Well Done, Good and Faithful Dad: A Review of SEASONS OF SORROW by Tim Challies
A comforting, honest book for those in their own seasons of sorrow.
Many people remember November 3, 2020 as election day of a contentious United States presidential race. I remember the day, of course, but for two other reasons.
November 3, 2020 was the launch day of the book I coauthored with my friend John Beeson about blogging for God’s glory. Months and months before the book launched, we picked November 3 to release the book. And when we picked the date—as you might expect—we neglected to notice it coincided with the Trump-Biden showdown. Unfortunate timing, to say the least. We could have planned better.
The other event, however, we could have never seen coming.
My favorite blogger is Tim Challies. He’s so faithful in his theology, so consistent in his output, and so generous in promoting the work of others. When John and I thought about which author might write the foreword to our book about blogging, we, of course, asked Tim first. Thankfully, we didn’t have to ask anyone else.
But the day we launched our book was also the day Tim’s only son died.
Tim wrote on his blog the following day, “Yesterday the Lord called my son to himself—my dear son, my sweet son, my kind son, my godly son, my only son.” His son Nick had been playing a game with friends and his fiancée on his college campus when he suddenly collapsed and could not be revived. When Tim posted about the tragedy, he added, “And we ask that you remember us in your prayers as we mourn our loss together.”
I wrote my own prayer to God and posted it online, as did many others. I prayed to our Heavenly Father asking, among other requests, that “when a man who loves words—and spends his life using them for your glory and the good of your people—has nothing to say, whisper to his heart that you are still God and you love him and his wife.”
It’s been two years since that season. Joe Biden is still President, our book is still on Amazon, and Tim’s son is still gone.
But these years have not gone by without effort from Tim to capture the story of his loss and the ways God has remained faithful. Those reflections, many of which have never been shared in public before, became his latest book Seasons of Sorrow. The book chronicles his reflections over the first year of grief. When I finished reading the book, I emailed Tim to tell him that, for so many reasons, this book is the best writing I’ve ever read from him. Here are two main reasons I love the book.
Seasons of Sorrow puts the pain of loss on the page. I’m a sucker for stories about fathers and sons. Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road and Harry Chapin’s song “The Cat’s in the Cradle” make me melancholy like few other stories and songs can.
In Seasons of Sorrow, we see the picture of a father who loves his son. He loves the way I want to love my sons. He always made a point to wake before his family to pray for them so they would know that, before they woke, their father was praying for them. Tim would make his son coffee before his son went to work. Even now, he writes about occasionally bringing a cup to the gravesite.
All this love makes all the loss so hard and leads to excruciating moments of introspection. In one reflection, Tim asks a question that anyone of us might ask were we in his place, namely, whether the tragedy came from God as punishment for some sin in his life. “Could it be,” he asks, “that Nick’s death is God’s discipline toward me? Could it be that Nick was some kind of idol in my life, and to loose my grip on him, God took him away? Could this all be my fault?” Then he adds, “I’m haunted by these thoughts and questions” (33). As any good and godly father might be. In another passage, Tim wrestles with the emotions involved with emptying his son’s bedroom to prepare it for future use as a guest bedroom. “What right do we have,” he asks, “to barge in and sort through his possessions? Who are we to decide what will be kept and what will be discarded, what will be treasured and what will be thrown away? Yet it must be done” (102). Some nine months after Nick’s death, Tim wrote, “I miss my son today. That goes without saying, I suppose, since I miss him every day. But on this day, the pain is particularly sharp, the ache especially deep” (170). Here, Tim normalizes for readers what I’ve heard others say: there will be good days and bad days.
In all these ways, Tim does not shrink back from putting his pain on the page, telling readers his many frustrations with what William Cooper called God’s “frowning providences.” But that is not all he does.
Seasons of Sorrow points us to both the comfort of God’s promises and the comfort of God’s people. In a reflection he titled “My Manifesto,” Tim affirms his resolve to follow God and trust him despite the pain of loss. “By faith I will accept Nick’s death as God’s will, and by faith accept that God’s will is always good. . . . I will be forever thankful that God gave me a son and never resentful that he called him home. My joy in having him will be greater than my grief in having lost him” (36). Many such things he says. In the concluding paragraph of the chapter, Tim poetically strings together scriptural promise after promise after promise, affirming his belief in them with the concluding words, “This is my manifesto” (37).
In a chapter titled “I Fear God and I’m Afraid of God,” readers will notice overlap with themes from the book of Job. Tim writes of fearing God “in a new way” and of how “some kind of innocence has been shattered.” And still, he affirms his desire to continue praying, “Thy will be done,” while also noting, “even as I pray, I cringe just a little” (45). As Job came to learn, there is an unexpected comfort that comes to us when we remember that the God who is who he is, is who he is—he’s not a small, tribal deity, but sovereign and good, awesome and kind. There’s an unexpected comfort in having our innocence shattered and our foundation rebuilt.
In these ways and others, Seasons of Sorrow pastors and comforts those who grieve by sharing the ways God sent people to pastor and comfort him. In one section, Tim mentions to a friend he’s concerned his own eagerness to see his son one day in heaven has overshadowed the hope of seeing Jesus in heaven. To this, Tim’s friend tells him he does not sound like a pagan. “You sound like a grieving father” he says (122). That’s good pastoring.
Near the end of the book Tim notes the sadness that Nick “was the last male in the Challies line” and that now even the Challies “surname will in the course of time disappear” (183). But to this, Tim also encourages readers by sharing the truth he encourages himself with, writing that “Nick doesn’t need to be remembered by other people, because he will never be forgotten by God” (185). Amen and amen.
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In the opening pages, Tim writes, “Writing is how I reflect, how I meditate, how I chart life’s every journey. And so when the sorrow was still new in my heart, when the tears were still fresh in my eyes, when I barely knew up from down and here from there, I began to write” (xiv). He goes on to say that he had to write because writing teaches him what he actually believes and what he should seek to believe. “I had to know,” he says, “whether to rage or to worship, whether to run to bow down, whether to give up or to go on.” Painful as the prose was for him, I am thankful he went on, bowed down, and worshiped.
For all these reasons, the subtitle could not fit more perfectly: the pain of loss and the comfort of God. It seems to me that not only has Tim been a good and faithful dad (the hope he writes about in the final chapter), but Tim has been a good and faithful author. In the coming years I expect I’ll buy more copies to give to those in our church going through their own seasons of sorrow.
* Photo by Jonah Pettrich on Unsplash
Oh to Be an Unwavering Pastor: A Review of Jonathan K. Dodson’s Latest Book
A new book about pastoring that helped me stay afloat.
The last few years have felt, at least to most people, anything but stable. And if we feel the instability generally across society, we certainly also feel the turmoil inside churches and among pastors. Into this context, pastor and author Jonathan K. Dodson published The Unwavering Pastor: Leading the Church with Grace in Divisive Times (The Good Book Company, 2022).
But what Dodson means by “an unwavering pastor” might not be what you expect. He does not mean a pastor chiseled from a block of granite, strong and indomitable against the storm, a pastor with Nehemiah-like fortitude to execute his vision amid detractors. Dodson has a different kind of unwavering pastor in mind, the kind of unwavering pastor that Paul became. In his final letter to Timothy, he tells his young protégé, “I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me” (2 Tim. 1:12).
Dodson points out that Paul does not waver in his final imprisonment and as he nears his execution, not necessarily because of “what he believed but who he believed in. He knew the God he trusted” (13–14, emphasis original). Dodson continues, “An unwavering pastor’s confidence doesn’t come from his command of theology, his experience in counseling, or his faithful spiritual disciplines.” Instead, he writes, our confidence “is derived from God’s unwavering commitment to his own gospel, to preserve, protect, and promote the grace of God in Christ through the Spirit for sinners. . . . If you believe this, then you too can become an unwavering pastor” (14). Oh to be more of this kind of a pastor, an unwavering unmovable pastor “always abounding in the work of the Lord” (1 Cor. 15:58).
During the summer of 2020, however, I experienced a struggle we could classify as something more than a mere waver but something less than a complete breakdown. I think many people and pastors did, but mine had less to do with Covid itself and more to do with all that had happened in our church in the previous years. I’ve written about that elsewhere, so I’ll leave aside those details. But I will say that I can relate to the way Dodson describes the experience of wanting to quit even though you know God hasn’t called you away. He just felt, as I had felt, that “pain was pushing [him] out the door” (129). Indeed, Paul can relate to this, and so can most pastors who’ve done the job for more than a decade. To paraphrase the author of Ecclesiastes, nothing is new under the sun or inside a church.
The Unwavering Pastor has a short introduction and eight chapters that explore what this understanding of unwavering might mean for different areas of ministry. For example, what might it look like for an unwavering pastor to love those outside the church in an age of cynicism about Jesus and the church (Chapter 2: “Questioning Christianity”), and what might it look like for an unwavering pastor to preach God’s Word not only to others but his own heart (Chapter 6: “Preach the Word”). I read the book slowly over two weeks, reading a section or two each morning during my devotions.
Besides the biblical engagement and personal stories, Dodson sprinkles throughout the book lessons he’s learned along the way. After sharing that he’s been ambushed in too many meetings, he advises, “If a critical person asks for a meeting, don’t be afraid to ask them what they want to meet about” (76). Besides mitigating anxiety, knowing the nature of the meeting can guide your prayers in the meantime and help you know if you should bring someone along with you.
I agree with the comments Dane Ortlund, author of Gentle and Lowly, makes in the foreword: “We don’t need to be told what bizarre and perplexing times we live in. We know that. We need to be given guidance for how to negotiate these times as pastors” (9). Dr. Ortlund goes on to say the greatest threat to pastors and churches right now is not pastors formally resigning from their posts. Rather, he says, “the greatest challenge is more subtle. It is to continue collecting a paycheck from the church while shifting our hearts into neutral. It is to carry forward the ministry at the level of activity while quitting ministry in terms of our hearts and longings” (10). Or to put it the way a friend of mine puts it: the danger is to quit without actually quitting. He’s not wrong.
I work part-time for Gospel-Centered Discipleship, a Christian website and publishing company. The company takes its namesake from another book by Dodson, a book recently re-released by Crossway as an updated ten-year anniversary edition. So, you could say, I should promote his book since, after all, Jonathan K. Dodson is my boss’s boss.
But I’m confident I would like The Unwavering Pastor even if I had no context for Dodson or Gospel-Centered Discipleship. In fact, being closer to the organization might have given me a better window to appreciate the struggles he writes about.
I remember during the recent low point in Dodson’s ministry, the one he talks about so candidly throughout the book, and how I texted my boss at GCD a screenshot from Dodson’s Instagram feed and asked if he was going to be okay. From my perspective, it seemed like two things were true at once: Dodson was struggling under the weight of pastoral ministry, and simultaneously his church and elders had rallied to support him as best as they could. To use the word he uses in the book, even as Dodson’s heart had become uncoupled from his church, his church’s heart toward him grew more coupled. Having this context made reading The Unwavering Pastor more visceral. In an age where so many people will do whatever they need to do to sell books, it helped to know Jonathan hadn’t feigned pastoral fatigue just so that his book would come across as “more authentic.” When he says he was tired and hurt by the church, he really was tired and hurt.
I’ve liked all of Dodson’s other books too. I was blessed by Here in Spirit as he describes his openness to the dramatic work of the Spirit and yet also the biblical grounding. And I love the transparency and moral courage of Our Good Crisis, a book that explores the meaning of the beatitudes for our present day. As an aside, I typically find the genre of “book trailers” underwhelming, but the trailer for Our Good Crisis has one of the best book trailers I’ve ever watched (here), second only perhaps to my perennial favorite of Zack Eswine’s The Imperfect Pastor (here).
I’d recommend The Unwavering Pastor to any church leader, whether the waters around him feel calm, whether a storm sits on the horizon, or whether his boat already threatens to capsize. I’d also recommend this book for teams of elders to discuss. The book would even bless the Christian in the pew who wants to gain a better appreciation for the weight and joy of Christian ministry in our divisive times and how the Chief Shepherd who safeguards his church amid the storm neither slumbers nor sleeps.
* Photo by Maria Teneva on Unsplash
What Does “Vanity of Vanities” Mean? A Review of a New Book on Ecclesiastes
For as odd as some statements in the book of Ecclesiastes may seem at first, they are truths we need in our day.
The author of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes makes some pretty wild statements. He asks rhetorically, “What happens to the fool will happen to me also. Why then have I been so very wise?” implying wisdom benefits nothing.
In another place, he says, “Man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity.” Later in the book, he writes, “Be not overly righteous . . . . Be not overly wicked” (Eccles. 2:15; 3:19; 7:17–18). Wait—what?
When we consider the biblical story and the good news of God redeeming all of creation through the person of Jesus, perhaps the wildest statement of all could be the opening statement of the book: “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (Eccles. 1:2).
How could anything be vanity—or meaningless—if God is redeeming all things?
I don’t actually believe these statements from the book, when rightly understood in their context, are as wild as they seem at first blush. As there is a season for everything, so there is a context for everything—especially when interpreting passages from the Bible.
But what context helps us make sense of Ecclesiastes? How should a Christian benefit from a book that can seem so full of cynicism in one place (6:1–6) and hedonism in another (2:10)?
Back in April of this year, Russell Meek, a friend of mine, released a book to help Christians understand Ecclesiastes. Dr. Meek teaches Old Testament and specializes in Ecclesiastes. His new book is called Ecclesiastes and the Search for Meaning in an Upside-Down World.
The big questions about the meaning of life and the many other questions addressed by Ecclesiastes have never been theoretical for Meek. He writes in the preface of his struggles with substance abuse and later in the book about his troubled childhood and lousy relationship with his father. “I started using drugs when I was around twelve years old, just after grandmother died,” he writes on the opening page, adding, “and that way of facing life stayed with me for a long, long time.”
Later in life, while getting a master’s degree, a mentor helped Meek see Ecclesiastes in a new light. “I started to study Ecclesiastes because I thought I had found in it a kindred spirit who, like me, had thrown up his hands and given up on faith and life and, who had accepted the meaninglessness of these on planet Earth.” Instead, Meek found in the book a “path through life that doesn’t involve the bottom of a pill bottle.”
Meek’s book is a short book, less than one hundred pages. In the first chapter, Meek explores the overlap of words used in Ecclesiastes with other books in the Bible, especially the overlap with the book of Genesis. In the second chapter, Meek argues that the author of Ecclesiastes wants readers to understand the Hebrew word for vanity (hebel) in the context of the Genesis story of Cain and Abel. The word hebel, by the way, being the same word for the name Abel (Hebel in Hebrew). In the third and final chapter, he explores the ending of Ecclesiastes and the emphasis on fearing God and enjoying his gifts.
To be fair, I think Meek’s book is a peculiar, even odd, mashup of a powerful, personal memoir and a technical commentary. He writes about losing his father, the sins of racism, and substance abuse; he also writes about Hebrew words most of us don’t know and essays in theological journals we’ve never read. I told Russ I felt this way when I read an early copy of the book a year and a half ago. However, I don’t really mind the genre blend. In fact, I like it. I was helped by both aspects of the book—his personal testimony and the technical commentary—to better understand what God has for his people in the book of Ecclesiastes. In some ways, Meek’s book has parity with the mashup of Ecclesiastes itself: personal reflections interspersed with philosophical reflections.
Our church is considering preaching through Ecclesiastes next year during Lent. Rereading Meek’s book this summer certainly got me more excited (not less) to preach Ecclesiastes to our people and apply God’s wisdom to our lives. Ecclesiastes exalts the words “given by one Shepherd,” meaning the words given by God, and warns readers to “beware of anything beyond these” (12:12–13). While we should prioritize God’s Word above all other words, I believe Russ’s book about Ecclesiastes will increase your desire to do just that, to “fear God and keep his commandments, for,” as Ecclesiastes concludes, “this is the whole duty of man” (12:13).
* Photo by Daoudi Aissa on Unsplash
Every Believer’s Biography Is Every Believer’s Biography
My foreword to a new 30-day devotional by Will Dobbie published by Christian Focus.
A few years ago I started to get to know Will Dobbie. At the time, he pastored a church plant in a suburb of London. He has since moved with his family to the US to work with another church plant.
Will is a guy who can do a lot of different things: lead an army into battle, pastor a church, and play classical piano music. He can also write. That’s actually part of what connected us in the first place—his writing and a common friendship with another pastor.
A few days ago, Christian Focus published Will’s first book, From Everlasting to Everlasting: Every Believer’s Biography. The book is a 30-day devotional exploring God’s plan of salvation for every believer. I thought Will had a winning book idea when he first told me about the concept a few years ago. And he did.
Will was kind to ask me to write the foreword for the book. I’m sharing it below. We’d love for you to buy his book on Amazon.
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We lost my younger brother at the beach—just a toddler and learning to walk, he snuck away in a sea of people. Although I was his older brother, I was still too young to be either culpable for losing him or much help in finding him. Our family had just moved to England, where we would spend the next three years, and my mother wanted to take her sons on an outing to make memories adventuring in a new country. A couple of hours later, we found him holding the hand of an elderly woman as she walked up and down the beach looking for what she rightly assumed would be a frantic mother. That day my mother certainly made memories.
A similar incident happened to my family one summer at a water park, except this time I was the parent with the lost child—a father old enough to be more than culpable, yet still struggling to be any help in finding my daughter. She was only lost a dozen minutes or so, but it felt much longer. We found her near the lazy river.
I suspect most parents have a similar version of the same story, whether the child wandered off at a beach or amusement park, a sporting event or concert. Thankfully, almost all lost-child stories have happy endings that, in hindsight, parents can laugh about with their grown-up children.
As I read the Bible, I learn that not only does God save His people from their sins, but He also intends for Christians to understand their salvation: to understand that they were lost but now are found. Our practiced belief in God’s eternal plan to save us, to make us more like Him, and to one day make every wrong right, provides so much of a Christian’s peace and joy in a world full of angst. This is not to say that when we are confused about aspects of our salvation we are necessarily any less saved, but it is to say that when we lack understanding of the riches of God’s redemption, we will lack joy and, probably also, obedience.
This is why I was excited when Will first told me about his idea for a book that would trace the story of a believer’s redemption from beginning to end. Now that Will has finished the book, I’m only more excited. The Christian world needs devotional material with both warm-hearted prose and theologically rich truth, not simply one or the other. Will’s book From Everlasting to Everlasting has both.
As a pastor of a local church, I have another reason to long for others to read this book. In our day so many issues conspire to divide local churches that Christians need constant reminders of the one story that binds us irrevocably together. Just as a group of parents could share a meal together and bond as they tell each other stories of the common experience of losing and finding a child—the panic, the relief, the thanksgiving—so also I believe a church will bond together when we understand that every believer’s biography is indeed every believer’s biography.
In other words, I can, and should, preach to my church about the need for Christians to pursue the unity we already have in Christ, but my pleas for unity will accomplish little if, deep down, those in my church believe that which makes us different carries more weight than that which makes us the same. Biblically speaking, the opposite is true of Christians: the deep story of our sin and salvation, of Christ’s cross and consummation, carries more weight than our lesser identities in gender, ethnicity, or any social status. “How can I relate to her?” I might be tempted to think. “We have nothing in common.” Except that when we have Christ in common, we have everything in common. As Paul writes in Galatians, “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:27–28). From Everlasting to Everlasting reminds us that Christians share common, gospel bedrock, a unity deeper and sturdier than mere affinities.
Your tour guide on this panorama of God’s salvation knows all this too. And he’s found a way to share it with you in thirty daily excursions through the vistas of our redemption. Some of the concepts Will writes about may be new to you, while you may have heard others many times before. Regardless, my prayer for you is that God would use these words to pour fresh peace and joy into your life—that you would know in your inmost being, as Paul writes in Ephesians, “what is the breadth and length and height and depth . . . [of] the love of Christ” (Eph. 3:18–19). I pray that this knowledge that we once were lost but now are found would bind us together, that we would unite over the common experience of the panic and the relief and the thanksgiving that comes when God washes our sins as white as snow.
Benjamin Vrbicek
Community Evangelical Free Church
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
* Photo by Xavier Mouton Photographie on Unsplash
Finding Jesus at the Nub End of Jared C. Wilson’s Fraying Rope
I’m not gonna lie; I love this theme in Wilson’s writing.
The guys at the church often tease me about being a fanboy of Jared C. Wilson’s writing. Last year they even took a picture from Wilson’s Instagram page and photoshopped my head into the picture as though I were just hangin’ with my bud. You might even say my relationship with Jared is as his relationship is to actor Mark Ruffalo. I just let the office guys tease me. They know I’m right.
I could mention a few reasons why I appreciate Wilson’s writing. I’ve done that in other blog posts—hence my reputation. This afternoon, I’ll just share one reason. Wilson seems to understand what it means for faith to wear thin and to know what it means to need Jesus, not theoretically but experientially. To say it another way, Wilson knows a Christian’s salvation rests in the strength of Jesus, not in the strength of one’s faith in Jesus. Knowing this difference matters a lot, especially as you suffer. And knowing the difference matters as you commend Jesus to others.
Wilson writes in his book The Gospel According to Satan, “When you get to the end of your rope, there is Jesus” (84). In his writing he doubles back over and over again to this theme of finding hope in God when all around our soul gives way. His words remind me of Paul’s comments about finding hope in God when Paul wondered if he would even live or perhaps if he even wanted to live. “For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia,” Paul writes. “For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death.” This is the nub end of Paul’s rope, and he attributes trials of such severity to God’s desire that his children find their strength in him, not in their own ability. “But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead” (2 Cor. 1:8–9).
“Until God is your only hope,” Wilson writes in another book, “God will not be your only hope. Utter brokenness is key to gospel wakefulness, because we will not be all-satisfied in Christ until Christ is all we have” (Gospel Wakefulness, 127). This quote comes from a transparent section where Wilson describes a terrible season in life and marriage. I’ll say more about that season in a moment. Wilson continues, “I was groaning in prayer in our guest room, flat on my face, wetting the carpet with tears the moment the Spirit whispered the gospel into my ear. That moment changed everything for me.”
Referencing this same, depression-filled season in another book, he writes, “It’s my conviction that God will not become your only hope until he becomes your only hope” (The Prodigal Church, 212). Wilson writes something similar in his earlier book Gospel Deeps, my personal favorite in the Wilson corpus: “I realized that God would become my only hope when he had become my only hope” (Gospel Deeps, 116). Then, with the proverbial twinkle in his eye, Wilson adds, “Let the reader understand.”
I do understand. And the longer I walk with Christ and serve in pastoral ministry, I’m coming to understand better. This is the Christian life—knowing the goodness and grace and sovereignty of God and coming to know it deeper. I’m reminded of the line in the last chapter of Lewis’s The Last Battle, when the faun named Tumnus says to Lucy, “The further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets. The inside is larger than the outside.”
“Christ will not become our only hope until Christ has become our only hope!”
Wilson repeats this theme in his latest book, Love Me Anyway: How God’s Perfect Love Fills Our Deepest Longing (Baker Books, 2021). After writing two books about gospel-centered ministry mainly for pastors and church leaders, Wilson returns to writing for a broader Christian audience. While maintaining his faithfulness to biblical, gospel truth, he also writes with an artful, maybe even playful, prose that so many seem to have appreciated in his book The Imperfect Disciple. Love Me Anyway explores the key phrases in the great chapter on love by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, as well as our cultural fascination with love songs.
“It is at the end of your rope that we find Christ is more than enough.” Good writing only infrequently uses exclamation points, reserving them for only those sentences truly deserving. Wilson’s next sentence has one. “And I have come to believe that for a great many of us—if not all of us—Christ will not become our only hope until Christ has become our only hope!” (Love Me Anyway, 129). Later in the book Wilson adds, “I had come to the end of my rope and found there the sufficiency of Christ” (164).
But more than using similar phraseology as in his other books to repeat the theme of finding the strength of Jesus when faith wears thin, in Love Me Anyway Wilson gives his most extended recounting of the season in life which precipitated his wakefulness to the glory of the grace of Jesus Christ. The season brought him to a place of wakefulness not merely to gospel propositions about Jesus but a gospel encounter with Jesus.
Many years ago, as he lived for a long and lonely season in the spare bedroom of his house because his marriage was so poor that his wife didn’t want him in their bedroom, God showed up and began to warm cold hearts. You’ll have to get the book to read it. The details of the story are similar to what he wrote near the end of The Prodigal God, but in Love Me Anyway the story comes with more transparency. Wilson expected the marriage would dissolve, though he prayed it wouldn’t. And with his face wetting the carpet many nights he prayed God could change him.
God did. Because God can. And does. Our God loves to make his power perfect in our weakness and be there for his children when our hands slip from the nub end of our rope.
* Photo by Rui Silvestre on Unsplash
12 Books You Should Read and 12 Sentences Why
My attempt to help jumpstart your year of reading.
A not-so-complementing trope associated with bloggers and self-proclaimed influencers goes like this: “A lot of people have been asking me about ‘such and such.’”
The question typically serves as the prelude to a humblebrag. A lot of people have been asking whether I consider myself more of a pastor or a male model. This sort of baloney makes readers wonder whether a single person has ever asked said influencer such a question.
There is one question, however, I want to bring up that I’ve been legitimately asked. I wouldn’t say a lot of people have asked, though. In fact, only one person has asked the question. It’s the same person who asked me the exact same question last year, a question that I believe came to me on at a “blog comment” from my fellow-Pennsylvania-pastor-friend Josh. Until now, I pretty much ignored Josh’s question, which I can explain why after I tell you what the question is. (But first: Sorry for doing that, Josh!)
In the first blog post of each year, I share the list of books I read the previous year, always including in the post a few quirky tidbits about my year of reading. Because the list is typically so long, and because, to paraphrase Twitter, “a book read doesn’t equal an endorsement,” it’s hard for those who skim my annual blog post to have any helpful takeaway other than Benjamin is probably as quirky and eclectic of a reader as the lists seem to indicate. And that’s not much of a takeaway.
This is why, I think, Josh has asked me each of the last two years to create a much reduced list of books that only includes the books I suggest people read and perhaps why I make each suggestion.
I didn’t ignore the question because I thought it was a dumb question. I just never answered because of the work involved.
But this week I’m going to give it a try. Below are the twelve books that I would encourage readers to read, a list pared down from the list of all the books I’ve read over the last four or five years, a list that includes several hundred books.
Before sharing the list, I’ll mention that I didn’t include the Bible on the list below. But I will say that the Bible is the only book I read every year and certainly the only book I try to open nearly every day. I think I’m on my twentieth time through the book cover to cover. Therefore, for me to not put the Bible on the list is not at all meant to be a disrespect to the Bible but rather a way to respect the Bible by saying it is beyond belonging to a list of “book suggestions.”
I’m sure I’m missing a few books worthy of reading. If you think so, let me know in the comments below what those books are and why, in your opinion, they are must-reads.
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12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You by Tony Reinke
This book is a few years old, so it’s probably “15 ways” now.
The Storm-Tossed Family: How the Cross Reshapes the Home by Russell Moore
Our hearts and homes are far more broken than we might expect, and yet the grace of God is also far more lavish than we might expect.
Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy: Discovering the Grace of Lament by Mark Vroegop
We don’t know how to lament well, and that is neither to our credit nor joy.
Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers by Dane C. Ortlund
While Pharaoh says, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you more burdens,” Jesus says, “I will give you rest . . . . for I am gentle and lowly in heart.”
Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace by Jared C. Wilson
Look, I’m contractually obligated to pick at least one Jared Wilson book because I love his books so much—so I’m picking this one because it’s new-ish and it also includes a helpful story-like-fable that wraps all the gospely-warmth and wisdom into a compelling and instructive whole. (As an aside, my favorite Wilson books are still Gospel Deeps and The Pastor’s Justification, although his newest book, Love Me Anyway, is great too.)
The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus by Zack Eswine
It’s the only ministry book I re-read every other year or so, which I do because I’m prone to wander, prone to leave the kind of pastoral ministry that God loves, and this book calls me back again and again.
Struck: One Christian’s Reflections on Encountering Death by Russ Ramsey
What an honest story of pain and loss and grappling with God and coming out the other side in hope and joy.
The Art of Rest by Adam Mabry
We ain’t very good at rest, and this book explains why that’s a problem and what we must do about it.
The Song of Solomon: An Invitation to Intimacy by Douglas Sean O’Donnell
So, this is a preaching commentary, but as I’ve studied and taught Song of Solomon several times, I found this whole book so wonderfully done that it should belong on this list because of its great combo of exegetical insights and devotional warmth.
The Ten Commandments of Progressive Christianity by Michael J. Kruger
We need to see progressive Christianity for what it is, or more accurately, for what it is not—and this very short book will help you do so.
When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community from Emotional and Spiritual Abuse by Chuck DeGroat
The book opens with an extended quote from Thomas Merton, a Catholic monk who lived during the middle of the twentieth century who said that a Christian consumed with himself “is capable of destroying religion and making the name of God odious to men,” to which I say, “Indeed, Merton, indeed.”
All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Read this fictional story from WWII for the reminder that books are more than a succession of words placed one after the other on pages placed one after another; instead, books are spectacles to see reality that cannot be seen were it not so beautifully described.
Honorable Mentions:
Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making by Andrew Peterson
The Writer’s Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose by Helen Sword
Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi
On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser
A Few More (Sort of) Honorable Mentions:
Shepherd & Sheep: Essays on Loving & Leading in a Local Church by Benjamin Vrbicek
Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World by Benjamin Vrbicek
Don’t Just Send a Resume: How to Find the Right Job in a Local Church by Benjamin Vrbicek
Once for all Delivered: A Reformed, Amillennial Ordination Paper for the Evangelical Free Church of America by Benjamin Vrbicek
Struggle Against Porn: 29 Diagnostic Tests for Your Head and Heart by Benjamin Vrbicek
Can you blame me for trying?!
* Photo by Radu Marcusu on Unsplash