Category: Tolle Lege

Readability: 1

Length: 254 pp

Author: Randy Alcorn

If The Treasure Principle is a guided missile towards our hearts concerning the issue of money, and Money, Possessions, and Eternity is an invasion by the whole army, then  perhaps Managing God’s Money is the air force sent in to knock out most of the enemy forces. Behind all three books there is no better general in my opinion to help use our money strategically – Randy Acorn. I think every Christian should read The Treasure Principle, but if after reading it you want a refresher, or a more through dealing with the various facets of using our money well with out treating the subject exhaustively, then managing God’s Money is perfect.

Many who say, “I have nothing to give,” spend large amounts of discretionary income on cars, clothes, coffee, entertainment, phones, computers, and so on. They have nothing to give when they’re done spending, precisely because they’re never done spending

It’s not how much money we make that grabs hold of our hearts. It’s how much we keep.

Whatever “king’s kid” the prosperity proponents are speaking of, it obviously isn’t Jesus!

We need to stop thinking of ourselves as owners and instead see ourselves as God’s couriers. Just because God puts his money in our hands doesn’t mean he intends for it to stay there!

Much of our “giving” is merely discarding.

If I’m devoted to “simple living,” I might reject a computer because it’s modern and nonessential. But if I live a … strategic lifestyle, the computer may serve as a tool for Kingdom purposes. In my case, I use it daily to serve God in my writing. A microwave oven isn’t essential. But it’s handy and labor saving and can free up time to engage in Kingdom causes. Simple living may be self-centered. Strategic living is Kingdom centered.

Amazon: $5.99

Readability: 1

Length: 196 pp

Author: Russell Moore

Tempted and Tried is an excellent book. What makes its such? Moore is an excellent writer and has a penchant for peculiar illustrations and bizarre analogies, and while that certainly makes for an interesting read, it doesn’t grasp excellency, at least not in the Edwardsian sense. What is remarkable here is that the Scriptures are so well exegeted and applied, exposing our sinful bent in a contemporary and Biblical way while reveling in the victory of Christ for us over temptation. The result: we hate sin more and love Christ more, specifically we hate sin more because we love Christ more. Any book that will do this for me is excellent.

Temptation is so strong in our lives precisely because it’s not about us. Temptation is an assault by the demonic powers on the rival empire of the Messiah. That’s why conversion to Christ doesn’t diminish the power of temptation—as we often assume—but actually, counterintuitively, ratchets it up.

Temptation—for the entire human race, for the people of Israel, and for each of us personally—starts with a question of identity, moves to a confusion of the desires, and ultimately heads to a contest of futures. In short, there’s a reason you want what you don’t want to want. Temptation is embryonic, personality specific, and purpose directed.

But Jesus hungered with us, and for us. He is the firstborn son of the kingdom, the true humanity, and the true Israel of God. Jesus understood what his fathers in the garden and in the wilderness didn’t. When confronted with the question, “Are you the Son of God?” he heard the word of his Father more loudly than the word of his own grumbling stomach.

WTS Books: $10.04               Amazon:$10.19

Readability: 2

Length: 266 pp

Author: Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert

What Is the Mission of the Church? This is a crucial and timely question; praise God it is now also an excellent book. How would you answer this question? Does the mission of the church include bringing the kingdom, seeking shalom for our communities, working for social justice, doing good deeds or is it simply the proclamation of the gospel? Do you realize that as a Christians you must answer this question? You cannot afford to be fuzzy here. This isn’t a periphery issue; if the church is to be the church this much must be clear, “What is our mission?” This book isn’t just a good treatment of a good topic; it is a needed treatment of a crucial topic. At least for leadership, this book is a must read because the topic is a must know.

[I]t is not wrong to probe the word missional. It’s a big trunk that can smuggle a great deal of unwanted baggage. Being suspicious of every mention of the word is bad, but raising concerns about how the word is sometimes used is simply wise.

With that in mind, we register a few concerns about how missional thinking has sometimes played out in the conversation about the church’s mission:

1. We are concerned that good behaviors are sometimes commended but in the wrong categories. For example, many good deeds are promoted under the term social justice, when we think “loving your neighbor” is often a better category. Or, folks will talk about transforming the world, when we think “faithful presence” is a better way to describe what we are trying to do and actually can do in the world. Or, sometimes well-meaning Christians talk about “building the kingdom” or “building for the kingdom,” when actually the verbs associated with the kingdom are almost always passive (enter, receive, inherit). We’d do better to speak of living as citizens of the kingdom, rather than telling our people that they build the kingdom.

2. We are concerned that in our newfound missional zeal we sometimes put hard “oughts” on Christians where there should be inviting “cans.” You ought to do something about human trafficking. You ought  to  do  something  about  AIDS.  You ought to do something about lack of good public education. When you say “ought,” you imply that if the church does not tackle these problems, we are being disobedient. We think it would be better to invite individual Christians, in keeping with their gifts and calling, to try to solve these problems rather than indicting the church for “not caring.”

If everything in Matthew culminates in the Great Commission, everything in acts flows from it.

The mission Jesus is about to give is based exclusively and entirely on his authority. There can only be a mission imperative because there is first this glorious indicative. God does not send out his church to conquer. He sends us out in the name of the One who has already conquered. We go only because he reigns.

The mission of Jesus is not service broadly conceived, but the proclamation of the gospel through teaching, the corroboration of the gospel through signs and wonders, and the accomplishment of the gospel in death and resurrection.

The mission of the church is to go into the world and make disciples by declaring the gospel of Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit and gathering these disciples into churches, that they might worship and obey Jesus Christ now and in eternity to the glory of God the Father.

WTS Books: $9.59               Amazon:$10.87

Readability: 2

Length: 244 pp

Author: Tim Keller

Many Christian books on marriage contain some good practical advise for our marriages, unfortunately I feel many are as harmful as they are helpful. It does me little good to know how to drive a nail if I don’t know what I am building. The why of marriage must be clearly in mind if we are to know the practical what of marriage. This Momentary Marriage is my favorite why book, but The Meaning of Marriage is perhaps the most well-rounded. Keller lays a gospel foundation under marriage and then builds solid, well thought out application that is anchored in that foundation.

I’m tired of listening to sentimental talks on marriage. At weddings, in church, and in Sunday School, much of what I’ve heard on the subject has as much depth as a Hallmark card. While marriage is many things, it is anything but sentimental. Marriage is glorious but hard. It’s burning joy and strength, and yet it is also blood, sweat, and tears, humbling defeats and exhausting victories.

We should rightly object to the binary choice that both traditional and contemporary marriage seem to give us. Is the purpose of marriage to deny your interests for the good of the family, of is it rather to assert your interests for the fulfillment of yourself? The Christian teaching does not offer a choice between fulfillment and sacrifice but rather mutual fulfillment through mutual sacrifice. Jesus gave himself up; he died to himself to save us and make us his. Now we give ourselves up, we die to ourselves, first when we repent and believe the gospel, and later as we submit to his will day by day. Subordination ourselves to him, however, is radically safe, because he has already shown that he was willing to got to hell and back for us. This banishes fears that loving surrender means loss to oneself.

[T]he picture of marriage given here [Ephesians 5] is not of two needy people, unsure of their own value and purpose, finding their significance and meaning in one another’s arms. if you add two vacuums to each other, you only get a bigger and stronger vacuum, a giant sucking sound. Rather, Paul assumes that each spouse already has settled the big questions of life– why they were made by God and who they are in Christ.

[W]hen you envision the “someone better,” you can think of the future version of the person to whom you are already married. The someone better is the spouse you already have. God has indeed given us a desire for the perfect spouse, but you should seek it in the one to whom your married. Why discard this partner for someone else only to discover that person’s deep, hidden flaws? Some people with serial marriages go through the cycle of infatuation, disillusionment, rejection, and flight to someone else – over and over. The only way you’re going to actually begin to see another person’s glory-self is to stick with him or her.

WTS Books: $15.05               Amazon:$16.17

Readability: 2

Length: 258 pp

Author: John Piper

How is it that a book can still shock and thrill you with the glory of God even after having read it four times? I say it is because it is intensely Biblical, and that means it draws from inexhaustible stores. Further this is so because its focus is the eternal, infinite God; as D.A. Carson says,

The Pleasures of God is perhaps the most important book that John Piper has written. It is certainly the freshest and most penetrating. Many preachers and writers are calling Christians today to be more God-centered. The irony is that even the call to be God-centered focuses attention on us, on what we must do. Certainly the Bible spends no small part of its pages telling us what we must do, but it does so out of profound God-centeredness. And here is a book that does not tell us what we must do to be God-centered; it simply is God-centered. Intoxicating.

The Pleasures of God is a survey of Scripture to look into the delights of God’s soul. What does God rejoice in? Oh what worship, what peace, what meditation, what pauses of awe there are when you ponder the answers to that question. God is the happiest being in the universe, here you will see it, and by God’s grace be caught up into it.

Desiring God is perhaps the most influential book in my life, but I’m pretty sure that The Pleasures of God is my favorite. Tolle Lege! Yes, I already want to again.

Being infinite, God is inexhaustibly interesting. It is impossible therefore that God be boring. If we find him boring we are like five-year-olds who find sex boring. The problem is not with sex. Nor is the problem with God. His continual demonstration of the most intelligent and interesting actions is volcanic. As the source of every good pleasure, he himself pleases fully and finally. If that’s not how we experience him, we are either dead or sleeping.

The exhaltation of his name is the driving force of the gospel. The gospel is a gospel of grace! Grace is the pleasure of God to magnify the worth of God by giving sinners the right and power to delight in God without obscuring the glory of God.

[God’s] passion to save and to purify feeds itself not from the shallow soil of our value, but form the infinite depth of his own.

[Reflecting on Zephaniah 3:17] Can you imagine what it would be like to hear God singing? A mere spoken word from his mouth brought the universe into existence. What would happen if God lifted up His voice and not only spoke but sang! Perhaps a new heaven and a new earth would be created.

Behold, I create a new heavens and a new earth…
I create Jerusalem a rejoicing,and her people a joy.
(Isaiah 65:17-18, RSV)

What do you hear when you imagine the voice of God singing? I hear the booming of Niagara Falls mingled with the trickle of a mossy mountain stream. I hear the blast of Mt. St. Helens mingled with a kitten’s purr. I hear the power of an East Coast hurricane and the barely audible puff of a night snow in the woods. And I hear the unimaginable roar of the sun 865,000 miles thick, 1,300,000 times bigger than the earth, and nothing but fire, 1,000,000 degrees centigrade, on the cooler surface of the corona. But I hear this unimaginable roar mingled with the tender, warm crackling of the living room logs on a cozy winter’s night.

And when I hear this singing I stand dumbfounded, staggered, speechless that he is singing over me – one who has dishonored him so many times and in so many ways. It is almost too good to be true.

[God’s] anger must be released by a stiff safety lock, but his mercy has a hair trigger

God has no deficiencies that I might be required to supply. He is complete in himself. He is overflowing with happiness in the fellowship of the Trinity. The upshot of this is that God is a mountain spring, not a watering trough. A mountain spring is self-replenishing. It constantly overflows and supplies others. But a watering trough needs to be filled with a pump or bucket brigade. So if you want to glorify the worth of a watering trough you work hard to keep it full and useful. But if you want to glorify the worth of a spring you do it by getting down on your hands and knees and drinking to your heart’s satisfaction, until you have the refreshment and strength to go back down in the valley and tell people what you’ve found. You do not glorify a mountain spring by dutifully hauling water up the path from the river below and dumping it in the spring. What we have seen is that God is like a mountain spring, not a watering trough. And since that is the way God is, we are not surprised to learn from Scripture – and our faith is strengthened to hold fast – that the way to please God is to come to him to get and not to give, to drink and not to water. He is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

WTS Books: $9.82               Amazon:$10.19

Readability: 1

Length: 200 pp

Author: Gregory Koukl

If you want to gain skills to converse winsomely with others concerning the Christian faith I highly encourage you to read Gregory Koukl’s Tactics. For what it does, I know of no other book better. I’ll let it argue for itself:

Do arguments work? The simple answer is, “Yes, they do,” but this needs explanation.

Some suggest that using reason isn’t spiritual. “After all, you cant argue anyone into the kingdom,” they say. “Only the Spirit can change a rebels heart. Jesus was clear on this. No one can come to him unless the Father draws him (John 6:44). No intellectual argument could ever substitute for the act of sovereign grace necessary for sinners to come to their senses.”

Of course the last statement is entirely true as far as it goes. The problem is, it doesn’t go far enough. There is more to the story. It doesn’t follow that if God’s Spirit plays a vital role, that reason and persuasion play none. In the apostle Paul’s mind there was no conflict.

And according to Paul’s custom, he went to them, and for three Sabbaths reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and giving evidence that the Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead… And some of them were persuaded. (Acts 17:2-4, italics added)

…Simply put you can argue someone into the kingdom. It happens all the time. But when arguments are effective, they are not working in a vacuum.

…Here’s the key principle: Without God’s work, nothing else works; but with God’s work, many things work.

The burden of proof is the responsibility someone has to defend or give evidence for his view. Generally, the rule can be summed up this way: Whoever makes the claim bears the burden. The key here is not to allow yourself to be thrust into a defensive position when the other person is making the claim. It’s not your duty to prove him wrong. It’s his duty to prove his view.

 Amazon:$10:19

Readability: 1

Length: 167 pp

Author: Elyse Fitzpatrick & Jessica Thompson

I was deeply convicted while I read Give them Grace, but I also was freshly reminded of the grace that is in Christ. I expected to find great ways to shepherd my children to Jesus from so highly a commended book (Tullian Tchividjian says it is the best book on parenting he has read), I wasn’t disappointed, but I didn’t expect to be so powerfully reminded of the gospel myself. But this is the ways it must be. You must know grace to preach grace. I concur with Tullian, Give them Grace is now my first book recommendation on parenting.

One of the reasons we don’t share this story [the gospel] with our children is that it doesn’t resonate deeply in our own hearts.

We need much less of Veggie Tales and Barney and tons more of the radical, bloody, scandalous message of God made man and crushed by his Father for our sin.

If a Mormon can parent the same way you do, your parenting isn’t Christian.

We long to be told, “You are good!” but only Jesus Christ and those clothed in his goodness deserve to hear it.  And if we really embrace this truth, our parenting will be transformed from wishful deception to powerful grace.  It will make our parenting Christian.  Our children aren’t innately good, and we shouldn’t tell them that they are.  But they are loved and if they truly believe that, his love will transform them.

Yes, a new day when everything will be put to rights will come, but in the meantime, while we’re living in the not yet, we need grace. And we don’t need it just a tiny bit; no, the truth is we are desperate for buckets of it. We need it every hour of every day. We need it when we remember that we need it and we need it when all we can see before us is futility and trouble and disappointment.

So, when you have that morning to top all mornings, when everything that could possibly go wrong does, when grace doesn’t mean anything to you, it is his grace that will sustain you. What mornings like these teach us is that we’re just like our children. They forget, and so do we. They need grace, and so do we. We are partners in grace with them.

WTS Books: $8.43               Amazon:$10.19

Readability: 2

Length: 267 pp

Author: John Piper

Bloodlines deals with an impressive array of issues concerning racism and ethnicity, but its chief value does not lie there. Rather Piper attacks the issue of racism with the biggest gun possible from multiple angels, the gun that will ultimately entirely annihilate racism – the gospel. Oh what a joy to finish a book loving diversity more and loving the gospel more. Biblical, theological, personal, emotional, practical, and more – this book is well worth the read.

Racial harmony is a blood issue, not just a social issue.

The bloodline of Jesus Christ is deeper than the bloodlines of race. The death and resurrection of the Son of God for sinners is the only sufficient power to bring the bloodlines of race into the single bloodline of the cross.

I believe that the gospel—the good news of Christ crucified in our place to remove the wrath of God and provide forgiveness of sins and power for sanctification—is our only hope for the kind of racial diversity and harmony that ultimately matters. If we abandon the fullness of the gospel to make racial and ethnic diversity quicker or easier, we create a mere shadow of the kingdom, an imitation. And we lose the one thing that can bring about Christ-exalting diversity and harmony. Any other kind is an alluring snare. For what does it profit a man if he gains complete diversity and loses his own soul?

And together with every other race, whites are killing their babies and wallowing in their porn and taking their illegal drugs and leaving their wives and having babies without marriage. The difference is that when you develop patterns of sin in the majority race, they have no racial connotation. Since majority people don’t think of themselves in terms of race, none of our dysfunctions is viewed as a racial dysfunction. When you are the majority ethnicity, nothing you do is ethnic. It’s just the way it’s done. When you are a minority, everything you do has color.

[T]he gospel of Jesus does not enter controversy as another ideology or philosophy or methodology for social improvement. It enters like dynamite. It enters as the power of the Creator to reconcile people to himself and supernaturally make them new.

Hand in glove with the doctrine of our disabling depravity is the doctrine of God’s effective purchase of his people on the cross. The reason it’s like hand and glove is that our inability because of sin calls for a kind of redemption that does more than offer us a forgiveness we don’t have the ability to receive. Rather, it calls for a redemption that effectively purchases not only our forgiveness but also our willingness to receive it. In other words, the unwilling glove of depravity calls for the insertion of a powerful hand of ability-giving redemption.

WTS Books: $13.55               Amazon:$13.79

[The first video is a trailer for the book, the second is an 18minute documentary.]

http://www.desiringgod.org/player.js?embedCode=lncmpyMjpp0ANvUcRug3X41JiqYXhaYh&video_pcode=M5NmE6ZYB0PramgRtR1EDFp03Mxp&deepLinkEmbedCode=lncmpyMjpp0ANvUcRug3X41JiqYXhaYh&width=435&height=298

Readability: 3

Length: 123 pp

Author: David McIntyre

Who needs prayer, we have programs?

My prayer is that you would be leaping to read a good, Biblical book on prayer, so let me simply commend this book to you with a prayer:

Oh dear YHWH, forgive us our self-reliance. We fail even cry out like the disciples to learn how to pray? We instead say trite little prayers asking you to bless our human wisdom and power. Father, teach us to want to be taught to pray.  May we desire prayer because we desire You, and not because we desire to be masters of another spiritual discipline. Bless this small book recommendation toward this end.

It [prayer] is in one aspect glory and blessedness; in another, it is toil and travail, battle and agony. Uplifted hands grow tremulous long before the field is won; straining sinews and panting breath proclaim the exhaustion of the ‘heavenly footman.’ The weight that falls upon an aching heart fills the brow with anguish, even when the midnight air is chill. Prayer is the uplift of the earth-bound soul into the heaven, the entrance of the purified spirit into the holiest; the rending of the luminous veil that shuts in, as behind curtains, the glory of God. It is the vision of things unseen; the recognition of the mind of the Spirit; the effort to frame words which man may not utter.

Now, do not let any one say that such a life [waiting in prayer] is visionary and unprofitable. The real world is not this covering veil of sense; reality belongs to those heavenly things of which the earthly are mere ‘patterns’ and correspondences. Who is so practical as God? Who among men so wisely directed His efforts to the circumstances and the occasions which He was called to face, as ‘the Son of Man who is in heaven? ‘Those who pray well, work well. Those who pray most, achieve the grandest results.10 To use the striking phrase of Tauler, ‘In God nothing is hindered.’

The equipment for the inner life of prayer is simple, if not always easily secured. It consists particularly of a quiet place, a quiet hour, and a quiet heart.

The prayer of faith, like some plant rooted in a fruitful soil, draws its virtue from a disposition which has been brought into conformity with the mind of Christ.

1. It is subject to the Divine will: ’This is the confidence that we have in Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us’ (1 John 5:14).
2. It is restrained within the interest of Christ: ’Whatsoever ye shall ask in My name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son’ (John 14:13).
3. It is instructed in the truth: ’If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you’ (John 15:7).
4. It is energized by the Spirit: ’Able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us’ (Eph. 3:20).
5. It is interwoven with love and mercy: ’And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against any; that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses’ (Mark 11:25).
6. It is accompanied with obedience: ’Whatsoever we ask, we receive of Him, because we keep His commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in His sight’ (1 John 3:22).
7. It is so earnest that it will not accept denial: Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you’ (Luke 11:9).
8. It goes out to look for, and to hasten its answer: ‘The supplication of a righteous man availeth much in its working’ (James 5:16, RV).

WTS Books: $7.83               Amazon:$7.94

Readability: 1

Length: 206 pp

Author: Tullian Tchividjian

Jesus + Nothing = Everything; this equation came out of the hardest year of Tullian’s Life, the year that Coral Ridge merged with the church he planted, New City Presbyterian Church. You about can read some of the struggles he faced here. This equation sustained, saved, and sanctified him through that time. In short, here the power of the gospel for all of the Christian life is gloried in. This isn’t just theology for your head, but for you heart and life.

In my misery I demanded an explanation from God. After all, I had done what he asked me to do—I had put “my baby” on the altar. And now this? Like Jonah in the belly of the great fish, I was arguing with God and making my case for why God owed me rescue. Worn out, afraid, and angry, I insisted that God give me my old life back. The gentle but straightforward answer from God that I received from the pages of Colossians that morning was simple but sobering: ‘It’s not your old life you want back; it’s your old idols you want back, and I love you too much to give them back to you.’

That June morning was when Jesus plus nothing equals everything—the gospel—became for me more than a theological passion, more than a cognitive catch-phrase. It became my functional lifeline. Rediscovering the gospel enabled me to see that:

because Jesus was strong for me, I was free to be weak;
because Jesus won for me, I was free to lose;
because Jesus was someone, I was free to be no one;
because Jesus was extraordinary, I was free to be ordinary;
because Jesus succeeded for me, I was free to fail.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=28825135&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0

Jesus + Nothing = Everything: Intro from Crossway on Vimeo.