? This makes his aim in writing all the more attractive to me – to work through several of Paul’s prayers in such a way that we hear God speak to us today, and to find strength and direction to improve our praying (pp. 9-10).

After a relatively brief introduction where Dr. Carson presents his case for this lack of prayer constituting the most urgent need of the church, he brings twelve chapters on the subject of prayer. In all he examines seven of Paul’s prayers including 2 Thess. 1:1-12, 1 Thess. 3:9-13, Col. 1:9-14, Phil. 1:9-11, Eph. 1:15-23, 3:14-21, and Rom. 15:14-33.

Interspersed among the soundly exegetical and practical studies of these prayers are topic headings like Lessons from the School of Prayer, Praying for Others, Excuses for Not Praying, and Praying to a Sovereign God. Only in the last chapter on Rom. 15, Prayer for Ministry, did I feel a bit cheated by a more cursory treatment of the biblical text and its ramifications for those of us in vocational ministry than I would have hoped.

Otherwise, and I have read the book in its entirety, this is by far one of the most helpful resources on prayer I have ever encountered. Given the fact that one of our core values at OGC is intercessory prayer and that, to my knowledge, we’ve not given ourselves to an equipping hour yet on this immensely important subject, our leadership team has decided to make this a church-wide emphasis for adults in the first quarter of 2010. We have purchased fifty copies of this paperback book which are available at our resource table in the narthex throughout December. The cost is $13 or whatever you can afford. If you can help someone else in need purchase a book by an extra contribution to the cause, that would be much appreciated.

We will take one chapter per week over the thirteen weeks utilizing the discussion questions at the end of each chapter. We will also do some workshop praying along the way, so we can practice what we are learning. To start we will meet in the fellowship hall. If the crowd proves too big, a problem I would love to have, we’ll move over to the sanctuary. I will take the point on facilitating the discussion, but I am certain that we will do some smaller group work as well to encourage wider levels of participation.

I urge you to get your copy soon and begin to read Dr. Carson’s work so that you might experience what The Banner of Truth wrote on the back cover – the reader is guided, gently yet persuasively, towards a reformation in personal dealings with God.

 

Are You Weary in the Battle?

November 30, 2009 By in Books Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

HolinessAnd make no mistake about it. The Christian life is a struggle, a battle, a war.

Paul made clear to the church of Ephesus that we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Eph. 6:12).

In light of this perpetual warfare Paul exhorted Timothy, Fight the good fight of faith (1 Tim. 6:12) and Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus (2 Tim. 2:3).

As I prepared to start another work week with our early morning prayer time as a staff, I read a word of encouragement from J. C. Ryle’s Holiness that gave my prone-to-be-weary soul a burst of strength for the fight. In stressing that the Christian’s fight must be one of faith, Ryle urges special faith in our Lord Jesus Christ’s person, work, and office as the life, heart, and mainspring of the Christian soldiers character. He writes:

He sees by faith an unseen Savior, who loved him, gave Himself for him, paid his debts for him, bore his sins, carried his transgressions, rose again for him, and appears in heaven for him as his Advocate at the right hand of God. He sees Jesus and clings to Him. Seeing this Savior and trusting in Him, he feels peace and hope and willingly does battle against the foes of his soul.

He sees his own many sins, his weak heart, a tempting world, a busy devil; and if he looked only at them, he might well despair. But he sees also a mighty Savior, an interceding Savior, a sympathizing Savior—His blood, His righteousness, His everlasting priesthood—and he believes that all this is his own. He sees Jesus and casts his whole weight on Him. Seeing Him, he cheerfully fights on, with a full confidence that he will prove “more than conqueror through Him that loved him”  (Rom. 8:37).

So if you are weary this Monday morning as you reengage the battle fronts before you, I remind you with Ryle’s help to do so by faith in your unseen Savior casting your whole weight on Him.

What Shall We Do to Be Thankful?

November 25, 2009 By in Books Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

WatsonThe day before Thanksgiving seems to make such a question advisable.

The Puritan Thomas Watson contended in his book, The Godly Man’s Picture, that, among other things, the goldy man is indeed a thankful man.

Toward the close of his chapter on that notion, he raises the practical question as to what shall godly men, and women for that matter, do to be thankful. His answers are two:

Answer 1: If you wish to be thankful, get a heart deeply humbled with the sense of your own vileness. A broken heart is the best pipe to sound forth God’s praise. He who studies his sins wonders that he has anything and that God should shine on such a dunghill: “I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, but I was shown mercy” (1 Tim. 1:13). How thankful Paul was! How he trumpeted forth free grace! A proud man will never be thankful. He looks on all his mercies as either of his own procuring or deserving. If he has an estate, this he has got by his wits and industry, not considering that scripture, “Always remember that it is the Lord your God who gives you power to become rich” (Deut. 8:18). Pride stops the current of gratitude. O Christian, think of your unworthiness; see yourself as the least of saints, and the chief of sinners—and then you will be thankful.

Answer 2: Strive for sound evidences of God’s love to you. Read God’s love in the impress of holiness upon your hearts. God’s love poured in will make the vessels of mercy run over with thankfulness: “Unto him that loved us, be glory and dominion forever!” (Rev. 1:5,6). The deepest springs yield the sweetest water. Hearts deeply aware of God’s love yield the sweetest praises.

What will work in us a spirit of gospel thanksgiving this holiday and beyond? Lord, grant us a sober perspective on our sinful condition AND a deep awareness of your stunning love.

Amazing love, how can it be, that thou my God shouldst die for me!

Puritan Power & Perspective on Waiting

November 23, 2009 By in Books Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

GurnallFor some reason I’ve made it a habit to turn to the Puritans first thing each morning this year in my abiding in Christ time.

Moody Press published a collection of daily readings in spiritual warfare from the writings of William Gurnall called The Christian in Complete Armour (1994). Numerous times the meditations within its pages have framed my perspective for the day and boosted my reserves of spiritual power and strength.

The entry for November 21 this week proved particularly meaningful for me and I thought I would pass it on.

Wait on God as long as you have to, until He comes according to His promise and takes you out of your suffering. Do not be hasty to take yourself out of trouble. . . . The fullest mercies are the ones we wait for the longest. Jesus did not immediately supply wine at the marriage of Cana, as His mother had asked, but they had the more for waiting awhile.

Hope assures the soul that while God waits to perform one promise, he supplies another. This comfort is enough to quiet the heart of anyone who understands the sweetness of God’s methods. There is not one minute when a believer’s soul is left without comfort. There is always some promise standing ready to minister to the Christian until another one comes. A sick man does not complain if all his friends do not stay with him together, as long as they take turns and never leave him without someone to care for him. . . .

The believer can never come to Him without finding some promise to supply strength until another is ripe enough to be gathered.

They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength (Isa. 40:31).

More on Adoption – Not a Fairy Tale

November 22, 2009 By in Books Tags: , , , 2 Comments

Earlier this week I made a post quoting from J. I. Packer regarding the doctrine of adoption and the way we are loved by God as sons because of being in Christ through faith.

God receives us as sons, and loves us with the same steadfast affection with which he eternally loves his beloved only-begotten. There are no distinctions of affection in the divine family. We are all loved just as fully as Jesus is loved. It is like a fairy story–the reigning monarch adopts waifs and strays to make princes of them. But, praise God, it is not a fairy story: it is hard and solid fact, founded on the bedrock of free and sovereign grace. This, and nothing less than this, is what adoption means. No wonder John cries, “Behold what manner of love!” When once you understand adoption, your heart will cry the same (Knowing God, IVP, 1993, p. 216).

This morning in our Oxford Club for men we raised the question as to whether or not Dr. Packer might overstate the case a bit when he writes, There are no distinctions of affection in the divine family. Is there no difference at all between the affection shared by the Father and His Son within the Godhead in comparison with the affection we enjoy as sons through adoption?

John Frame speaks to the question in his book Salvation Belongs to the Lord:

Jesus Himself is the Son of God . . . . He has a unique sonship, a relation to God that we cannot attain. His sonship is higher than ours, and it is the source of ours, for it is only those who receive Christ (John 1:12) who gain the authority to be sons of God. In John 20:17 Jesus distinguishes his sonship from ours when he says to Mary, “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ Jesus never describes God as “our” Father in a way that equalizes the relationship between Jesus’ sonship and ours. Nevertheless, we are sons of God because God sees us in Christ, in his beloved Son. So, we share the blessings that the Father gives to his unique Son, Jesus (P&R, 2006, p. 206).

Of course this clarification takes nothing away from the astounding truth that God loves us as sons through the association we share with Jesus, our Brother. But it does help to recalibrate our thinking to remember the ultimately unique and ultimate sonship of the second person of the Trinity in relation to the first.

The recalibration notwithstanding, the immedidate message to our hearts from a consideration of adoption, as Dr. Packer reminds us (and I doubt Dr. Frame would disagree) remains the same. I am a child of God. God is my Father; heaven is my home; every day is one day nearer. My Savior is my brother; every Christian is my brother too (p. 228).

May we preach this message to our hearts every day and multiple times throughout the day until we finally go home to our reward and inherit the fullness of all our adoption secures for us in Christ Jesus. Then we will no longer need to preach these truths to our hearts for then we shall see Him as He and be like Him. Even so come quickly Lord Jesus.