This book was written by Iain H. Murray, the biographer of Martyn Lloyd-Jones and historian most noted for his work with Banner of Truth. Wesley and the Men Who Followed takes up the great Arminian Evangelical evangelist and founder of what eventually became the Methodist church. It is a critical, yet kind, reflection on the life and…
Tim Chester has written an excellent little book, A Meal with Jesus: Discovering Grace, Community, andMission around the Table, that explores the eating practices of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. Here are some of my notes and highlights from the book: “There are three ways the New Testament completes the sentence, ‘The Son of Man…
It has been said that, next to the Bible, the most read book in the English language is John Bunyan’s classic The Pilgrim’s Progress. I wonder if that is still true? Most people today (including Christians) have not read it. The books that command the attention of children and adults today are not nearly so substantial. Popular fiction—whether Christian…
From my personal reading notes archives, here are some real gems from John Flavel’s The Mystery of Providence. I read this several years ago and its one of the best Puritan Paperbacks Banner of Truth publishes. “Who can but confess that as there are tools of all sorts and sizes in the shop of Providence, so there is…
Herman Bavinck towers head and shoulders above most theologians, though he is only beginning to be more widely read in English. His chief accomplishment was the four-volume masterpiece, Gereformeerde Dogmatiek, originally published in Dutch from 1895 to 1899. The English translation, Reformed Dogmatics, was completed in 2008 and is a treasure-trove of theological reflection. The…
A significant part of a preacher’s work is book work. We simply cannot feed the sheep if we are not feeding ourselves, and the primary way we feed ourselves is by reading. But the threats against a pastor’s reading are many. We have many responsibilities, each of them competing to gain the best of our time. These…
The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment by Jeremiah Burroughs is one of the great Puritan classics. I first read it over a twenty years ago, but still return to it when thinking about contentment. Here are my notes. Don’t get distracted by the detailed Puritan outlining. There are some real gems here. Better yet, read…
Early Christian Writings (translated by Maxwell Staniforth and Andrew Louth, published by Penguin), contains the following: These writings date from the 2nd century and are generally known as the writings of “The Apostolic Fathers.” Some of the authors may have been disciples of the original apostles. In reading through these letters, epistles, and treatises, I observed…
“The aim of this book is to provide a handbook for preachers that will help them apply a consistently Christ-centered approach to their sermons” (ix). So commences Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture by Graeme Goldsworthy, an exceptionally well-crafted manual on hermeneutics by Graeme Goldsworthy, a lecturer in Old Testament, biblical theology, and hermeneutics at Moore…
While Evangelicals are hungry for authentic spiritual experience, we are, it seems to me, rather confused about how to get it. This hunger is a good thing, evidenced by the many books now available on spiritual formation and the disciplines, not to mention the plethora of devotional guides now on the market. But evidence of…
