The Little Friar

God of hope, when Christ your Son appears may he not find us asleep or idle, but active in his service and ready. Come, O come Emmanuel, you are the way, the truth and the life; you are the true vine and the bread of life. Come, living Savior, come to your world which waits for you. Almighty God, give us grace to cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which your Son Jesus Christ came to us in great humility; so that when he shall come again in his glorious majesty we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God now and for ever. Amen.

Strengths Based Marriage: Build a Stronger Relationship by Understanding Each Other's Gifts by Jimmy Evans and Allan Kelsey presents an extremely practical program for introducing strengths into marriage. While the book presupposes a couples' having completed the popular StrengthsFinder assessment (which can cost upwards of $150 for the pair), there are still plenty of resources here to overcome the various obstacles to a happy, strong marriage.  Couples will learn more about one another, and that understanding is a rich foundation for growing stronger marriages. Strengths Based Marriage covers topics like Stopping the Cycles of Pain, Speaking Love to Your Spouse's Heart, and Secrets of Successful Marriages. It's a great resource for couples and will be a book I return to again and again for premartial counseling. ________________ Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookLook Bloggers < http://booklook...

Daniel Henderson's The Prayer God Loves to Answer: Accessing Christ's Wisdom for Your Greatest Needs offers a richly-textured, evangelical view of the prayer life of Christians who live in a broken, chaotic world.  His pastoral wisdom shines through on nearly every page, particularly for those Christians who find themselves "stuck" in their prayer life. Henderson offers some very practical steps for praying to receive Christ's practical provision in the midst of our confusion and uncertainty in life and relationships.  God is ready to open the treasuries of divine wisdom.  He's just waiting for us to ask. As a pastor, I find myself up late at night, worrying through some very tough questions about faith and my life.  And I counsel folks nearly on a daily basis who confide in me that I'm not alone in those struggles.  The Prayer God Loves to Answer is written for us.  This book is nothing short of a transformational school of prayer!  Don't miss...

Charles Lee Irons has given us a masterful aide in reading through the Greek New Testament in his A Syntax Guide for Readers of the Greek New Testament .  I've been reading through the Greek New Testament devotionally, as well as for sermon preparation, for more than a decade.  And Irons has brought together a number of regularly-consulted resources to produce a simple, durable volume that can help students, pastors, and other readers gain facility with the language -- with an eye toward regular reading of the Greek New Testament. A Syntax Guide for Readers of the Greek New Testament allows readers to interact with the Greek text with minimal interruption and maximum understanding.  In focusing specifically upon syntax, this Guide takes its place among other resources as a time-saving new tool that builds on, rather than replaces, what already exists.  In the author's own words, it "picks up where these other tools leave off, presupposes their use, and moves ...

Cheryl Sacks' The Prayer Saturated Family: How to Change the Atmosphere in Your Home through Prayer helps families integrate prayer into their home and nurturing a healthy prayer life.  It explores the various ways in which prayer serves to unite families and change the spiritual temperament of their relationships.  Sacks offers practical wisdom about how to incorporate that prayer life in the rhythms of contemporary family life, opening up the prayer traditions of each family in their own daily rhythms. As a pastor, I was particularly drawn to those sections that discuss the various roadblocks to prayer life, as well as how families can respect the individual differences of its members in those prayer traditions.  Those are questions with which most families who come to me in pastoral counseling ask.  Sacks writes with a pastoral heart and deep spiritual wisdom.  My favorite chapter is Chapter 11:  "Praying in All the Seasons of Life: It Is Never Too ...

Ella Francis Sanders' The Illustrated Book of Sayings: Curious Expressions from Around the World is a lexical foray into some of the world's strangest and most wonderful expressions, which is truly such an iconic and original idea to explore.  It's an amazingly remarkable collection of sayings from around the world -- full of diversity, humor and poignancy.  It's such a wonderful collection, in fact, that I'm struggling to choose just one as an example.  This is a collection that belongs on every bibliophile's shelves. _________________ I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.

Cindy Feasel's After the Cheering Stops: An NFL Wife's Story of Concussions, Loss, and the Faith that Saw Her Through recounts her husband's descent into alcoholism and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), in this disturbing story of what happens when the lights go off and the cheering stops. Feasel's husband, Grant, played pro football from 1983 to 1992.  During that time, it seemed as if Cyndy Feasel led a charmed life.  She was a traditional Southern Christian woman married to an NFL center and long snapper.  She joined NFL wives during games, wore a mink coat, and owned a lovely, but modest, house in Texas.  But beneath the lights and glamour, Feasel's life descended into an isolated domestic nightmare, shaped by her husband's addiction, domestic violence, and CTE. Linked to the helmet-to-helmet collisions players experience in the NFL, CTE is a degenerative brain disease associated with aggression, impulse-control problems, and depressio...

This is the last thing I'm going to say about the recent American presidential election.  I really have no desire to give it more import than it actually has -- which is to say, it doesn't have very much.  I'm obviously aware of aware of how much time and energy many American evangelicals have devoted to this election, taking active stands on behalf of one candidate or the other in the name of religious liberty, social morality, etc.  Not that there's anything wrong with this  per se , yet I think it is a cause for concern if, as I suspect has occurred in certain quarters, American evangelicals have expended more effort on advocating for or against a particular candidate than on fulfilling their true calling relative to the Kingdom of God.  Now that the election is over and Donald Trump has emerged victorious, it's just as critical, now as before, that the Church remind itself of what that calling truly is, namely, to bear witness in the wo...

Clayton Jennings' Jesus Over Everything: Letting Go of What You Cannot Keep to Gain What You Cannot Lose explores Christian faith at its core, and continually points at Jesus as the one Truth that liberates us from the world's falsehoods.  Stripping Christian spirituality to its foundations, Jennings continually insists that Jesus is everything, so Jesus must be over everything.  This is essential reading for those who want to live faithfully. ________________ I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.

Craig Bloomberg's The Historical Reliability of the New Testament: Countering the Challenges to Evangelical Christian Beliefs is a masterful account of over 800 pages devoted solely to establishing the historical reliability of the entire New Testament.  The book itself divides into six parts -- covering the Synoptic Gospels, the Gospel of John, Acts and Paul, the rest of the NT, canonicity and transmission, and the problem of miracles.  The first four parts of the book are what you might expect.  Blomberg takes contentious historical issues throughout the canon (such as differences between Synoptic accounts, the time of Jesus' death in John, etc.) and hashes them out, one by one, detail by detail.  He interacts with major theses and works that have argued them, while omitting the plethora of minor studies that have taken on the subjects, for the sake of space.  His detail, while still being oriented toward a clear goal, makes this one of the most impo...

Devotions for Christmas: A Celebration to Bring You Joy and Peace is a new devotional from Zondervan provides devotions from December 1 to December 31, and each can be completed and reflected upon in a few or several minutes.  The book covers a variety of topics, such as family traditions and holiday memories, and the authors show how each topic relates to Jesus Christ and Scripture.  Every devotion begins with a relevant Bible verse; for example, the December 20 devotion, "Christmas Stockings", is based on Jeremiah 33.3. Sadly, though, because the devotional begins with December 1, it confuses Advent -- that season of preparation for Christmas and Epiphany with Christmas, and misses the Christmas season (because it ends with December 31, instead of January 6th, the "twelfth day of Christmas").  So this devotional lacks the internal cohesion of the Christian celebration of Christmas. While the devotional makes a great Christmas gift, it really isn't...

Each of the following quotes, drawn from a variety of essays by Ernst Käsemann, represent some initial thoughts upon capitalism, theologically understood. Why? We will no more be able to shield our eyes from class struggle, which began in the previous century within the nation and now has gripped all continents, gripped them indeed as a deadly conflict between the privileged and those who have been exploited for centuries.  What disguises itself as the free market system and which promises to enrich all, is in reality the continuation of imperialism and colonialism by means of a capitalistic system.  It survives by the third world delivering raw materials and taking back our finished goods, among which -- and this is especially abominable -- are weapons of every sort.  Thus the slums grow, which are the underside of our prosperity, and for three quarters of humanity our earth becomes a hell, in which hunger, murder, and prostitution reign and ...

Sigmund Brouwer's Saffire: A Novel tells a fascinating, intelligent mystery set during a compelling time in history -- about James Holt, who has made a lasting impression on Teddy Roosevelt during their service together in the Spanish-American War; now it's 1909 and the President wants James to travel to Panama and meet with the Canal's American Zone leader.  Once James arrives, however, his investigation into the disappearance of young Saffire's mother turns deadly, and he finds himself in the midst of a potential revolution. Holt is one of the most colorful, distinctive figures I've heard in recent novels.  The faith element is light and never preachy; James views everyone through a faith-based worldview and wants to help those who cannot help themselves.  The secondary characters are vibrant.  In particular, TB Miskimon, Canal Zone Inspector and reluctant helper to James, provides some humorous pieces of dialogue and Saffire makes a memorable first ...

Andrew Klavan's The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Come to Faith in Christ sets out the story of how a secular Jewish artist and intellectual from New York wind up on his knees before the baptismal font at age 50.  The journey reads like an Andrew Klavan story, perhaps the best yet because it is the Andrew Klavan story.  All of the narrative elements that fill his more than thirty novels and films become even more vivid in his first nonfiction book because we know them to be not only artistically profound but literally true -- a strong male protagonist in the tough guy tradition struggles against not merely flesh and blood but also "principalities, powers, and the darkness of this world". Klavan's telling of his own descent into suicidal madness and ultimate recovery constitute the book's greatest narrative achievement, as he coherently describes his own incoherence.  But the book's most beautiful passage depicts a mystical experience with his be...

Tony Evans' Kingdom Prayer: Touching Heaven to Change Earth is one of the best books on the spiritual discipline I've read this year -- and is, hands-down, quite probably the best book Evans has given us.  For most Christians, prayer is often neglected -- as if a footnote for the day or an obligatory thing to do to make sure God is informed.  Evans, though, challenges us to see afresh the transforming power of speaking and working with God to transform the world.  Scripture is full of stories of those who accomplish extraordinary things because they refused to rely on their own ordinary powers.  Those who have turned to God for strength and help have found that miracles -- moments when heaven touches the earth -- happen all the time. Kingdom Prayer is an amazing book, and it's one every Christian should read. _________________ I received a free copy of this book from Moody Publishing in exchange for my honest review.

Colin Smith's Momentum: Pursuing God's Blessings through His Beatitudes explores the idea that the beatitudes represent a progression, a path to spiritual maturity in the Christian life.  Far from one of those self-help spirituality books, though, Momentum is focused on the spiritual life as a gift of transforming the heart and all its passions through the progression of maturity that is life in Christ. That progression follows certain steps along the path:  Poorness of spirit, spiritual mourning, meekness, hunger for righteousness, mercifulness, purity of heart, and peacemaking: I'm convinced that there is a roots-life-fruit pattern to the Beatitudes:  the first three beatitudes form the roots of a godly life, and since these roots lie in an awareness of our own need, they produce a deep longing for what we do not have.  Becoming poor in spirit, mourning over your sins, and submitting your life to God will produce a deep hunger and thirst for righteousness...

Marianne Wright has given us a valuable collection in The Gospel of George MacDonald .  MacDonald, one of the most prolific and influential writers of the nineteenth century, wrote over fifty books that had a wide reading in their day, and played a significant role in CS Lewis' conversion from atheism.  This anthology brings together selections from MacDonald's novels, fairy tales, and sermons, and offers a clear glimpse into MacDonald's hopeful and faithful Christian vision of a world reconciled to God in Jesus Christ. Arranged topically, each sections gives selections that are accessible for newcomers to MacDonald, most between 10-20 pages.  I was excited to find selections from MacDonald's widely-read Unspoken Sermons , but it's selections from Sir Gibbie, The Princess and the Goblin, Lilith, and At the Back of the North Wind that are lesser-known that made me stop and think -- and pray. MacDonald will doubtless be a challenge to our culture's sentime...

Asked to name his favorite passages from the Bible, Trump said, "It's a toss-up between Genesis 34 and Judges 19.  Both have been an inspiration." Why does Trump want to be president?  I used to think it was the narcissism of power.  Now add the sex:  He thinks he'll get laid more.  In a Trump White House the Blue Room will be known for its films rather than its receptions, while the Green Room will be repainted and renamed the Shades of Grey Room. Why does Hillary want to be president?  I used to think it was the narcissism of power.  Now add the money:  She's sure her connections owe her.  In a Clinton White House, the Oval Office will be known for its around-back deals. Either way, if you want to know what sins plague political leaders, look to monasticism.  There's a reason those vows for monks and nuns involve money, sex and power.  (Same goes for pastors, too.) A big fan of the first few amendments, Trump and Cli...

Jody Hedlund's Newton & Polly: A Novel of Amazing Grace imagines the early life of 18th-century preacher John Newton, as well as the inspiration behind his hymn "Amazing Grace" in her novel, Newton and Polly . Fifteen-year-old Polly Catlett is out wassailing in her small English town with her aunt, but Polly is unaware that her aunt uses their caroling as a cover for rescuing children who were smuggled into slavery.  Certain that their actions have been discovered and that they are being followed, Polly and her aunt quickly find a place to hide. Luckily, the young sailor John Newton has noticed their plight and throws off their shadow.  Polly soon learns that their savior is also her cousin when he pays a visit to the Catlett home.  As Polly slowly warms up to her rebellious 17-year-old cousin, she also learns that he fell in love with her the moment he heard her voice while caroling. Polly and John's relationship grows, despite the disparity in temperament bet...

Sam Serio's Sensitive Preaching to the Sexual Hurting brings a rich pastoral wisdom to one of those issues that preachers tend to avoid:  Sex. Serio offers a number of pastorally sensitive, helpful resources to pastors and teachers in addressing sexual issues -- including casual sex, abortion, sexual assault and rape, child molestation, pornography, same-sex attraction and more.  These are timely topics, and Serio has given the church a graceful gift in providing this thoughtful, practical tool. Drawing on a tradition that traces all the way back to Gregory the Great's Pastoral Rule , Serio helps preachers negotiate the baptismal waters of gentle care, encouragement, and comfort with richly textured "sensitive preaching".  I'm particularly drawn to Serio's ability to weave together the importance of the preacher's own character and habits of care with quality preaching about one of the most sensitive issues in our culture.  While many pastors prea...