14 Best Books of 2008
Here’s this year’s list: 14 Best Books of 2008.
Two disclaimers:
1) This list involves books I read in 2008, not just books published in 2008. Only a few of these books were published in 2008.
2) This list is subjective and personal. This is not necessarily a list of 14 books I think you should read (though all of you will probably want to latch on to one or two of these). This is a list of the 14 books that most significantly impacted me or that gave me the most pleasure in 2008.
1. Dean Karnazes, Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of An All-Night Runner
Reading this book, in conjunction with turning 30, somehow flipped a switch in me, changing me from a man who jogged 7 miles a week to a man who now runs 90 miles a month.
2. Martyn Lloyd Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure
I’m beginning to think this is the greatest collection of sermons in print. Through slowly reading these old sermons I feel like I’ve been personally mentored, counseled, and cared for by Lloyd Jones towards deeper joy in Jesus, a richer understanding of the Christian life, and a better understanding of how God has wired me.
3. James Petty, Step By Step: Divine Guidance for Ordinary Christians
I can’t imagine a better, more freeing book on understanding God’s will and decision making.
4. Mike Mason, Champagne for the Soul: Celebrating God’s Gift of Joy
Through his 90-day experiment with joy, Mike Mason examines joy from 90 different angles, producing an incredible book.
5. G.K. Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown: The Enthralling Adventures of Fiction’s Best-Loved Amateur Sleuth
I love these stories. These are, in my limited opinion, the best mystery stories ever written. Whenever my mind won’t quite settle down, I’ll often read a Father Brown story before bed, filling my imagination with color and calming me towards sleep.
6. Tim Chester & Steve Timmis, Total Church: A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community
A tremendously helpful book that helped me further refine my identity as a pastor and my understanding of the church.
7. Matthew Elliott, Feel
An exciting look at what the Bible really teaches about our emotions. See the review. This book has subtly changed how I feel and how I think. I’m looking forward to having Matthew Elliott come speak to my church in the new year.
8. Daniel Taylor, Tell Me a Story: The Life-Shaping Power of Our Stories
A brilliant, accessible, inspiring unpacking of the significance of story. This book could easily appear higher on this list.
9. Ed Welch, Running Scared: Fear, Worry & the God of Rest
One sentence/idea from this book brought about a spiritual breakthrough for me while sitting on my porch in August. I’ve not been quite the same since.
10. Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling
This book made me think on new levels and look at life through new lenses.
11. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative
Big idea: pay attention to the details when reading biblical narrative, that’s where the story really comes alive.
12. Howard & Geraldine Taylor, Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret
My second son’s namesake. I know Hudson Taylor’s spiritual secret (resting in Jesus no matter the circumstances), but I don’t live it. I want to teach my son Hudson to do what I’m just now learning to do and what Hudson Taylor learned to do only through suffering.
13. Ethan Rarick, Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West
The best chronicle of the Donner Party’s ordeal in the Sierras. A great work of history. A great story.
14. Dane Ortlund, A New Inner Relish: Christian Motivation in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards
Tasting honey motivates you to live differently. Readers of Edwards know what I’m talking about.
Merry Christmas from the Buzzards
Taylor, Cru (2 yr.), Justin, Hudson (2 mo.)
To all Buzzard Blog readers, Merry Christmas. Thanks for reading and interacting with what I write here. Blogging will continue to be light through the holidays, though I’ll try to get a Best Books of 2008 post up soon.
The shots that didn’t end up on the Christmas card:
50/50 Gospel
Johnathan Dodson: the dangers of a 50/50 gospel. Read this post.
Better Men
Men are God’s method. The church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men…What the church needs today is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use–men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Ghost does not come upon machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men–men of prayer…
The training of the Twelve was the great, difficult and enduring work of Christ…It is not great talents or great learning or great preachers that God needs, but men great in holiness, great in faith, great in love, great in fidelity, great for God–men always preaching by holy sermons in the pulpit, by holy lives out of it. These men can mold a generation for God.
-E.M. Bounds
How to Leave a Church
Today I received a kind, yet difficult to read, email from a person who is planning on leaving our church. In working through my response, I was helped by re-reading an excellent article from Reed Jolley, my pastor during my college years.
Here’s the article in full:
PUTTING ASUNDER:
SOME THOUGHTS ON HOW TO QUIT YOUR CHURCH
REED JOLLEY
April 2007
After ten great years, it’s time for our family to leave this church.
She said this over a cup of coffee and with a hint of tears in her
eyes. She wanted me to know that their family’s sojourn with Santa
Barbara Community Church had been a pleasant one, that they had grown
in their faith, and that they would miss the people. She wanted to
express her gratitude and let me know why they needed to leave….
It’s fairly easy to find a book or an article that tells you how to
choose and join a church. Eugene Peterson, for example, writes in one
of his books that it’s a good idea to choose the church that is the
smallest and closest to your home. On the other hand, Ted Haggard says
somewhere that we should ask where God seems to be moving and then get
as near to that place as possible. Fair enough. But what about
leaving a church? American evangelicals shuffle all too often from
church to church, following the movements and fancies of the moment,
but that’s not what I’m addressing here. I’m talking about when there
are legitimate reasons for leaving a local body of believers.
First, however, let me say that our loyalty to our church should be
stronger than our attraction to the better praise band down the street
or to the in-depth preacher who just took a job at the church on the
corner. Leaving a church should feel like leaving a marriage. It
should hurt because we have lived our lives with a group of people, and
now we are leaving. But, again, there are legitimate reasons to
leave. Doctrinal considerations or the specific needs of our children
are, for instance, two valid reasons for leaving a church. When a
church is moving in a direction that an individual or a family feels is
contrary to God’s Word, that is another prudent reason for making a
change.
But how should one leave? The usual method is to slither out the back
door with the hope that no one notices. Over the years I’ve had
numerous conversations with people who have left Santa Barbara
Community Church, conversations that are sometimes embarrassing and
sometimes hurtful. Haven’t seen you in a while, I say as we pass on
State Street. Is everything okay? Then I learn that this person has
moved to another church for whatever reason. I’m quick to try to
relieve the embarrassment. Assuming this person has moved to a good
church, I say something like Well, may God bless you and keep you. . . That’s a great church, and I’m sure it will be better
with you in it. We’re all on the same team in the Body of Christ.
We’ll miss you.
But these conversations—while cordial and sincere—are hurtful because
they happen accidentally. A serendipitous encounter at the grocery
store should not be the moment to announce that three months ago you
left your church. When I have these encounters, I find myself thinking
as a pastor, I’ve prayed for this person and invested my life in this
family. I performed his wedding and dedicated his baby. Besides,
aren’t we members of the same church universal? How could he and his
family leave without so much as a good-bye?
So how do we leave a church? I offer the following suggestions:
First, leave deliberately. Don’t slither or slide. Don’t wander
hither and yonder. When it’s time to go, go—and then go become an
integral part of another good, Bible-believing, Christ-saturated
church. The New Testament knows nothing of individual believers taking
a little from here and sampling a little from over there. The biblical
doctrine of the church describes a body of believers deeply committed
to Christ and to one another.
Second, go graciously. Has your theology changed to the extent that
you need to join a different church? Have the needs of your family or
your work schedule compelled you to make a move? Fine. Move, but move
graciously. Resist the temptation to concentrate on the warts and
blemishes of the church you are leaving. (You’ll find, soon enough,
that your new church has a few of these too!) It is important that you
leave your church graciously and join your new church graciously.
Eugene Peterson writes:
Every time I move to a new community, I find a church close by and join
it—committing myself to worship and work with that company of God’s
people. I’ve never been anything other than disappointed. Everyone
turns out to be biblical, through and through: murmurers, complainers,
the faithless, the inconstant, those plagued with doubt and riddled
with sin, boring moralizers, glamorous secularizers. Every once in a
while a shaft of blazing beauty seems to break out of nowhere and
illuminate these companies, and then I see what my sin-dulled eyes had
missed: Word of God-shaped, Holy Spirit-created lives of sacrificial
humility, incredible courage, heroic virtue, holy praise, joyful
suffering, constant prayer, persevering obedience.
Third, go thankfully. I write as a man who has been a pastor of the
same church for almost three decades. During these years many people
have left our church (some of them because of me). To be honest, some
of the people who have left I don’t miss much. And others I miss
sorely. But I always appreciate the one who takes the trouble to say
good-bye.
Embarrassing or awkward as it may be, have an exit interview with one
of the leaders, elders, or pastors of the church you are leaving.
Explain the reasons for your departure, express your gratitude for
their hard work, and commit yourself to praying for the church with
which you will no longer be associated. These exit interviews are rare,
but they are sweet. Pastors care about people. So when someone comes
to me, shares where God seems to be leading her, and gives thanks for
her season of involvement at SBCC, I beam with joy. Pastors are not
running a business and trying to get more customers. Pastors are
shepherds of a flock. On our good days we are not jealous of our
sheep; we have their best interests at heart. Still, it is rarely easy
to hear someone say, I gotta go. . . In fact, it always hurts. But
the pain is softened when we learn that he or she is going to settle in
a godly congregation of Christ-exalting believers. After all, we’re on
the same team working for the same purposes.
Church membership and church involvement are serious undertakings.
When we meet Christ, we are saved into the church. The Bible speaks of
our being members of one another (Romans 12:4-5). We are joined
together in Christ (Ephesians 4:15-16). We eat from one loaf and drink
from one cup (Ephesians 4:4-5). We are to carry one another’s burdens
(Galatians 6:2). We might even find ourselves selling our property in
order to meet another’s needs (Acts 4:32ff.). We are to be a forgiving
community (Colossians 3:13) that is deeply in love with one another
(John 13:34). The church is a precious gift to God’s people. Christ
died to bring the church into being (Ephesians 5:25)! The church is
the mantelpiece of God, the display of God’s splendor before the angels
(Ephesians 3:10)! So let us take care that we cherish the organism that
Christ suffered to create—and may God bless his church!
Changing at Age 30: Hudson Taylor
In line with yesterday’s post (What a Man Can Learn When He Turns 30), yesterday I came across Hudson Taylor’s description of his similar spiritual condition in his early thirties. Here’s an excerpt of a letter Hudson Taylor wrote to his mother in his thirties, roughly six months before experiencing a spiritual breakthrough that was to mark the rest of his life:
I cannot tell you how I am buffeted sometimes by temptation. I never knew how bad a heart I have. Yet I do know that I love God and love his work, and desire to serve him only and in all things. And I value above all else that precious Savior in whom alone I can be accepted. Often I am tempted to think that one so full of sin cannot be a child of God at all. But I try to throw it back, and rejoice all the more in the preciousness of Jesus and in the riches of the grace that has made us “accepted in the beloved.” Beloved he is of God; beloved he ought to be of us. But oh, how short I fall here again! May God help me to love him more and serve him better. Do pray for me. Pray that the Lord would keep me from sin, will sanctify me wholly, will use me more largely in his service.
p. 128, Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret
What a Man Can Learn When He Turns 30
I don’t know why it has taken me 30 years to see this. No, I do know why, it’s because I’m stubborn.
Several weeks into my thirties I feel like I’m just beginning to realize that I’m more sinful and confused than I ever dared believe, but in Jesus I’m even more loved and cared for than I ever dared hope.
Lately the gospel that I preach to other people has been affecting my own heart more profoundly than ever before. This is bringing uncomfortable, disruptive, surprising, needed, slow, and very happy change.
The self-righteous Pharisee in me that I didn’t even know was there (but everybody else probably did) is being slowly shattered.
God is good.
A 30 year-old dog can learn new tricks.
Redeeming Social Life Online
I’ve taken my original message notes/blog post, Thinking Biblically About Facebook, and developed it into an essay for The Gospel & Culture Project. Read the article: Redeeming Social Life Online.
