No Other Boast

Readability:  1

Length: 179 pp

Author: John Stott

I really do enjoy reading C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, and there are some excellent illustrations and arguments that just beg to be used, but as far as communicating the very core, the essence of Christianity it falls short. If you want a little book to take an unbelieving friend through to communicate to them the central message of the Christian faith may I suggest John Stott’s Basic Christianity. Here the gospel isn’t just defended, but shown as necessary and gloried in.

You can never take God by surprise.  You can never anticipate him.  He always makes the first move.  He is always there ‘in the beginning’. Before man existed, God acted. Before man stirs himself to seek God, God has sought man.  In the Bible we do not see man groping after God; we see God reaching after man.

In seeking God we have to be prepared not only to revise our ideas but to reform our lives. The Christian message has a moral challenge. If the message is true, the moral challenge has to be accepted. So God is not a fit object for man’s detached scrutiny. You cannot fix God at the end of a telescope and say ‘How interesting!” God is not interesting. He is deeply upsetting.

Jesus never concealed the fact that His religion included a demand as well as an offer. Indeed the demand was as total as the offer was free. If He offered men His salvation, He also demanded their submission.

WTS Books: $6.00               Amazon: $6.00

Readability:  1

Length: 112 pp

Author: David Murray

Here is a little book packed with tons of help for the depressed Christian. It is short and easily readable and thus more attractive to the depressed person who does not feel like reading a book. Murray deals with the crisis, complexity, condition, causes, cures, and caregivers in relation to the subject of depression. Christians Get Depressed Too is a helpful pastoral tool I am glad to have and recommend. There are a couple of powerful Biblically-grounded insights that really jolted my thinking on the subject. I leave you with one of them.

We would never take this view (sinful cause/spiritual solution) when counseling people with cancer, strokes, broken legs, diabetes, or Alzheimer’s. As Reformed Christians, our default position is that these physical problems are most likely the result of living as fallen creatures in a fallen world. Why should our default position with brain problems be any different? Are we saying that the brain, the most complex organ in our body is somehow exempt from the effects of the fall? My skin is broken down by psoriasis, my eyes are broken down with shortsightedness, my nose is broken down with rhinitis, my joints are sometimes broken with arthritis, my bowel has required two operations, my legs are broken down with varicose veins, my body is covered in dangerous moles (two of which have been removed), but I am actually very healthy! I do not believe any of these ailments are the result of personal sin but simply the consequences of being a fallen creature living in a fallen world or of inheriting genes from my mother and father who also had similar health issues. Why then should we always conclude that brain disorders are the result of personal sin?

WTS Books: $7.50               Amazon: $10.00

Readability:  1

Length: 216 pp

Author: Mark Dever and Michael Lawrence

In 2007 Steve Jeffery, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sach wrote an excellent, thorough, and important defense of penal substationary atonement entitled Pierced for our Transgressions. It is a book for the serious student. Dever and Lawrence set out to compliment that book with this collection of sermons tracing the theme of substitution progressively through the Bible. It Is Well is not only more assessable, but here penal substitionay atonement is Biblically defended, reveled in, and applied.

It’s amazing when you think about it that God’s meeting place with man, the place where atonement would be made, was in the very symbol of his holiness and righteousness. This room, separated physically and by rules – with the ark of the covenant, the bowing cherubim, the law written by God’s own hand – is where not only God’s righteousness and holiness but also his mercy would be shown most clearly.

Contrary to what liberal theologians like to say about the symbolic meaning of the cross, the good news is that there is nothing symbolic about it. The symbols were in the Old Testament; they were given so that when the real thing happened, we’d know what we were looking at. When Jesus was lifted up on the cross, he wasn’t making a symbolic statement about the power of faith over the meaninglessness of life. No, he was making atonement for sin, as only he could do.

You are included in that wide-open whoever if you will turn away from your rebellion and put your faith in the God whose love is measured not by your feelings but by his actions – a love measured by the span of a wooden beam and nail-pierced hands. Oh, friend, look to Jesus today and be saved.

So this is the scene: the Judge of the world condemned by a corrupt court. The true High Priest to be murdered by an unholy counterfeit. The lamb of God sacrificed by the high priest as a political scapegoat.

Atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins may, if they’re honest, admit the strange pervasiveness of moral evil, but they have no real explanation for it. It’s like a coin flipped six billion times always coming up tails. I think something’s going on there.

WTS Books: $13.31               Amazon: $13.49

Readability:  1

Length: 147 pp

Author: Trevin Wax

Caesar is not Lord, Jesus is. This would be a most radical statement in the early Christian world – it would be subversive. Not subversive in the sense of overthrowing Caesar, but in the sense of putting him back in his proper place.

In , Tevin Wax calls for us to put the idols that rule over us (Caesars) back in their place, under the Lordship of Christ. Trevin deals well with the Caesars of the self, success, money, leisure, sex, and power. Here is a necessary book that is also very helpful.

The disciples we produce are a direct result of the gospel we preach.

Abstinence education may be effective for the public school system, but churches should not preach abstinence alone.  After all, telling young people that they should not have sex because of all the bad things that could happen to them actually perpetuates a self-centered view of sexuality.  The teenagers who engage in sexual activity are having sex to please themselves.  The teenagers who do not engage in sexual activity are not having sex in order to protect themselves.  But the common root in both of these mindsets is self-centeredness.

WTS Books: $7.49              Amazon: $10.31