Monday, November 28, 2011

The Meaning of Marriage; by Tim and Kathy Keller

Tim and Kathy Keller provide us a great resource for the Biblical Theology of Marriage. As a pastor of a church with a demographic of 80% single adults we find that Keller has a great opportunity and need to research and teach on the subject of marriage. His congregation obviously will be thinking about marriage and thinking about whether or not it is a cultural covenant or a Biblical covenant.

Keller bases his book on a series of messages that he first gave in 1991, but he has refined those messages over the years and delivered them many times. So, with the background of 37 years of marriage and the many years of counseling others and preaching about marriage he has a profound sense of what our culture, especially our Western Evangelical Church culture, needs to hear. He has taken his messages, refined them and added pertinent data from Christian and secular sources to provide us a great book.

Don't neglect to look at his bibliography and download some of the articles that he mentions in the book.

Each chapter builds on the previous one. Maybe the best chapter happens to be Chapter Six, Embracing the Other. It is written by Kathy and does a great job of defining the roles of men and women (husbands and wives) in the marriage relationship based on Ephesians 5. It is nice to hear from a woman's perspective how those roles are defined and best played out in marriage. Kathy gives good insights and lots of good information that I plan to incorporate into my pre-marital counseling situations.

Chapter seven deals with Singleness and is just as profound as chapter six on providing good and sometimes very new thoughts on how the Bible relates to marriage. Given the fact that Redeemer Church has 80% single adults this chapter is well researched, well written and comes with lots of experience behind it. This is a wonderful chapter. Chapter eight deals with the topic of sex and has great information.

This book is a must read for any couple thinking of marriage or for any Christian Counselor who is dealing with people and their marriage issues.

Finally, the best principle for me from the book was on page 168 when Keller states that the most powerful tool in any marriage partners arsenal is the gift of "Forgiveness!" That is absolutely true and something that many people forget about. If you have the ability to love your partner, forgive your partner and seek forgiveness from your partner you will succeed in marriage.

Well, enough said, stop reading reviews of the book and just buy it, you won't be disappointed.

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Thinking. Loving. Doing. A Call to Glorify God with Heart and Mind

This is a good compliation of thoughts by several well know Christian writers / preachers. It is a short book but a profound book for all of us to read, understand, ponder and then put into action.

The goal of the book is to push us beyond the fact that the Christian Life is that of engaging the intellect. We also need to put into action that which we are reading. I think that the opening line in Thabiti Anyabwile's chapter sums this up, "The fullest expression of Christian living is a combination of head, heart and hands. In involves receiving truth through the head, which ignites new affections in the heart and flows out in action through the hands." To many of us are so busy gaining knowledge that we neglect to put what we learn into action.

In the first Chapter, Rick Warren mentions how he went to church on Sunday morning and in Sunday school was encouraged to take an application from the lesson. Then in service he got another application, then on Sunday night a third application from scripture and on Wednesday night a fourth application. He was so busy getting applications he was suppose to follow through on that he never had time to follow through. Does that sound like your church?

We need to follow Thabiti's thought and put the head knowledge into our heart and let it flow out through our hands as we take action to apply all that we are learning about scripture.

But further the book challenges us that we as Evangelical's in the West have lost the art of "Thinking." We critically think about what we read or learn. We don't delve into learning about God so that we can "Think" about who He is, what He does and what He desires His children to be doing. Christians today are not challenged to THINK. They are challenged to sit and listen to others who have supposedly done the thinking for them.

Rick Warren's chapter challenges us as Christians to become learners, to immerse ourselves in learning about God, to read continually, to saturate our minds with the things of God so that when we act we are acting out of a knowledge base of Biblical thought.

Art Mohler's chapter delves into the need to look at Worldviews, see how they have developed, why they have taken hold in our cultures and what we need to understand regarding them so that we can critically anyalsis and respond to them. We need to study not just our own Christian worldview but the worldview of others so that we can acknowledge and address them in a way that challenges them to look at Christianity to find the truth.

R.C. Sproul then takes us through a study of Philosophy and the Philosopher's of the past. He looks into what the early philosophers were thinking, how they pondered our world and cultures and why they came to the conclusions that they came to. He then works through Paul's address in Acts to the philosopher's regarding their statue to the 'unknown God.' He knew their thoughts and that they gathered everyday to dialogue about "what is new?" He brought them the answer to what is new and it was in the form of Jesus Christ. But to do so he had to study, learn, understand others thought processes and then see how Christianity fit into that mode of communication to help people come to understand Christ. Today we don't think that way.

The Thabiti gives us in his chapter a dilogue about encountering Islam with the Mind of Christ. It is a challenging chapter that will help you develop a critical mindset on how to approach our fellow humans who happen to follow the teaching of Mohammad.

Finally Francis Chan challenges our thinking and our lifestyle. His chapter sums up the problem and approaches us with a challenge of how are we going to live today.

This book is short, but very challenging. It will push you to want to "THINK" and learn and grapple with today's issues but then to take your Christianity, your faith, your love for Christ and want to love others enough to do something about sharing what you have learned so that they to can come to know the Savior.

This books is one that would be great to read as part of a book club and then talk through the lessons learned and then hold each other accountable for how you are going to put it into action.

Enjoy and Think while you read!

Sunday, November 20, 2011

God's Grand Design; The Theological Vision of Jonathan Edwards

First of all I want to thank Crossway Books for sending a copy of this book seeking my thoughts via a review.

Sean Michael Lewis does a wonderful job of research and analysis of the preaching ministry of Jonathan Edwards. His years of teaching experience with this subject show in the way that he prepared and presented the material.

In today's culture and theology with it's resurgence of "preaching the Gospel from both the Old and New Testament" it is refreshing and reassuring to discover that Jonathan Edwards was preaching this way in his ministry long before today's resurgence. Edwards saw the Gospel as being previewed and painted in word pictures through the history of the Old Testament and the lives of the Patriarchs. He pulls the Gospel from Creation, from the story of Noah, the stories of Abraham and the nation of Israel, especially the exodus from Egypt and final settlement in the promised land. Edwards preaching of theology was solid and grounded in the Gospel. He was not a pioneer of that method, but he certainly was one who held the line and preached it well.

It was encouraging to know that with our modern day emphasis on the Gospel and how it is found in both the Old and New Testament I was pleasantly affirmed to know that the great Jonathan Edwards had walked this path before us.

This book is not an easy read, it will demand that you take your time, read it thoroughly and thoughtfully and then meditate on what you have read. Edwards is a figure that most of us have heard about, but we haven't studied much of his work. Instead we look at Calvin and Luther of John Moody and kind of skip over the era of the Puritans. But Lewis gives us a great gift in describing Edwards and his preaching. He extensively quotes Edwards and that reinforces the points that he is drawing us towards from the teaching ministry of Jonathan Edwards.

This is a book that every serious student of Theology should read. It will give you good understanding and encouragement of how a pastor daily thought about Theology, taught Theology through his sermons and lived it out in his life.

Enjoy!

Friday, November 11, 2011

25 Books that Every Christian Should Read, by Renovare ministry

This book reviews 25 important Christian books (according to the folks at Renovare') that will change your life. In the foreword Chris Webb asks, "Are there any definitive books every Christian should read, other than the Bible itself?" Then he goes on to answer that questions from the viewpoint of the staff at Renovare'. They feel that Christians need to be well read in their Bible, memorize scripture, study scripture and apply scripture. But they also feel that Christians need to be well read in the "Classics" of Christian thought as presented in the writings of wise saints, poets, thinkers and the early church fathers.

As such they have put this first book together to highlight what they feel are the 25 most important texts for us to read in conjunction with our Bible. The book will introduce you to each of the 25 books, their authors and give you a biography of that author and a synopsis of the book itself. They include excerpts from the books to whet your appetite for what you will find when you get your hands on the actual book.

Here is a sampling of the great Christian thinkers that they write about; St. Athanasius, St. Augustine, Thomas a Kempis, Brother Lawrence, G.K. Chesteron, etc. etc. This book lives up to one of the main claims in the introduction. It serves as a handbook to have beside you as you read the great works by these authors. It gives you good information and help in knowing what it is you are about to delve into.

One other point to make, the committee wants to make it perfectly clear that these books will change your life. BUT, they are not just easy reads. They are books that you must dig into, you must read and read again to catch the truths contain in them. They are scholarly works that demand attentive reading. 

I can't really say a lot more about how wonderful this guide book is. If you are truly interested in the great thinkers of Christianity then this is a wonderful guide book that you MUST have in your library.

Enjoy!