ENOUGH ABOUT ME by Jen Oshman (Fan and Flame Book Reviews)
A great book to help us embrace the lasting joy found in Jesus.
Jen Oshman, Enough about Me: Finding Lasting Joy in the Age of Self. Wheaton: Crossway, 2020. 176 pages.
Although strange at first, I grew to love it—the whole summer I rarely looked in a mirror.
During college I worked at a Christian sports camp in southern Missouri, and mirrors were not hung around campus except for the one I stood before as I brushed my teeth at the beginning and end of the day. I wouldn’t have realized mirrors are everywhere about our homes and schools and businesses, but you notice the contrast right away when mirrors go missing. You notice how mirrors invite occasional glances to check and recheck your appearance. And I admit all this as a dude, even one who’s wardrobe for a hundred days that summer consisted of an unbroken recycling of five gym shorts and t-shirts. The absence of mirrors, in a small but significant way, gave camp counselors the gift of self-forgetfulness.
Jen Oshman recently published Enough about Me: Finding Lasting Joy in the Age of Self with Crossway. The book doesn’t talk about mirrors and sports camps in southern Missouri, but the book does aim to set us free from our obsession with us, an obsession that steals our deepest joy rather than cultivating it. Jen and her husband Mark served as missionaries in Japan and the Czech Republic and now serve as church planters in Colorado. Oshman is the mother of four daughters, a podcaster, and a regular blogger on her own website, a guest contributor to places like The Gospel Coalition, and a staff-writer for Gospel-Centered Discipleship.
The audience for Enough about Me is primarily women, likely those in their 20s–40s who would show up to a women’s Bible study at a church. But the book intentionally aims at accessibility for those new to the faith. For example, Oshman writes near the middle of the book, “If you’ve ever been to church, you’ve likely heard the word gospel” (p. 69), which she then goes on to explain. New and non-Christians will feel at ease with statements like this and the stories of women grappling with what it might mean to follow Jesus and find lasting joy. Throughout the book, she introduces readers to many of evangelicalism’s favorite authors from the past and present, people such as Augustine, C.S. Lewis, Timothy Keller, Jared C. Wilson, Gloria Furman, and Jen Wilkin.
Oshman opens the book with the story of her tears as a young college student. Reaching goals hadn’t provided the comfort and joy she had expected they would. On the floor of her college dorm, she grabbed the Bible she brought to college but had never opened. “Although I believed in God,” she writes, “I didn’t know his word. That night, however, I grabbed it like a lifeline, reaching out for something more, something to help me catch my breath, find peace, and heal me” (pp. 20–21).
I found the final chapter particularly compelling, where she argues that a sub-Christian life is a life with a “safe, small god,” and “weak, meager faith” leading us to a “doable, manageable calling.” In short, a small god who beckons small faith who demands small obedience. The chapter made me think of a pointed question I recently heard posed by author and pastor Ray Ortlund. Ortlund asked something like whether Jesus was the glorious miracle worker that he says he is or if he is more of a “chaplain to our status quo”? Ouch. His question popped me in the nose before I had time to put up my guard.
But when we ordain Jesus as the Chaplain of Our Status Quo—or to use the words Oshman uses of a small god calling us to small obedience—our lives shrink and shrivel; they enfold inward until they collapse. The biblical story of redemption, however, tells a different narrative, one that expands our life rather than snuffing it out (p. 164).
Oshman closes the book by returning to where she opened, the story of her on a dormitory floor finding joy in God’s Word and the big God of the Bible calling her to big faith and big obedience. Oshman writes, “God, in his mercy and power, lifted my eyes from myself to him. It was in beholding him, that joy came” (p. 164).
I loved the book so much because, as Oshman tells her story of awakening, she also tells mine. And although the details may be different, if Christ has captured your heart, she’s telling your story too. Jen Wilkin writes in the foreword: “What is more fulfilling than a life spent chasing self-actualization? A life spent giving glory to the God who transcends” (p. 12). Enough about Me helps us embrace this paradoxical truth, the truth that we find life when we lay down our own to follow Jesus.
* Photo by Laura Lefurgey-Smith on Unsplash
WHO IS JESUS by Greg Gilbert (FAN AND FLAME Book Reviews)
A book review of WHO IS JESUS? by Greg Gilbert, a helpful book for consideration of the most important question you’ll ever consider.
Greg Gilbert. Who is Jesus? (9Marks). Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2015. 144 pp. $12.99.
Life is full of questions. Many of them, however, don’t really matter.
You want fries with that? Are we there yet?
But some questions do matter.
Honey, did you remember to get the kids from school? Any idea why I pulled you over today? Will you marry me?
In my own life, another question has been, and continues to be, very important.
Who is Jesus?
Greg Gilbert—a pastor in Louisville, Kentucky—agrees; that’s why he wrote a book with that title. In fact, Gilbert states that it is “the most important question you’ll ever consider” (23).
For many, however, this question seems, at best, irrelevant. For many, the thinking goes like this: “I’m sure Jesus was a great moral teacher and he helped people find their way, but he lived so long ago—what difference could Jesus possibly make to me?”
Rather than dismissing these sentiments altogether, Christians can certainly agree that Jesus’s fame is in stark contrast to many aspects of his life that ought to have made him historically obscure. Gilbert writes,
After all, we’re talking about a man who was born in the first century into an obscure Jewish carpenter’s family. He never held any political office, never ruled any nation, never commanded any armies. He never even met a Roman emperor. Instead, for three-and-a-half years this man Jesus simply taught people about ethics and spirituality, he read and explained the Jewish Scriptures to Jewish people… (15)
Christians and non-Christians alike can look at details such as these and wonder why anyone would even speak about Jesus today, let alone worship him.
But it’s interesting that Jesus didn’t think the question of his identity was irrelevant; he believed it mattered a great deal what others thought of him. In fact, in one of the gospel accounts, Jesus asked his followers this very question: “Who do you say that I am?” (Matthew 16:15). Jesus cared a great deal about what others thought about him because he believed great things were at stake for others in how they related to him. Jesus even believed an individual’s eternal destiny was contingent upon how he or she related to him (John 14:6).
But if when you hear this, you are inclined to dismiss it as “hype”—the over-inflated rhetoric so common in religious circles—then Gilbert’s book is for you. It’s not written primarily for those already convinced but for those with questions. This is obvious in several ways.
For starters, consider the way readers are addressed. Near the beginning, Gilbert writes, “Think about it: You probably have at least one or two acquaintances who would say that they are Christians” (16). The assumption, obviously, is that Gilberts understands that many of his readers will not already be deeply committed Christians involved in a local church where they would certainly have more than “one or two [Christian] acquaintances.”
Also, throughout the book Gilbert preemptively raises the kinds of questions that an interested skeptic might have. For example, questions about the Bible. Gilbert writes,
Now wait a second before you close this book! I know some people recoil when the Bible is mentioned because they think of it as “the Christians’ book,” and therefore they think it’s biased and useless for getting accurate information… (19)
Right after this quote, he goes on to make a superb defense for the relevance and reliability of the Bible, and he does so without stuffing the prose with confusing, technical terms. Never does he refer to the “perspicuity” of Scripture, which is an unclear word that actually means clarity. Nor in the book will you read the phrase “hypostatic union,” though the truth that Jesus was “fully God and fully human,” is in there. In other words, the book is accessible—not simplistic or childish, but accessible.
An additional strength of the book for non-Christians is that what the book does teach, it teaches in narrative. By this I mean that Gilbert unfolds the answer to “Who is Jesus?” in the same way the New Testament does—one story at a time. The effect is that we, the readers, are given the same vantage point as Jesus’s early followers. Gilbert writes,
We’re not going to work page by page through any one of the New Testament documents. Instead, we’re going to use all those sources to try to get to know Jesus in the same way that one who was following him might have experienced him—first as an extraordinary man who did wholly unexpected things, but then with the quickly dawning realization that “extraordinary” doesn’t even being to describe him… He was more than a teacher, more than a prophet, more than a revolutionary, even more than a king. As one of [Jesus’s followers] put it to him one night, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” (21-22)
There are other ways this book will help non-Christians consider who Jesus is—such as its length (only 144 pages) and its balance between humor and urgency—but what if you are already a Christian? What’s in it for us?
If you are a Christian reading this review, which I suspect most are, you shouldn’t find the book boring. As a pastor, I didn’t. I even learned a few new things, but perhaps more importantly, I was re-confronted with the many things we tend to forget about Jesus—but shouldn’t. And if you’d like to go deeper with the book, there is a helpful study guide available as well. I could see great benefit in giving Who is Jesus? to a non-Christian friend with the hope of meeting for several weeks to discuss “the most important question [they’ll] ever consider” (23).
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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF SEX? by Denny Burk (FAN AND FLAME Book Reviews)
Lots of helpful things in WHAT IS THE MEANING OF SEX? Here are seven of them.
What is the Meaning of Sex? by Denny Burk (Crossway, 2013, 272 pages)
What is the Meaning of Sex? does many things well, but most especially is the way it assesses each ‘sub-topic' in light of the ultimate meaning of sex, namely, the glory of God.
Hence, the symmetry of the eight chapter titles: Glorify God with Your _______ 1) …Body, 2), …Hermeneutic, 3) …Marriage, 4) …Conjugal Union, 5) …Family Planning, 6), …Gender, 7) …Sexuality, and 8) …Singleness.
Throughout, I found Burk a reliable guide.
Here are 7 significant takeaways (for me):
- The distinction between subordinate purposes and ultimate. Burk notes that some who discuss the purposes of sex (i.e., procreation, pleasure, etc.) stop short of identifying its ultimate purpose—like someone who states that a car is for ‘sitting in’ without drawing attention to its ultimate purpose, namely, transportation (Burk’s metaphor, 23-24).
- Jesus and Paul are NOT in a hermeneutical ‘cage match’—the Bible’s “red letters” vs. “black letters.” You’ll have to read the chapter; it’s good stuff.
- The book is not only a polemic against homosexual practice. This is in there, but the treatment doesn’t overwhelm the whole. (If there was a minor place for improvement, because Chapter 7 is so focused on homosexuality, I might encourage a title more specific than “Glorify God with your Sexuality.” The content is great, but perhaps it needs a narrower heading.)
- The discussion of the Pill and its potentially abortifacient qualities (148-151). This conversation is a staple of my pre-marital counseling. I appreciated the refresher.
- Each chapter has a great summary at the end—thoroughly useful for teaching and discussion purposes.
- Detailed scholarship without missing the forest.
- The whole of the book, in all its varied discussions, coheres.
A Key Passage
When it comes to ultimate meaning, we do not find answers in causes but in purposes. If you want to understand a hammer, it is not enough to know its cause (i.e., where the hammer came from, the factory in which it was manufactured, who designed it, etc.). To understand a hammer, I have to know for what purpose it was created. A hammer’s created purpose is to drive nails… It is the hammer’s purpose that determines the ultimate meaning, not the cause. Similarly, I might know everything there is to know about theories of human origins, about human reproduction, and about the biological genetic factors that determine human sexuality. But if I do not understand the purpose for which human sexuality was made, then I do not understand it. Nor am I prepared to give a proper ethical evaluation of its use. (Burk, What is the Meaning of Sex?, 22-23; emphasis original)
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