Book Review: The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment

by Tim Challies.

Let’s cut right to the chase from the start: This is a very good book.

It’s a good book, first of all, because it’s a needed book. If you’ve been paying attention to what’s going on around you, you’ve probably noticed that there are a whole lot of conflicting ideas out there all claiming to be God’s truth. I don’t know if I can say that there are more varied ideas than there ever were—how would I know?—but I do know that more of them show up on my radar screen than did in the good old days before I had cable TV and internet access, when I managed to live my life mostly oblivious to the constantly changing trends in evangelicalism.

That I am constantly bombarded by different ideas, all demanding that I embrace them in order to be more in tune to the real truth, means that I am constantly called on to make judgments about the correctness of concepts or practices. And I’m betting my experience isn’t much different than the experience of most of us who claim to be Christians. Real life in the real world calls for frequent evaluations as to truth or error, and right or wrong. In other words, every single one of us needs to be discerning in regards to all sorts of things all the time.

Click to read more ...

Book Review: The Great Exchange

My Sin for His Righteousness by Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington.

I mentioned back in November that I’d be reviewing this book soon. When I made that foolish statement, I didn’t anticipate that The Great Exchange is not a book suitable for skimming. It is, instead, packed full of goodies, requiring that I make frequent stops for digesting as I made my way through. So here we are, three months later, and I’m finally finished up with reading and moving on to reviewing.

In The Great Exchange, Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington show us what the apostles taught in scripture about the atonement, patterning their work after George Smeaton’s The Apostles Docrine of the Atonement, a classic study written more than 130 years ago. There are two sections in this book: a first section summing up the teaching of the apostles on Christ’s atonement and placing this teaching in it’s historical context; and the second—the bulk of the book—examining the apostle-authored texts dealing with Christ’s atonement, moving from Acts through Revelation.

The authors are firmly convinced that the message of the cross is central to true faith.

The message of the cross—the historical gospel of the God-man, Jesus Christ, who personally visited the earth, which was created through him, with the mission of redeeming his own people with his own infinitely precious, bloody, substitutionary death—has been and must remain the solitary basis and the singular foundation of the Christian faith and worldview.

Click to read more ...

Book Review: The Literary Study Bible, ESV

Leland Ryken and Philip Graham Ryken, General Editors

This Bible is different than any of the other Bibles you own. It is, to use the words of the editors, “a literary guide to the entire Bible,” using the English Standard Version. This means that the purpose of The Literary Study Bible is to explain the literary forms used by the biblical authors so the reader can get a better handle on what is being said.

I’ve been reading from this new study Bible and carrying it to church and Bible study with me since November, and I like it. (Except for the cover. The book jacket and the book cover look the same, and I prefer plain covers on my Bibles so I don’t look so much like I’m packing a children’s Bible.)

I’ve had a nagging feeling that I haven’t been paying enough attention to the literary features of the Bible. The Literary Study Bible has proven to be an excellent way for me to start giving literary form it’s rightful place in my Bible study. Here are some of the features in this Bible that make it useful for this purpose:

Click to read more ...