Book Review: Be Still, My Soul

Embracing God’s Purpose & Provision in Suffering: 25 Classic & Contemporary Readings on the Problem of Pain edited by Nancy Guthrie.

If you’ve lived long enough, you know that very few, if any, escape suffering somewhere along the line. When those trials come, we need a rock solid ground beneath us. This secure stability in difficulty is what Nancy Guthrie hopes to guide us to in Be Still, My Soul. She writes:

The scriptural truths elucidated in this book by respected classic and contemporary theologians and Bible teachers are the truths that have been the solid foundation under my feet in the storms of suffering and sorrow in my life.

This book follows the same formula as Come Thou Long-Expected Jesus, the Nancy Guthrie collection of Christmas readings that I reviewed a year and a half ago. Only this time the topic is not the incarnation but God’s perspective, purpose, and provision in suffering. Nancy Guthrie, who lost two of her children as infants and who has written books on  the subject of God and suffering is uniquely equipped to compile selections that will give the reader courage, hope, and peace in suffering.

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Book Review: Hearing Jesus Speak into Your Sorrow

by Nancy Guthrie

Nancy Guthrie and her husband lost two of their children—two babies—to the same genetic disease. This book, she says, is “the culmination of my search for deeper understanding that has come with the perspective of years and further study of the Scriptures since writing my earlier book Holding On to Hope.”

Guthrie has built her book around eleven statements of Jesus that speak to the experience of sorrow and grief. What that give us is a thorough, biblical answer to the questions raised when we suffer, and when we’re experiencing the worst things in life, we need the full answer. It’s a wonderful thing to trust that there will be a glorious resurrection when all that hurts us is made right and whole in a way it never could be in this life, but it’s even better when we can understand that there is meaning in our sufferings themselves. We draw comfort, too, in knowing that our Saviour understands our sorrow because he experienced deep suffering. And there’s more, for those are the main points of just three of the chapters in Hearing Jesus Speak into Your Sorrow.

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Book Review: Big Truths for Young Hearts

Teaching and Learning the Greatness of God by Bruce A. Ware.

Can I start this review with the story of how Big Truths for Young Hearts came to be? It’s origin is in the bedside discussions Bruce Ware had with his two daughters when they were children. 

“I began,” Ware writes, “in those early years spending ten to fifteen minutes with each of our daughters at their bedside, going through the doctrines of the Christian faith.” What he was doing was teaching them the same systematic theology he taught at seminary, but gearing it toward his children. His daughters are now adults, and they encouraged their father to write a book based on his bedtime talks with them, so he did.

The result a good gift to the church, especially to parents who wish to teach the faith to their children. As far as I know, there is nothing else like it—a systematic theology for children. There are, of course, children’s catechisms, but catechisms focus more on what is so and less on why it is so. A systematic theology gives us the reasons and tells us how everything fits together. If your kids are like mine were, they want to know the reasoning behind the doctrines, and that’s what you’ll provide when you read this book to them.

Big Truths for Young Hearts contains six sections—Bibliology through Eschatology—but with child-friendly titles instead of the technical theological terms. The section that contains Bibiology and Theology Proper, for instance, is called God’s Word and God’s Own Life as God. (You’ll find a quote from that section here.) Each section has six short chapters, two or three pages each, explaining and defending a doctrinal truth, finishing up with two questions for discussion and a memory verse or two.

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