Category: Books

One Morning I Haven’t Forgotten

Graham.jpgWe were in St. Louis.  Our entire family was staying at an older Radisson hotel downtown.  As I recall, we were living in Kansas City at the time.  It seems like we were traveling to Alabama.  As I recall, we left late one evening from Kansas City with plans to spend the night in St. Louis.

 
Anyway, I recall waking up very early the next morning.  I slipped out of the room trying not to awaken Charlotte or my two daughters.  On my way out of the room I took with me William Martin’s biography of Billy Graham,  A Prophet With Honor: The Billy Graham Story.   I remember sitting at a small table outside the hotel for the next few hours reading story after story of Graham’s life.  I’m not sure why I remember this so clearly, but I do.  I remember the coolness of the early morning, drinking coffee that someone from the hotel had made, and being absolutely mesmerized by these stories.

 
What impacted me so profoundly on that morning was the integrity of this man.  The genuineness of this man came through in story after story.  Person after person he had worked with for many years spoke of his integrity and trustworthiness.  Now I’m not sure why this impacted me so strongly.  I suspect some of this had to do with a few instances in which I had been disappointed by people whom I had admired and then later found out had a secret immoral lifestyle.  It was not that this man was flawless.  It was simply that he was authentic.  That morning took place about seventeen years ago.  Yet, it remains significant.

 
Can you recall a moment like this one in which you later realized that this was a significant marker in your faith walk?  How has that moment made a difference in your life? 

Excerpt from “The Reason for God”

Keller.jpgI have been reading Tim Keller’s excellent book The Reason for God.  (The subtitle is: Belief in an Age of Skepticism.)  Now this is a book I am enjoying.  In the first part of the book, Keller responds to questions and objections regarding Christianity that he has often received in the context of his ministry in New York City.  Some of these objections include:
 

  • There Can’t Be Just One True Religion
  • How Could a Good God Allow Suffering?
  • Christianity Is a Straitjacket
  • The Church Is Responsible for So Much Injustice
  • How Can a Loving God Send People to Hell?
  • Science Has Disproved Christianity
  • You Can’t Take the Bible Literally

The second part of the book discusses some reasons for faith.  This book has been very enjoyable.  Reading Tim Keller at times reminds me of reading C. S. Lewis.  He is a thinker with a heart for ministry.

 
The following is an excerpt from chapter four in which Keller responds to charges that the church is responsible for so much injustice:

Christian theology also speaks of the seriously flawed character of real Christians.  A central message of the Bible is that we can only have a relationship with God by sheer grace.  Our moral efforts are too feeble and falsely motivated to ever merit salvation.  Jesus, through his death and resurrection, has provided salvation for us, which we receive as a gift.  All churches believe this in one form or another.  Growth in character and changes in behavior occur in a gradual process after a person becomes a Christian.  The mistaken belief that a person must "clean up" his or her own life in order to merit God’s presence is not Christianity.  This means, though, that the church will be filled with immature and broken people who still have a long way to go emotionally, morally, and spiritually.  As the saying has it: "The church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints."  (pp. 53-54)

If Keller is right, regarding the church containing those who are "immature and broken," then why do so many of us go to such great lengths to hide our imperfections and our flaws?

Same Kind of Different as Me

Same_Kind.jpgI just finished this book.  Oh my.  This one was difficult to put down.  I read it after my friend Elizabeth told me it was one of the best books she had ever read.  Then my friend Ray told me that he was rearranging his schedule one day so that he could hear the authors of this book speak.  (They were speaking at a university in the city where he lives.)

 
I began reading the book.  The more I read, the more difficult it was to put down.   My friends were right.  The book is very, very moving.   

 
The book, Same Kind of Different as Me, was written by Ron Hall and Denver Moore.  The subtitle of the book: "a modern-day slave, an international art dealer, and the unlikely woman who bound them together."  The book is a story of deep friendship, faith, and redemption.  It is the story of two men who learned to see one another as human beings in the most unlikely friendship.

 
Ron and Deborah Hall had volunteered to serve in the shelter of the Fort Worth Union Gospel Mission.  There they came in contact with Denver Moore,  "…A street bum who refused to sleep inside or talk to anyone at the shelter.  An angry, dangerous loner who frightened everyone he came in contact with."

 
The following comes from the dust jacket of the book:

His name was Denver Moore.  And this is his story, told in his own voice.  It’s the tale of a man who grew up in virtual slavery, picking cotton for "the man" as late as the 1960s.  A man who never attended a day of school, never was paid for his years of back-breaking labor, who saw surviving on the streets as a step up in life.  And never dreamed he’d be friends with an SUV-driving Starbucks-sipping white man.

 
This is Ron Hall’s story too, told in his voice as well.  An upscale art broker with an eye for a masterpiece and a nose for a deal, he’d shot like a rocket from selling soup to selling Picassos and Van Goghs.  At home in Hollywood haciendas, Soho galleries, and European castles, he never expected the next chapter of his life would be written in an inner-city homeless shelter.  Or that a street person’s fierce loyalty and uncanny spiritual insight would carry him through the most painful time of his life.

 
And of course it is Debbie Hall’s story — a gutsy woman of deep conviction.  It was her compassion and persistence that brought them together, her vision that transformed an inner city and eventually brought hope to thousands.

“Venting”

Dungy.jpgI just finished Tony Dungy’s new book A Quiet Strength.  Now this is a refreshing read!  After a summer of hearing about Michael Vick’s dog fights and more news about "Pacman" Jones, this book is a view of the positive, wholesome side of some of the people in professional sports.

 
Dungy, coach of the 2007 World Champion Indianapolis Colts, speaks openly of his faith in God and his commitment to follow him each day.  Dungy grew up in a good home, the product of two parents who took advantage of his growing up years to teach him what they thought he ought to learn.  Regarding his dad, Dungy says that he was "…usually a quiet, thoughtful man."  Dungy’s father was a scientist who taught on the college level.  At home, he saw much of life as object lessons that gave him the opportunity to teach his children.  

 
Dungy recalls a conversation that took place with his father when he was in high school.  This conversation would mark him, in a positive way, for many years to come:

As I alluded to earlier, I had always had a problem with my temper.  I often earned technical fouls in my high school basketball games and was known to lose my cool in football games as well.  In high school and college, I was a perfectionist, usually riding my teammates rather than encouraging them.

 
"Venting," I called it.

 
"Dumb," my dad called it.

 
Our exchanges usually ran something like this:

 
"Did you change the referee’s call?"

 
"No."

 
"Did it make the situation better?"

 
"No, but I felt better, and then I could focus."

 
"Well you might have felt better faster if you were thinking about the next play instead of taking three or four or ten plays to ‘vent.’  You waste a lot of emotion and energy in venting or worrying about an injustice or something you can’t do anything about."

 
This was excellent advice from my dad, but I wasn’t ready to listen.  It wasn’t until those Steelers (Pittsburgh) invited me into their Bible study that I began to change.  There I was exposed to guys I respected who were constantly in God’s Word — always praying and reading their Bibles together.  These professional players were not the weak and the meek; they were some of the biggest, toughest guys I had ever met.  And yet they were drawing their strength and purpose from God. (p. 42)

Later in the book, Dungy makes several references to this early conversation with his father.  I got the impression that his parents were very intentional about what they taught him at an early age.  They also seemed to take advantage of "teaching opportunities" along the way.    You might enjoy this book. 

Reading: Thomas R. Kelly

coffee6_1.jpgA number of years ago, I read Thomas R. Kelly‘s A Testament of Devotion.  I read it at the suggestion of a friend.  As I recall at that time, there was some turmoil going on in both my life and ministry.  I was grateful for anything that would help me deal with life.

 
I think such works really are best read not in an effort to be more "spiritual" but as a normal human being who is desiring to keep God at the center of all things.  Perhaps you read the interview with Eugene Peterson in Christianity Today (March 2005) entitled "Spirituality for all the Wrong Reasons."  At one point in the interview he said, 

I’ve been a pastor most of my life, for some 45 years.  I love doing this.  But to tell you the truth, the people who give me the most distress are those who come asking, "Pastor, how can I be spiritual?"  Forget about being spiritual.  How about loving your husband?  Now that’s a good place to start.  But that’s not what they’re interested in.  How about learning to love your kids, accept them the way they are?

This is what reading someone like Kelly does for me.  Such works help me with the ordinary moments of life.  Loving my wife.  Dealing with work.  Wrestling with motives.  If you have not read Kelly, listen for a moment as he speaks about living with God at the center in everyday life.  The following are a few brief lines from A Testament of Devotion:

Much of our acceptance of multitudes of obligations is due to our inability to say No.  We calculated that the task had to be done, and we saw no one ready to undertake it.  We calculated the need, and calculated our time, and decided maybe we could squeeze it in somewhere.  But the decision was a heady decision, not made within the sanctuary of the soul….

 
…Life from the center is a life of unhurried peace and power.  It is simple.  It is serene.  It is amazing.  It is triumphant.  It is radiant.  It takes no time, but it occupies all our time.  And it makes our (lives) new and overcoming.  We need not get frantic.  He is at the helm.  And when our little day is done, we lie down quietly in peace, for all is well.  

Life Together

In the past few days, I have been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s powerful little work Life Together.  My edition is a small paperback (122 pages).  Yet, it is a powerful book.  Before this week, I had never read the book in its entirety.

 
Bonhoeffer was born February 4, 1906 and died April 9, 1945.  Bonhoeffer, in his relatively short life, produced several works that continue (even to today) to nurture, teach, and encourage believers.  Much of his adult life was spent in Germany during a very difficult time.

 
Finally, on April 5, 1943, Bonhoeffer along with his sister and her husband were arrested and put into prison in Tegel.  During the first year of prison, guards were friendly to this minister.  They preserved and took care of his papers and writings.  Then after a year, Bonhoeffer was transferred from one Gestapo prison to another.  During his final weeks, he came in contact with men and women from throughout Europe.  One English officer who witnessed these events wrote:

Bonhoeffer always seemed to me to spread an atmosphere of happiness and joy over the least incident and profound gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive….  He was one of the very few persons I have ever met for whom God was real and always near….  On Sunday, April 8, 1945, Pastor Bonhoeffer conducted a little service of worship and spoke to us in a way that went to the heart of all of us.  He found just the right words to express the spirit of our imprisonment, the thoughts and the resolutions it had brought us.  He had hardly ended his last prayer when the door opened and two civilians entered.  They said, "Prisoner Bonhoeffer, come with us."  That had only one meaning for all prisoners — the gallows.  We said goodbye to him.  He took me aside: This is the end, but for me it is the beginning of life.  The next day he was hanged in Flossenburg.

Savoring Every Bite

In his book Devotional Classics, Richard Foster writes the following about Madame Guyon:

Madame Jeanne Guyon (1648-1717) was born in Montargis, France.  When she was only fifteen, she married an invalid who was thirty-eight years old.  Unhappy in her marriage, she sought happiness in her devotional life.  She lived in a convent under royal order for a year and then was imprisoned in Vincennes and the Bastille because of her religious beliefs.  Almost twenty-five years of her life were spent in confinement.  Many of her books were written during that period.

The work she is most famous for is her book Experiencing the Depths of Jesus Christ.  In an exercise which she calls "Praying the Scripture," she writes:

"Praying the Scripture" is a unique way of dealing with the Scripture; it involves both reading and prayer.  Turn to the Scripture; choose some passage  that is simple and fairly practical.  Next, come to the Lord.  Come quietly and humbly.  There before him, read a small portion of the passage of Scripture you have opened to.

 
Be careful as you read.  Take in fully, gently, and carefully what you are reading.  Taste it and digest it as you read.  In the past it may have been your habit, while reading, to move very quickly from one verse of Scripture to another until you have read the whole passage.  Perhaps you were seeking to find the main point of the passage.

 
But in coming to the Lord by means of "praying the Scripture," you do not read quickly; you read very slowly.  You do not move from one passage to another, not until you have sensed the very heart of what you have read.  You may then want to take that portion of Scripture that has touched you and turn it into prayer.

 
After you have sensed something of the passage, and after you know that the essence of that portion has been extracted and all the deeper sense of it is gone, then, very slowly, gently, and in a calm manner begin to read the next portion of that passage.  You will be surprised to find that when your time with the Lord has ended, you will have read very little, probably no more than half a page…"

 
(Foster, Devotional Classics, pp. 302-303)

I find this helpful — especially as I think about the importance of reading Scripture to shape and form my life.  No, this is not a substitute for a rigorous study of Scripture in its original languages and seeking to understand the setting in which it was written, etc.  I do think we need to hear what she is saying.  What she is saying can greatly complement my Bible reading and study.  It is a reminder to me that Scripture is to form and shape me.  It is a reminder that the goal of reading Scripture is not to see how much Scripture I can read but to see how much of my life I can open before the Lord as he speaks in Scripture.  

 
A number of years ago, I was teaching a Bible class at a church.  As I recall, the subject of the class was the nature of the Bible itself: its origin, languages, forms of literature, authors, etc.  At one point, a guy in the class said, "Who needs all of this?  No one needs to know Greek or Hebrew!  We just need to read the Bible!!"  Of course, on one level, he may have been correct.  One does not have to understand what I just mentioned in order to have a rich life with God.  Yet, I noticed that he had in his lap a Bible — an NIV.  As I recall, I said something like this in response, "No, you don’t have to know all of this.  I do think we can be very grateful for those who have taken the time and discipline to learn these languages so that the rest of us can have a Bible in our own language like the one in your lap.  While all of us don’t have to learn the original languages, I am thankful that some people do so that we can have a Bible in English."

 
In the meantime, I am also thankful for a person such as Madame Guyon who speaks powerfully regarding the power of savoring Scripture.   She reminds all of us that reading Scripture is like eating steak.  It is important to savor every bite. 

What Do People See?

jim_and_casper.jpgWhat do people really see when they visit our church?  Do we realize what they see?
 

I have been reading an interesting book this week, co-authored by Jim Henderson and Matt Casper.  The title of the book is Jim &  Casper Go To Church.  The book is a conversation between the two as they visit eleven different churches in the United States.  What makes the book especially interesting is that Matt Casper is an atheist.  Henderson and Casper have forged a friendship that gives the book much warmth.

 
Casper gives his reaction, as a non-believer, to many of the things done by well-meaning Christians in various church settings.  It is interesting to see this from the eye of a non-believer.

 
In one chapter of the book, they describe their visit to a very high profile church.  They are both very complimentary of much about the church.  Then they mention that only one person spontaneously spoke to them the morning they were there.  Hmmm.

 
I suspect that the longer many of us live as Christian people, the harder it becomes to see what outsiders might see in our churches.  Some years ago as I began a new work with a church, I asked them about their sign in front of the church building.  It was awful.  Faded.  Sagging in one direction.  Very, very dated.  Anyway, I asked several people about the sign in front of the building.  The responses I received?  "What sign?"  "Is there something wrong with our sign?"  After I raised the question, several people came back to me and said,  "I go by that sign every day and never noticed how badly it looks.  We really need a new sign."  I suspect we are like that with our churches in general.  After a while, we just don’t see what is so obvious to an outsider or newcomer.

 
What do you think people (outsiders or newcomers) see in your church?  What do they probably notice that is positive and encouraging?  What might they notice that is not so encouraging?  Do you think it is difficult for many of us who are longtime members of these churches to see these things?

Faith Embraces Both Thought and Passion

Edwards.jpgSeveral years ago, I was introduced to some of the writings of Jonathan Edwards.  Edwards was such an important figure in American life.  He lived from 1703 to 1758.  He ministered for twenty-three years to a church in Northampton, Massachusetts.  Later, he became president of Princeton University but died only a few weeks after beginning that work.

 
One important theme of his writings was the idea of "religious affections," which he saw as the passions that move the will to action. 

 
The following is an excerpt from Religious Affections:

The nature of human beings is to be inactive unless influenced by some affection: love or hatred, desire, hope, fear, etc.  These affections are the "spring of action," the things that set us moving in our lives, that move us to engage in activities.

 
When we look at the world, we see that people are exceedingly busy.  It is their affections that keep them busy.  If we were to take away their affections, the world would be motionless and dead; there would be no such thing as activity.  It is the affection we call covetousness that moves a person to seek worldly profits; it is the affection we call ambition that moves a person to pursue worldly glory; it is the affection we call lust that moves a person to pursue sensual delights.  Just as worldly affections are the spring of worldly action, so the religious affections are the spring of religious actions.

 
A person who has a knowledge of doctrine and theology only — without religious affection — has never engaged in true religion.  Nothing is more apparent than this: our religion takes root within us only as deep as our affections attract it.  There are thousands who hear the Word of God, who hear great and exceedingly important truths about themselves and their lives, and yet all they hear has not effect upon them, makes no change in the way they live.

 
(cited in Devotional Classics, edited by Richard J. Foster and James Bryan Smith, pp. 20-21)

Later, Richard Foster says regarding Edwards: "Jonathan Edwards teaches us that the intellectual life and the passionate life should be friends, not enemies…. We today desperately need this lesson because a modern myth abounds that true objectivity must be passionless.  As a result, we analyze and dissect the spiritual life without the slightest personal involvement or commitment and think we understand it.  But the spiritual life cannot be understood in this detached way.  We understand by commitment.  And we enter into commitment and sustain commitment by what Edwards rightly calls "holy affections."

 
(Devotional Classics, p. 25)

You Are Not Alone

Today I am thinking about the privilege and joy of living in the presence of God.  I don’t say that in a light, "churchy" sort of way.  I really mean this.  To live with a sense of his presence not only provokes worship but creates a sense of direction in a world where there is so much noise.  When I am aware of his presence, I find that I live with a sense of divine purpose.

 
At times I feel completely overwhelmed by what is taking place in my life.  Usually it is not any one thing but one thing stacked on top of the other, on top of the other, etc.  At times, I feel nervous and anxious about the future.  Usually, it has to do with the unknown.  Sometimes, I feel discouraged about the present.  This happens when I feel severely let down or have experienced a loss of some kind.  Needless to say, I have to be reminded again and again of God’s forever presence.

 
I like these words by Richard Foster:

Think of the number of people who have been encouraged in this way by the simple writings and profound life of Brother Lawrence.  How vastly enriched we are that he was finally persuaded, almost against his will, to write down how he had learned, The Practice of the Presence of God.  His famous words still throb with life and joy.  "The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees as the blessed sacrament."  Every thought, every decision, every action stemmed from the divine Root.  A simple kitchen monk, who meekly referred to himself as the "lord of all pots and pans," found it to be possible. We can too!

 
But we fool ourselves if we think that such a sacramental way of living is automatic.  This kind of living communion does not just fall on our heads.  We must desire it and seek it out.  Like the deer that pants for the flowing stream, so we thirst for the living Spring.  We must order our lives in particular ways.  We must take up a consciously chosen course of action that will draw us more deeply into perpetual communion with the Father.

 
I have discovered one delightful means to this end to be prayer experiments that open us to God’s presence every waking moment.  The idea is extraordinarily simple.  Seek to discover as many ways as possible to keep God constantly in mind.  "There is nothing new in that," you may say.  "That practice is very ancient and very orthodox."  Exactly!  This desire to practice the presence of God is the secret of all the saints.

 
(Richard J. Foster, Freedom of Simplicity)