Here is a list of the books I read this year!
My goal was to read 24 books and I ended up with 28, so I was happy! There were a few “duds” but most of them were excellent!
I know that not everyone can set aside time to read as much as they’d like, but I think they’d be surprised how much they could read if it became a priority. I am thankful that part of my “job description” is to read and study!
Summary: Written by a puritan, this was one of the deepest and richest books I’ve read. I think I could read it a hundred times and learn more each time! He definitely doesn’t limit himself to cute religious one-liners, but goes deep into each matter he discusses! This book is aimed to point out some Religious Affections that should evidence of true faith in a person’s life. His chapter on Humility was the best I’ve ever read on that topic.
Quote: “When he says in his heart, “This is a great act of humiliation; it is certainly a sign of great humility in me, that I should feel thus and do so;” his meaning is, “This is great humility for me, for such a one as I, that am so considerable and worthy.” He considers how low he is now brought, and compares this with the height of dignity on which he in his heart thinks he properly stands, and the distance appears very great, and he calls it all mere humility, and as such admires it.”
Summary: I enjoyed this book for his Overview of the Bible and his “big picture” viewpoint.
Quote: “…another way of summing up the Old Testament witness to Christ is to say that it depicts him as a greater prophet than Moses, a greater priest than Aaron and a greater king than David. That is to say, he will perfectly reveal God to man, reconcile man to God and rule over man for God. In him, the Old Testament ideals of prophecy, priesthood and kingship will find their final fulfillment.”
Summary: This is full of practical advice to young preachers. It was delivered as a set of lectures to young people preparing for ministry. Admittedly opinionated, he is still very helpful on the majority of topics.
Quote: “Do not be too clever in your divisions, do not be too smart. This has been a real snare to many preachers. … [I know of] nothing that did greater harm to preaching than this very thing. Clever headings. Slick and smart divisions in which the preacher displayed his cleverness. … our headings should appear to be the inevitable way of dividing up the matter.”
Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture
Summary: I found the generalizations this author made concerning introverts and extroverts to be extremely accurate, though I understand that many extroverts may take exception to his description of their personality. It had some good advice on how introversion can be a blessing in church leadership.
Quote: “Evangelicalism values the doer over the thinker.”
And “One of the things I’ve accepted is that I will impact fewer people than extroverted pastors. … But I have come to see this “limitation” as an opportunity to have a deeper impact on the people I do influence. Extroverts can err on the side of scattering themselves too widely and only impacting people superficially.”
Summary: A good reminder that, although “trellis work” (programs and structures) are important in ministry, they cannot be allowed to take the focus off of the real goal of Christian ministry — that of “making and nurturing genuine disciples of Christ.”
Quote: “Trellis work also often looks more impressive than vine work. It’s more visible and structural. We can point to something tangible — a committee, an event, a program, a budget, an infrastructure — and say that we have achieved something.”
An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth
Summary: I was really looking forward to reading this book as a fun, lighthearted read in contrast to most of the other books I’d been reading. While it was definitely fun and lighthearted, I was surprised by the amount of good, practical advice it contained!
Quote: “In any field, it’s a plus if you view criticism as potentially helpful advice rather than as a personal attack. But for an astronaut, depersonalizing criticism is a basic survival skill.”
And, “Early success is a terrible teacher. You’re essentially being rewarded for a lack of preparation, so when you find yourself in a situation where you must prepare, you can’t do it. You don’t know how.”
Disappearing Church: From Cultural Relevance to Gospel Resilience
Summary: What an incredible study of just how much we’ve “Americanized” Christianity. He gives great descriptions of “post-modernism” and “post-Christian-America.”
Quote: “So distracted by the phony war between left and right, conservatives and liberals, we have failed to notice that a new power had seized control of both our imaginations and the halls of power. This new power swirls around a small yet widely held set of beliefs: [summarized]
1. The highest good is individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression.
2. Traditions and religions that restrict individual freedom and self-expression must be deconstructed, or destroyed.
3. The world will inevitably improve as the scope of individual freedom grows.
4. The primary social ethic is tolerance of everyone’s self-defined quest for individual freedom and self-expression.
5. Humans are inherently good.
6. Forms of external authority are rejected and personal authenticity is lauded.
Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World
Summary: I really, really loved this book! It was a great reminder that Spiritual Growth is best achieved by the normal, common, ordinary steps of our daily lives. (Being Episcopalian, he puts over-due emphasis on the sacraments in the second half of the book.)
Quote: “Like every other area of life, we have come to believe that growth in Christ — as individuals or as churches — can and should be programmed to generate predictable outcomes that are unrealistic and are not even justified biblically. We want big results — sooner rather than later.”
Summary: Elisabeth Elliot’s account of her husband’s death. I found her openness and honesty refreshing. Even in her updated section years later, where she doubted the effectiveness of bringing American ways to the native people.
Recovering Redemption: A Gospel Saturated Perspective on How to Change
Summary: A good book seeking to get back to the basics of Biblical Redemption — would be good for a new believer or even as an evangelistic tool.
Quote: “Men make terrible gods.… The expectation that somebody can somehow become for us the answer to all our problems is to put an impossible weight on them that they were never intended, created, or equipped to carry. It’s going to make life miserable for everybody.”
God Came Near: Chronicles of the Christ
Summary: This was my first non-fiction book by Max Lucado and it was easy to see why his writings are so popular. The book offered a lot of thought-provoking ideas.
Quote: “There is not a hint of one person who was afraid to draw near him [Jesus]. There were those who mocked him,.. were envious of him,… misunderstood him,… revered him. But there was not one person who considered him too holy, too divine, or too celestial to touch. There was not one person who was reluctant to approach him for fear of being rejected.”
Teaching to Change Lives: Seven Proven Ways to Make Your Teaching Come Alive
Summary: This is an absolute must-read for teachers as well as “perpetual students.” I wish I had read this before going to college! (And I wish my professors had read this before I got there, haha!)
Quote: “I, as a teacher, am primarily a learner, a student among students.”
[to the teacher] “… spend more time questioning answers than answering questions. Our job is not to give quick and easy answers, patent-medicine solutions that never work in the realities of life. It’s far, far better to have students leave your class scratching their heads with questions they think and talk about, and with problems they’re eager to find solutions for in the week ahead. Then you know you’ve got some education going on — rather than the polite yawns you usually get.
[to the student] “I’ll often ask a student to study a certain passage of Scripture and to find and list principles from it. Then comes the response, “Dr. Hendricks, how many do you want?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “How many do you want?”
“Uhhh,” he’ll stammer, “but you’re the professor.”
“And you’re the student. You’re paying for this education, not me.” It just blows all his circuits…. So the ultimate question to the learner is “What do you want?” not “What does the teacher want?”
Summary: This little book was given to me by a supporting pastor, and it was ok, I guess. Kind of had a mystical bent to it. Its basic premise was that we should have continuous revival by daily confessing our sins and coming back to God. But, the way it was presented was as if it were some huge, spiritual secret. This short book should have been a pamphlet instead.
The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God’s Delight in Being God
Summary: Most of this book was very good and incredibly thought-provoking. I really appreciate his insistence on tackling the hard, troubling passages of the Bible.
Quotes: “God is God — that he is perfect and complete in himself, that he is overflowingly happy in the eternal fellowship of the Trinity, and that he does not need us to complete his fullness and is not deficient without us.”
And, “…the death and misery of the unrepentant is in and of itself no delight to God. God is not a sadist. He is not malicious or bloodthirsty. Instead, when a rebellious, wicked, unbelieving person is judged, what God delights in is the exaltation of truth and righteousness, and the vindication of his own honor and glory.”
And, concerning apparently contradictory Bible truths: “Our method is not to choose between these texts, or to cancel out one by the other, but to go deep enough into the mysterious mind of God to see (as far as possible) how both are true.”
Summary: This was kind of a memoir from a guy raised in a physically and verbally abusive home. It was neat to see how he later saw that his younger years prepared him for what he would do in adulthood.
The Hole in Our Holiness: Filling the Gap between Gospel Passion and the Pursuit of Godliness
Summary: This was an excellent book on personal Sanctification! Chapter five by itself made the entire book worth it!
Quote: “Some of us like getting beat up and then being told exactly what needs to be done to become a true spiritual giant. This sort of exhortation seems promising at first, but it proves ineffective in the long run. Mere rule keeping is not the answer because holiness cannot be reduced to a little ethical refurbishment.”
“… Our good works are accepted by God, not because they are “wholly unblameable and unreproveable in God’s sight,” but because God is pleased through Christ to accept our sincere obedience, although it contains many weaknesses and imperfections.”
Fool’s Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion
Guinness, Os
Summary: This was a great book on apologetics and the proper use of logic.
Quote: Unfortunately I lost all my highlights for this book.
A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World
Summary: This book was terribly disappointing for me. I’d really been wanting to read a book on prayer, but the book was awful. Basically, it had a bunch of stories about his family, and then some extremely mystical references to prayer with practically no bible! Many of his examples followed the same pattern: “Something really bad was about to happen and we prayed and then it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been. Just imagine how bad it would’ve been if we hadn’t prayed!”
Quote: “You cry out to God so long and so often that a channel begins to open up between you and God.” [what!?!!]
Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry
Summary: This is a collection of about thirty-five chapters of edification and teaching for the preacher. One chapter on “Calvinism” but overall the book is excellent!
Quote: “If we do not ask seriously how differing texts fit together, then we are either super-human and see all truth at a glance, or we are indifferent and don’t care about seeing the coherence of truth. … Reverence for God’s Word, demands that we ask questions and pose problems, and that we believe there are answers and solutions that will reward our labors…”
And, “Many people are willing to be God-centered as long as they feel that God is man-centered. It is a subtle danger. We may think we are centering our lives on God when we are really making Him a means to self-esteem.”
“We inevitably try to compensate for loss of dynamic faith by increased moral resolve and the addition of man-made regulations.”
Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel
Summary: A good book discussing the Christian’s responsibility to be Salt and Light in a lost world — and how that cannot take place from a distance. Like it or not, we are living in a lost, sinful culture. And we must show love and compassion to those around us without compromising Biblical truth.
Quote: “For a long time, the church in America has assumed that its cultural conservatism was American, that most people at least ideally wanted to live up to our conception of the good life. … The problem was that, from the very beginning, Christian values were always more popular in American culture than the Christian gospel.”
And, “A Christianity that is walled off from the culture around it is a Christianity that dies. The gospel we have received is a missionary gospel, one that must connect to those on the outside in order to have life.”
Strange Fire: The Danger of Offending the Holy Spirit with Counterfeit Worship
MacArthur Jr., John F.
Summary: A go-to reference book to combat Pentecostalism.
Quote: “The true ministry of the Holy Spirit looks like. It’s not chaotic, flashy, and flamboyant (like a circus). It’s usually concealed and inconspicuous (the way fruit develops). We cannot be reminded too often that the Holy Spirit’s primary role is to exalt Christ…”
Summary: Extremely interesting storyline about an astronaut stranded on Mars. Easy to see why it become such a popular book and movie! However, the language is reflective of an adult male stranded on a distant planet.
Quote: “As with most of life’s problems, this one can be solved by a box of pure radiation…”
Summary: This was a neat book about the incredible missionary work done among the Dani people. Made more special, of course, since it was Dr. Scovill’s brother.
A Pocket Guide to Logic & Faith: Discerning Truth in Logical Arguments
Lisle, Jason
Summary: A decent little introductory book on the topic of Logical argumentation and particularly in relation to creationism.
Quote: “Reason is not a substitute for God; rather it is a gift from God.”
A Gospel Primer for Christians: Learning to See the Glories of God’s Love
Summary: This book came to me highly recommended, and I highly recommend it to others! The principle of the book is that the Gospel is more than just the good news of salvation, but should affect how we live our everyday lives.
Quote: “God did not give us His gospel just so we could embrace it and be converted. Actually, He offers it to us every day as a gift that keeps on giving to us everything we need for life and godliness.”
Summary: This was another book that came recommended to me as a help to young preachers. I did not find it nearly as helpful as some others on the same topic.
Quote: “A man will serve his people far better who takes time to sit where they sit and walk where they walk.”
Awe: Why It Matters for Everything We Think, Say, and Do
Summary: The basic premise of this book is that the way you live your life is a reflection of what “awes” you — What consumes you?
Quote: “Either your heart lives in a fundamental, life-shaping awe of the horizontal, physical, created world (“things that are on the earth”), or your heart lives in a foundational vertical awe of God, his work, his grace, and his kingdom.”
Daniel: Trusting the True Hero
Summary: I really appreciated this author’s attempt to make God the true hero of the story!
Quote: “The big message of Daniel’s stories and prophecies was not that God’s people should ‘Dare to be a Daniel,’ but that they should dare to trust in Daniel’s God.”
So, I’m already filling out my list of books to read next year — if you have any strong suggestions, please let me know!
By the way, I enjoy using Goodreads to track my progress and see what others are reading. If you are interested, make an account, update it with what books you are reading and let me know so I can follow your progress!
