Books Reviews

When you envision heaven, what fills you with the most anticipation? Is it the redemption of your body, being free from pain and suffering? Or perhaps it’s the thought of being reunited with loved ones? Maybe you’re even curious about experiences like “riding a drop of rain,” as a country song imagines. The Bible has…

Excerpts:“The gospel is not just the ABCs of Christianity, but the A to Z.”“The extravagant, spendthrift love of God is the most profound reality in the universe.”“The gospel is not religion or irreligion, morality or immorality, moralism or relativism, conservatism or liberalism. It is something else entirely.”

Excerpts:“God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.”“The pursuit of joy in God is not optional. It is not an ‘extra’ that a person might grow into after he comes to faith. It is the essence of faith.”“Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists…

Excerpts:“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”“Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.”“Pain insists upon being attended…

Excerpt: “The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”Excerpt: “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”

A year ago, as I was looking through the endorsers of a well – known decade – old book about the gospel, I was startled to discover that, out of 17 prominent Christian leaders, six had stepped down or been removed from their ministry positions. That’s a more than one – third dropout rate in…

Excerpts:“Holiness is not a series of do’s and don’ts, but conformity to the character of God and obedience to the will of God.”“Our first problem is that our attitude toward sin is more self-centered than God-centered.”“God has made provision for our holiness, but He has given us the responsibility of using those provisions.”

Excerpt: “My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.”Excerpt: “Grace means that God is on our side and thus we are victors regardless of how well we have played the game.”

Excerpt: “Prayer is the central avenue God uses to transform us. If we are unwilling to change, we will abandon prayer as a noticeable characteristic of our lives.”Excerpt: “Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent…

Excerpts:“There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.”“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it empties today of its strength.”“Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.”

I have been passionate about books my entire life. In grade school, my teacher assigned a series of reports on the provinces of Canada. Each week, I wrote one report, and by the end of the term, I gathered them all, added a table of contents and a title page, and bound them with yarn….

Excerpts:“To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love.”“God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful, that He can, without anything other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature.”“The man who has God for his treasure has all things in One.”

Excerpts:“Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.”“The more you know and the better you understand, the more severely will you be judged, unless your life is also the more holy.”“What good is it to argue about the Trinity…

Excerpts:“The foundation of all true knowledge of God must be a clear mental apprehension of His perfections as revealed in Holy Scripture.”“God is only truly known in the soul as we yield ourselves to Him, submit to His authority, and regulate all the details of our lives by His holy precepts and commandments.”“The god of…

Excerpts:“A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell.”“We are commanded to study His Torah. We are not commanded to understand it.”“Silence is a great source of strength.”

Excerpts:“The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who, by profession or culture, are identified as ‘Christians’ will become disciples—students, apprentices, practitioners—of Jesus Christ.”“The aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of loving persons, with Himself included in that community as its prime…

Excerpts:“Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day.”“You can’t follow Jesus in a hurry.”

Excerpts:“Bold prayers honor God, and God honors bold prayers.”“If your prayers aren’t impossible to you, they are insulting to God.”“Work like it depends on you and pray like it depends on God.”

Excerpts:“My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.”“Grace means that God is on our side and thus we are victors regardless of how well we have played the game.”“The saved sinner is prostrate in adoration, lost in wonder…

Excerpts:“The Spirit will lead you to the way of the cross, and that is definitely not a safe or pretty or comfortable place to be.”“The truth is that the Spirit of the living God is guaranteed to ask you to go somewhere or do something you wouldn’t normally want or choose to do.”“We are most…

Excerpts:“The core problem isn’t the fact that we’re lukewarm, halfhearted, or stagnant Christians. The crux of it all is why we are this way, and it’s because we have an inaccurate view of God.”“God doesn’t call us to be comfortable. He calls us to trust Him so completely that we are unafraid to put ourselves…

Review of Conceived by the Holy Spirit by Rhyne R. Putman I grew up in a family that adored Christmas. Every December, once school let out, my mom would take me and my little brother to a small town in west Tennessee to spend a couple of weeks with her side of the family. On Christmas Eve,…

Excerpts:“I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve. But that was before any of this happened.”“Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself.”“I want to be able to be in a room with somebody I don’t agree…

Excerpts:“The Bible is full of ordinary people who did extraordinary things because they trusted in an extraordinary God.”“When you have nothing left but God, you realize that God is enough.”“The Lord didn’t call us to be successful; He called us to be faithful.”

Summary Deep Reading: Practices to Subvert the Vices of Our Distracted, Hostile, and Consumeristic Age is a book co-authored by English professors Rachel B. Griffis, Julie Ooms, and Rachel M. De Smith Roberts. The book explores three major vices of the modern reading environment—distraction, hostility, and consumerism—and proposes a series of deep reading practices to help…

Excerpts:“The gospel is only good news if it gets there in time.”“The question is not whether God can work through persecution, but whether we can trust Him enough to let Him.”“The insanity of God is that He loves the world so much that He gave His only Son.”

Excerpts:“The Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me.”“If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry…

Excerpts:“The story of your life is the story of the long and brutal assault on your heart by the one who knows what you could be and fears it.”“God is not a concept to be discussed; He is a person to be loved.”“The heart is the connecting point, the meeting place between any two persons.”

Excerpts:“I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found.”“God’s love is a love that cannot be forced on anyone, but it is also a love that cannot be denied.”“The question is not ‘How am I to love God?’ but ‘How am I to let myself be loved…

Excerpts:“Just because I work incredible good out of unspeakable tragedies doesn’t mean I orchestrate the tragedies.”“Forgiveness is not about forgetting. It is about letting go of another person’s throat.”“The real underlying flaw in your life is that you don’t think that I am good.”

Excerpt: “There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.”Excerpt: “Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it empties today of its strength.”

Excerpts:“The gospel means much more than the personal salvation of individuals. It means a social revolution.”“What if we in the church believed that Jesus meant what He said? What if we took Him at His word and began to live out the gospel in ways that truly could change the world?”“The only thing that matters…

Excerpts:“Aslan is not a tame lion.”“Courage, dear heart.”“Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia.”

Excerpts:“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”“To know God is at once the easiest and the most difficult thing in the world.”“God is not a cosmic bellboy for whom we can press a button to get things done.”

Excerpts:“We ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed.”“There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful than that of a continual conversation with God.”“We must trust God…

Excerpts:“This hill, though high, I covet to ascend; the difficulty will not me offend.”“What God says is best, is best, though all the men in the world are against it.”“My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it.”

Excerpt: “We are settling for a Christianity that revolves around catering to ourselves when the central message of Christianity is actually about abandoning ourselves.”Excerpt: “Radical obedience to Christ is not easy… It’s not comfort, not health, not wealth, and not prosperity in this world. Radical obedience to Christ risks losing all these things. But in the end,…

Excerpts:“When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.”“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again.”“Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating.”

Excerpt: “Come to Me with a teachable spirit, eager to be changed. A close walk with Me is a life of continual newness.”Excerpt: “I am with you and for you. When you decide on a course of action that is in line with My will, nothing in heaven or on earth can stop you.”

Excerpt: “What matters supremely is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—the fact that He knows me.”Excerpt: “Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life’s problems fall into place of their own accord.”

Excerpts:“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, ‘Thy will be done.’”“Hell is a state of mind—ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the…