READING THROUGH THE FIRST QUARTER OF 2021

It has been a long time since I have posted any book reviews; but, many good things come to an end. Having stumbled on a Books-I-Read-in-March post by another Comings, I thought I’d go public with ones I read in February and March.

 Reliving the Passion by Walter Wangerin Jr. 1992 Zondervan

 I thought I would take a step back into my liturgical past and search for a devotional book which would walk me through the 40 days of “Lent.” What I found was, Reliving the Passion, by Walter Wangerin Jr. Having learned how to tell stories by listening to his father preach in eastern North Dakota, he draws memorable scenes from the well of Mark’s Gospel. While I would disagree with his imaginative construction of a few of the events, I was not distracted by our difference of opinion. Rather, the whole series of devotionals leaves me grieved and eager for Sunday morning. And, after all, that's the point. If you have never done anything for Lent, you might consider this journey to the brink of the resurrection. 

The Cross of Christ by John R. W. Stott. 1986 InterVarsity Press 

This book, and the next, form a set even though by different authors: one an Anglican and the other a Presbyterian. The first I picked up from a reference in another book I had read. The second was recommended to me from a great friend of the Baptist Bible Seminary class of 1969. 

In, The Cross of Christ, Stott discusses why even some Evangelicals are stepping back from the “shocking” record of what happened at Calvary. I get the impression that many find it more comfortable to Imagine the physical ordeal than to probe the significance of Jesus being ‘made sin for us.” (By the way: two of Walter Wangerin’s devotional readings make that moment live in ways intended to make us stand in uncomfortable awe.) As for Stott, he highlights four accomplishments of Christ at Calvary. These give us cause to declare, “God forbid that I should glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” He relates those four accomplishments to four buildings involved in our salvation experience: a Temple – Atonement; a marketplace – Redemption; a courtroom – Justification, and, a household – reconciliation. And it is the theme of that fourth building (a household) which is picked up by the second of the pair of books. 

Gentle and Lowly by Dane C. Ortlund. 2020 Crossway 

Of the four buildings cited by Stott, the fourth speaks of a living relationship. And it is that relationship which Ortlund seeks to expose in Gentle and Lowly. He wants the believer in Christ to understand God’s heart toward believers. He is not writing about wooing the lost with God-loves-everybody-ism. Rather, he is inviting believers to probe and take courage in the fact that God does actually love us. To do so he takes us through twenty-three texts from God’s Word which invite us to hear the beating of His heart. To do this he begins the search with Matthew 11:28-29. There Jesus describes himself as “gentle and lowly.” In these days when we must double down on the message of God’s wrath against sin, there will be a need to dig deep into the truth of God’s heart for his sheep whether they be “squeaky clean” or struggling, discouraged, and thinking their well of grace and mercy has run dry. I strongly recommend this book, as do such folks as D. A. Carson, Rosaria Butterfield, Paul David Tripp, and Nancy DeMoss.

Awake My Heart by J. Sidlow Baxter. 1960/1994 Kregel Publications 

This book is actually a daily devotional for a year. So, I'm a quarter of a year through it. The book was recommended by a great friend, and I cannot thank him enough. Baxter speaks the language of the first years of my faith in Christ, and I find them to be amazingly refreshing and pertinent sixty-plus years later. 

That leaves: Get Out of Your Head, by Jennie Allen. 2020 Waterbrook / Random House 

This proved, for me, to be a very worthwhile read after a year-long pandemic. If you find yourself becoming ingrown in your thinking, distracted by a host of controlling habits of the mind, Ms Allen brings frankness and the heart of God into the guidelines for claiming the ability to change as new creatures in Christ. I will warn you, though, that I did find her outline to be difficult to remember and easy to lose track of in its development. It would be good to bookmark the table of contents at the beginning, and refer back to it as a kind of GPS for the book.