Category: Book Reviews

I read an amazing book over the Christmas break that I would like to highly recommend. The book is Inside Out by Dr. Larry Crabb. Crabb defines spiritual growth and describes the process of real change. He defines spiritual growth as coming to know God better and asserts that this necessitates growing in one’s ability to relate deeply with others which includes loving others in a non-defensive way. The central message of Christianity is the need for restoration of relationship with God and with others. Crabb identifies the ways that we fail to love others well. We violate love and therefore sin when we distance ourselves from others in an effort to protect ourselves from pain. This relational sin of self-protection is the sin in our hearts that must be addressed in order to experience growth. We must give up our dependance on our own resources and shift toward dependence on God. This means trusting that God will preserve our life rather than relating from a stance of self-preservation. When we pursue personal safety, we do so at the expense of freely loving others. Crabb encourages us to identify our unmet longings and give up our demand for them to be met and rest in the fact that our deepest longings can only be met in God. Next, he directs us to identify the ways that we protect ourselves such as how we communicate with our spouse, interact on a committee, or socialize after church, and then repent of our failure to love others. As we learn to love others without self-protection, we move closer toward the promised abundant life. We must put aside our crisp, business-like, distanced, intellectual ways of relating and begin to vulnerably share ourselves with others and deeply relate at the level of the heart rather than just the head. We must risk the pain of judgement, ridicule, and rejection and trust God with our souls because life without deeply relating is not life at all.

Review #8. The Truth about Lies and Lies about Truth: A Fresh New Look at the Cunning of Evil and the Means of Our Transformation by David Takle. I know it seems like I say this about every book, but this really is my #1 all-time favorite book. This book is not available on audible, sorry. Also, warning, this is not easy reading. In this book, David explores how deception affects our lives. The Enemy’s main weapons against us are lies, so our best defense (and offense) is the truth. We were never meant to live with the experiential knowledge of good and evil. It blinds us to the realities of the spiritual world. Jesus opens our eyes and sets us free. Becoming like him is a lifelong process. We need to be transformed from the inside out in every area of life. The ways that we attempt to grow are deeply flawed. Our problem is not that we need better rules to live by. Rather, our way of perceiving reality and our relationship to God and the world had been terribly corrupted. Traditional wisdom has stressed a behavioral approach to Christian growth. In contrast, sanctification or spiritual transformation is something that the Holy Spirit does in the heart of the believer so that the person is different than before and sees the world through the lens of new core beliefs. We live differently not because we manage to do it well enough, but because we are becoming the kind of person who lives that way naturally. Spiritual formation must include transformation with the help of the Holy Spirit rather than a program of self-effort. The serpent brought sin into the world through deception. A lie only has power when it is believed. But, truth will not set a person free unless it is internalized at the deepest levels. This is why belief is such critical work and why intimate knowledge of the truth is so important in the Scriptures. Only through the exposure of what is false and the internalization of what is true can the power of truth be released into our lives. Much of our pain from past experiences is no longer caused by the experience, but our interpretations of it and the beliefs (i.e. lies) that we hold related to it. Until and unless we expose the lies and believe the truth about ourselves and God about that particular incident, we may harbor that pain throughout our lives and never break free. Consequently, the crucial argument in the book is that we have to internalize Truth (which is God’s way of seeing us, the issue, whatever) and that THAT VERY ACT will break the power of the Enemy’s deception, free us, and enable us to grow to be more Christ-like. Chapter 10 leads us step by step in a new way to engage with God daily, to be taught by Him rather than trying to grow ourselves through effort and our own intellect. It radically challenges our current ways of dealing with the subject of Christian growth and discipleship. We should view our new life with Christ as an apprenticeship to Him that is a continual process throughout our lives. Listening directly to God and letting Him break through the lies and teach us the Truth are the things that will transform our lives, give us power, and make us more Christ-like. Our lives are driven by beliefs we internalized as a result of life experiences, many of which are so far off from God’s perspective that we could not possibly live well. We keep trying harder to do what is right, without changing the underlying engines that drive our behavior. This book explains why this is so, why the church is often unable to help, and what we can do to get free.

Review #7: The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Timothy Keller. This is yet another one of my all-time favorites. In the first half of the book Keller lays out the major criticisms and doubts that modern skeptics have about faith and in particular Christianity. He takes on each criticism and provides the relevant Christian response. The criticisms include the belief that there can’t be just one true religion. He points out that historically, many of the major religions teach the one-religion philosophy and provides evidence that make the case that Christianity is that one true religion. The first half of the book is good but the second half is amazing!! Chapters 10 and 11 are the best!!! In the second half of the book Keller provides the reasons for faith and the evidence that Christianity is the one true religion. He describes the clues that there is a loving creator who made everything and everyone. One only has to look around at the beauty and joy of nature to wonder at their perfection. He probes into the basic and most important foundations of Christianity which of course begins with Jesus Christ. Keller explains why it was necessary for Jesus Christ to sacrifice himself for man’s sins and why the resurrection and cross are important building blocks for belief. Keller draws a distinction between Religion and the Gospel. In the paradigm of religion, we build our identity on our own moral achievement, we have confidence in ourselves when we are living up to our standards but then when we don’t live up to standards, we experience feelings of worthlessness and self-loathing. Right standing with God is based on moral effort. The motivation for following God is fear of losing God’s blessing. But, in the Gospel Paradigm, identity is built on God’s bestowal of value. I take on God’s view of me that I am BOTH valuable and worthy of respect AND depraved and morally corrupt. This leads to both deep humility AND great confidence. My right standing is based on God’s grace, and my motivation for following Him is a response to His profound love for me.

Review #6 The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery by David Benner. This is one of my all-time favorite books!! It is very short but very deep and challenging. Benner makes the important point that there cannot be deep knowledge of God without deep knowledge of one’s self. We try to create uniqueness and a self rather than receive the gift of my self-in-Christ. But identity is never simply a creation. It is always a discovery. True identity is always a gift of God (p.17-18). Genuine self-understanding revitalizes our spiritual life and leads to the fulfillment of our God-given destiny and vocation. Leaving the self out of Christian spirituality results in a spirituality that is not well grounded in experience or reality. Focusing on God while failing to know ourselves deeply may produce an external form of piety, but will always leave a gap between appearance and reality. This is disastrous to those we lead into the Christian life (p.22). Having information about God is no more transformational that having information about love. Theories and ideas about God can sit in sturdy storage canisters in our mind and do absolutely no good. Remember Jesus’ harsh words for the religious leaders who knew God’s law but did not know God’s heart. When knowledge about God is all objective but not personal, it is useless (p.24). Knowing about God’s love and forgiveness is not the same as knowing it as an experiential truth. The things that we know from experience, we know beyond belief (p.26). To truly know love, we must receive it in a vulnerable, undefended state. We must be willing to expose our whole self to God. This requires knowing the truth that the self that God loves is not the prettied-up pretend self, but our actual self (p.57). A genuinely transformational knowing of self always involves encountering and embracing previously unwelcome parts of self. (p.50) God loves us in our depth, complexity, totality, and sinfulness (p.56). A complete knowing of our self in relation to God requires knowing our self as deeply loved by God, our self as deeply sinful, and our self as in a process of being redeemed and restored. (p.67)

#5 The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God, by Timothy Keller. This is one of the best and definitely the most comprehensive book I have ever read on marriage. One of God’s great purposes for marriage is to remind us of Christ’s relationship with His redeemed people forever! A greater understanding of the gospel creates a deeper union between spouses as time goes on. Keller suggests on page 47 that we start with this, “Do for your spouse what God did for you in Jesus, and the rest will follow.” It should be our goal to be a servant-lover to our spouse, meaning that we learn how to delay gratification or even deny self to serve each other. Christ gave himself up for us and we should follow His example in our marriage. Marriage simply cannot be properly understood or practiced without being rooted in the gospel. “If God had the gospel of Jesus’s salvation in mind when he established marriage, then marriage only ‘works’ to the degree that it approximates the pattern of God’s self-giving love in Christ.” However, sacrificial love is only made possible through a continual refilling of your soul’s tank with the glory and love of the Lord. Next to our relationship with God, there is no relationship more important than marriage, “and that is why coming to know and love your spouse is difficult and painful, yet rewarding and wondrous. The most painful, the most wonderful—this is the Biblical understanding of marriage. The Spirit’s work of making the gospel real to the heart weakens the self-centeredness of the soul. … The deep happiness that marriage can bring, then, lies on the far side of sacrificial service in the power of the Spirit.”

Book review number four: The Sacred Romance: Drawing Closer to the Heart of God, by Curtis and Eldredge. We have the workbooks and it has been a great experience to work through them together as a couple. Here are a few quotes from the book: Humans were made for more than the mundane and drab; instead, we were made for joy and gloriousness and beauty. Thus, the standard perception (by most people, including many Christians) of Christianity as a list of rules and regulations and standards of behavior is misguided at best and harmful at worst. Conservative churches teach that God wants obedience, or sacrifice, or adherence to the right doctrines, or morality. Therapeutic churches suggest that God is after our contentment, happiness, or self-actualization. These are not God’s primary concerns. What he is after is us- our laughter, our tears, our dreams, our fears, our heart of hearts. We are created in the image of God, or more precisely, as a reflection of the Trinity. The Trinity is a community, and so to be made in its image means we are relational at our core. Our creation is by love, in love, for love. We were created for intimacy with God. The story of God and humanity is a romance where God is pursuing us, and we only need to turn to God. Curtis and Eldredge talk about the ways we are wounded as children and young adults and about how we learn to cope with those wounds by shutting down or developing behaviors that protect us. The result of this self-protection is often a less than vivid life of survival, rather than one of glory. Instead of hiding our wounds and acting as if they don’t exist, they urge us to carry them to God, the only One who can truly heal them.

Book review number 3: Hope for Parents of Troubled Teens. Connie Rae addresses some of the most important topics that are relevant to parents of teenagers. Some of the topics included are: parenting styles, parenting goals, keeping the marriage relationship strong, teen-parent communication, peer pressure, drugs, alcohol, sex, rebellion, and runaways. Connie provides specific and practical application to be completed by the parents and teen at the end of each chapter. The book is also based on biblical wisdom with plenty of scripture references throughout. The underlying parenting philosophy of the book is that responding to rebellion by emphasizing parental authority and/or aggression will not lead to success. While the rebelling teenager needs limits, he also needs a great deal of positive encouragement to talk out his feelings and personal struggles. Parents cannot mandate or force submissive behavior of teens. Connie states that, “The goal is not broken submission to the will of someone who is stronger. The goal must be to foster a heart change that will allow the teenager to be his own growing-up person, while at the same time maintaining a relationship with the authorities in his life that will contribute in positive ways to his growing independence” (p. 174-175). I highly recommend this book! It is so thorough and practical and is full of good biblical wisdom. I appreciate the balance between the parent’s responsibility for setting limits, and the acknowledging that teens need to be allowed to develop their own personal set of values and beliefs that will guide them as they transition out of their parent’s home and into adulthood.

Book review number two: How People Grow: What the Bible Reveals About Personal Growth, by Cloud and Townsend. This is one of my all-time favorite books, it is a very long book but I think the audible version is shorter. The thesis of the book is that true Spiritual growth leads to deep transformation of the soul. Our spiritual life, where we learn about God, and our emotional, relational life, where we learn how to solve real life problems, are not two different things. All growth is spiritual growth! The functional issues like emotional and relational problems are spiritual issues, and they are addressed in the Bible. The spiritual and the practical are linked together. Addressing our emotional issues is an important application of the doctrines of the church. When we do not address our emotional and relational issues, we truncate our spiritual growth.

I love books so much that I am going to write reviews of some of my favorites. I am going to try to post one a day, we will see how long I can keep it up. First up is: The Marriage Builder: Creating True Oneness to Transform Your Marriage, by Larry Crabb. It’s a very short book but the principles within it are profound. These principles are foundational and seem simple but they will take a lifetime to truly grasp. The basic tenants of the book are: we get all of our needs for security and significance met in God, therefore, we don’t need to depend on our spouse to meet our needs. We can devote our lives to sacrificial giving because God constantly replenishes our resources. Our goal in marriage is to help our mate appreciate their fundamental worth as human beings who bear the image of God, in a more tangible way, as we demonstrate the love that God has for them.