Month: November 2010

Readability:  3

Length: 155 pgs

Author:  Michale Lawrence

Michael Lawrence’s Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church is one of the most helpful and important books on ministry I’ve read.  I’m not recommending this book for everyone, but for readers who are teachers and preachers I cannot commend it enough.  I already know I want to read it again next year more slowly and purposefully.  As teachers and preachers we are all theologians, but are we Biblical ones.  I think most are not.  Many will use the Bible to support their theology, but that does not make it Biblical.  Many have a segmented theology, they believe this, and they believe that, but if you were to ask what the Bible was about as a whole they couldn’t provide an answer other than a jumbled composite of their segmented beliefs.  Biblical theology is about the whole story of the whole Bible.  Ignore this overarching storyline will always result in taking a text out of context.

The Bible interprets us by declaring what the main events of reality are, and then telling us to read ourselves in light of that story.

This means that the primary question that the historical-grammatical method is seeking to answer is not, “What does that word mean?” but “What does that sentence mean?” In answering that question, we quickly realize that context is king. So the first step of exegesis is to read the text, the whole text, over and over again. Interpretation actually begins with the whole, not the part. Then, in the context of the whole, we work backwards through the parts, back to sentences, back all the way down to individual words. What we learn and discover there then takes us back to the whole with a more accurate and perhaps nuanced understanding of meaning.

Readability:  1

Length: 155 pgs

Author:  Kent and Barbara Hughes

Disciplines of a Godly Family is the most practical book on parenting I have read while remaining biblically faithful.  The book is honest, simple, personal, and useful.  Eighty years of aggregate wisdom are here for you.  It is worth the small investment of time and money to gain such wisdom.  For those who think children unworthy of such, here is my favorite paragraph form the book.

So consider this:  Though one could travel a hundred times the speed of light, past countless yellow-orange stars, to the edge of the galaxy and swoop down to the fiery glow located a few hundred light-years below the plane of the Milky Way, though one could slow to examine the host of hot young stars luminous among the gas and dust, though one could observe, close-up, the proto-stars poised to burst forth from their dusty cocoons, though one could witness a star’s birth, in all one’s stellar journeys one would never see anything equal to the birth and wonder of a human being.  For a tiny baby girl or boy is the apex of God’s creation!  But the greatest wonder of all is that the child is created in the image of God, the Imago Dei.  The child once was not; now, as a created soul, he or she is eternal.  He or she will exist forever.  When the stars of the universe succumb to stellar destruction,  that soul shall still live.

Readability:  2

Length: 203 pgs

Author:  T4G

I have been blessed to attend several excellent conferences, but I think that the best one I ever attended was T4G ’08.  Part of it may have been where I was in life and how applicable those messages and panels seemed to be, but I really do think the Spirit was especially present there among all of us.  I am thankful to have the messages of that conference in printed format.  I highly recommend Proclaiming a Cross-centered Theology, if for nothing else that you read Thabiti Anyabwile’s chapter on race as an unhelpful and unbiblical category.

Bad theology kills.  So get rid of the adjective, not the noun.  Ditch the bad.  Keep the theology.  – Ligon Duncan

But believing in race is like believing in unicorns, because neither race nor unicorns exist in reality.  – Thabiti Anyabwile

“Race” is the theory, taking several forms, that there is an essential difference between people rooted in biological factors and manifested in things such as skin color, hair texture, eye shape, and color, and a few other obvious markers.  ‘Ethnicity,” on the other hand, is a fluid construct that includes language, nationality or citizenship, cultural patterns, and perhaps religion.  One way that race and ethnicity differ is that ethnicity is not rooted in biology as race theory historically has been.  –  Thabiti Anyabwile

The doctrine of human depravity therefore honors God completely like no other truth, because it leaves absolutely no honor for man in regard to salvation.  –  John MacArthur

Soft preaching makes hard people. You preach a soft message and you’ll have hard, selfish people. You preach the hard truth and it will break the hard hearts and you’ll have a soft people.  –  John MacArthur

Those of us who preach for a living are in the only profession where we can take no credit for what we do – except for what we mess up!  We’re the only ones in the world responsible for all the failures and none of the successes.  –  John MacArthur

It was as if there was a cry from heaven, as if Jesus heard the words “God damn you,” because that’s what it meant to be cursed and under the anathema of the Father. I don’t understand that, but I know that it’s true. I know that every person who has not been covered by the righteousness of Christ draws every breath under the curse of God. If you believe that, you will stop adding to the gospel and start preaching it with clarity and boldness, because, dear friends, it is the only hope we have, and it is hope enough.  – R.C. Sproul