The Blessings of Countless Guides in Christ: Some Preachers that the Preachers at Our Church Find Helpful

This Sunday one of our pastors preached from 1 Corinthians 4, a passage where Paul speaks of being a father to the Corinthian church. Paul contrasts his role as their spiritual father with what he calls countless guides in Christ. In the context of the letter, to have countless guides wasn’t necessarily a blessing because their guides didn’t often sing the gospel in harmony. Additionally, the net effect of countless guides and lack of spiritual fathers made the kingdom of God appear to be more about talk than the power of a changed life. Hence, Paul had the necessary role as their spiritual father, a father who knew the congregation and the congregation who knew him. Perhaps we could think of this distinction as the difference in a child’s maturation between having countless babysitters and having loving, involved parents.

But this passage got me thinking. While countless guides might be a hindrance to growth, they can also be a blessing. We can honor God for the countless guides we have access to in our day, that is, if we hold the guides in the right light. I’m so thankful to God that I could never listen to all the great sermons or read all the great books on a given passage. Even when I preach something less familiar to our church, from what I sometimes call the crispy pages of the Bible, as we did all summer long with the book of Jeremiah, I still can find great resources to help me and, by extension, our congregation.

I’ll say it another way. In Ephesians 4, Paul writes that God has given his church many gifts, including the gift of teachers. If God gives this gift of teachers, then I believe he intends for us to be learners—and those who teach regularly should be the best learners!

In my own preaching, after I’ve studied the passage, having explored my own questions and made my own preliminary observations, I often turn to commentaries for further study. After those commentaries, I often listen to sermons preached from the passage. In a week when I’m preparing to preach on Sunday, as I exercise or drive across town, I might listen to two sermons or I might listen to six. It all depends on how much time I have, how confused I might be about the passage, and how many sermons I can even find. While I’m listening to the sermons, I’ll take notes on my iPhone. And I confess: I almost always listen with the speed at 2x.

I’ll also mention that I’m dogmatic about not doing any peeking at other sermons until I’ve done my own work. The same goes for commentaries. I want to be able to argue in my mind with the preacher (or author) from an informed place rather than being passively carried along. In that Sunday school cliché, I want to be a good Berean.

Below I’m sharing a list of preachers that the preachers at our church find helpful. The list is certainly not my attempt to catalog the best preachers. I put them in alphabetical order by first name just to avoid the connotation of rank. I wouldn’t even begin to know how to assess and narrow a “best of” list. For starters, I doubt I’ll ever have a broad enough awareness for such a task. I wish I knew more preachers than I do, and I love it when I can add someone new to this list.

But I will share the criteria I did use to create the list. I prioritized three traits: (1) faithful local church ministry over a long time, as opposed to mainly conference speaking, (2) a tendency toward expository sermons in series through books of the Bible, which means lots of passages get covered, and (3) an accessible website that can be searched by passages.

For some of the pastors and churches I listed below, I know they have several gifted pastors on staff, and I might have only listed in the headings the one(s) I know best. And there are other preachers who I often check to see if they have preached my passage, but sometimes their websites are not as easy to navigate. Examples include the guys at Immanuel Nashville, such as Ray Ortlund, TJ Tims, and Sam Allberry. I’ll also look for sermons from Crawford Loritts, Paul Washer, Christopher Ash, Sean Michael Lucas, Kent Hughes, Charlie Dates, and others.

There are a few pastors listed below that I feel personally connected to, but perhaps they have either less time in ministry (so they’ve preached fewer passages) or their websites aren’t as accessible. I’ll add my friends below anyway and mark them with an asterisk. And if you’re reading this and you are one of my friends and your name is not on the list, I am seriously not trying to slight you. I could have listed more of my regular preaching friends at nearby churches in our denomination, guys like Trent, Josh, Kirk, and Matt. But I have too many ministry friends to list you all. Perhaps you could say I have countless guides, and I’m thankful to God for that.

Whether you’re a preacher like me or if you just listen to sermons and biblical podcasts for edification, I think it’s helpful to bring close the words from Matt Chandler that the Village Church often puts at the start of their content. Their website is terribly difficult to search by passages, and that’s frustrating. But I love that they remind listeners that the teaching they are about to receive is intended to be supplemental and not replace regular involvement in a good local church.

If you have pastors that you enjoy listening to and they meet the three requirements above, I’d love to expand my personal list and the one we keep for the teaching pastors at our church. Your suggestions certainly don’t have to be famous pastors. I’m always happy to listen to a faithful and fruitful pastor over a famous pastor.  

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Alistair Begg
Parkside Church, Chagrin Falls, OH
https://www.truthforlife.org/

Andrew Wilson
King’s Church, London, UK
https://kingschurchlondon.org/talks/

Ben Bechtel and Greg Kabakjian *
Midtown Community Church, Harrisburg, PA
https://mcchbg.org/sermons 

Bob Thune
Coram Deo Church in Omaha, NE
https://cdomaha.com/sermon-archive

Chase Replogle
Bent Oak Church, Springfield, MO
https://bentoakchurch.org/sermons/

Collin Smith
The Orchard Church, Chicago, IL
https://openthebible.org/browse-sermons/#scripture

Dane Ortlund
Naperville Presbyterian Church, Chicago, IL
https://www.npchurch.org/sermons 

Dave Cover, Keith Simon, Shay Roush, and others
The Crossing Church, Columbia, MO
https://thecrossingchurch.com/Resources 

Garrett Kell
Del Ray Baptist, Alexandria, VA
https://delraybaptist.org/resources/sermons/

Greg Lavine and John Beeson *
New Life Bible Fellowship, Tucson, AZ
https://newlifetucson.com/sermons/

H.B. Charles
Shiloh Metropolitan Baptist Church, Jacksonville, FL
https://hbcharlesjr.com/resource-library/scripture-index/?_resource_types=sermon-outlines

Jason Abbott *
Central Church, Jefferson City, MO
https://www.ccjcmo.org/sermons

Jeremy Treat
Reality Church, Los Angeles, CA
https://realityla.com/category/resources/sermons/?type=scripture

John Biegel *
Cornerstone, Annandale, VA
https://cornerstoneefree.org/sermons

John Piper, et. all
Desiring God, Minneapolis, MN (many sermons from Bethlehem Baptist Church)
https://www.desiringgod.org/scripture/with-messages

Jonathan Parnell, Marshall Segal, and others
The Cities Church, St. Paul, MN
https://www.citieschurch.com/sermons  

Josh Moody
College Church, Wheaton, IL
https://college-church.org/grow/resources/sermon-archive/

Kevin DeYoung
Christ Covenant, Matthews, NC
https://christcovenant.org/sermons/
(See also DeYoung’s former church, University Reformed Church or his personal website) http://www.universityreformedchurch.org/teaching/sermons.html
https://clearlyreformed.org/resources/ 

Luke Simmons
Ironwood Church, Mesa, AZ
https://www.ironwoodchurch.org/sermons

Mark Dever and others
Capitol Hill Baptist Church, Washington DC
http://www.capitolhillbaptist.org/resources/sermons/

Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Westminster Chapel, London, UK (he passed away many years ago, so the recordings are old)
https://www.mljtrust.org/sermons/

Matt Chandler and others
The Village Church, Dallas, TX
http://www.thevillagechurch.net/resources/sermons/

Matt Looloian *
Liberti Church, Camp Hill, PA
https://www.libertiharrisburg.org/sermons 

Michael Lawrence
Hinson Baptist Church, Portland, OR
https://www.hinsonchurch.org/sermonindex 

Mike Bullmore
Crossway Community Church, Bristol, WI
https://cwc.church/sermon-archive

Timothy Keller
Redeemer Church, New York, NY
https://gospelinlife.com/

Precept Austin
A collection of all sorts of sermons and commentaries organized by passage
https://www.preceptaustin.org/

Shad Baker *
Carlisle Evangelical Free Church, Carlisle, PA
https://cefc.church/sunday-messages

The Gospel Coalition
A sermon bank of tons of sermons from various preachers
http://resources.thegospelcoalition.org/

Zack Eswine
Riverside, Webster Groves, MO
https://www.riversidestl.org/sermons

* Photo by Kamil Szumotalski on Unsplash

A Spectacular Burst of Light without Antecedent: A Review of Marilynne Robinson’s READING GENESIS

Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024), 344 pages.

I’m conflicted about Marilynne Robinson’s writing.

When I read her essays, I wonder if I can’t understand them because she is so much smarter than me and I lack the minimum intelligence necessary to learn from her, let alone critique her. When I read Robinson, I sometimes feel like Michael Scott from The Office, needing her to stop with the eloquence and “talk to me like I am five.”

Other times I wonder if the problem is not with me. Perhaps Robinson is actually not as good of a writer as everyone says she is because her essays contain too many contorted paragraphs. Sometimes her prose appears to swat at intellectually nuanced “flies” only she can see.

And when I read her material that has an explicit focus on God and the Bible, I become even more conflicted. Sometimes I wonder if her view of God is so much better than my own—and her view of the Bible is so much more sophisticated than my own—that perhaps I understand neither God nor the Bible as well as I should. Yet in other moments, I think of her in the same way as I think of many mainline Protestant pastors and professors, as those who see some truths about God and the Bible rightly and yet also see some really big truths really wrongly.

Having read her much anticipated and much acclaimed latest book, Reading Genesis, I now believe all of this can be true at once.

Hence my confliction.

Who Is Marilynne Robinson?

You might not have ever heard of Marilynne Robinson. But in literary writing circles, not just Christian literary writing circles, she’s a legend. I’ll put it this way. When one podcast interviewer had her on his show a few years ago, he said that lots of people want to interview former President Barack Obama, but, he noted, Barack Obama went out of his way to interview Robinson. She’s the sort of author who, even when writing non-fiction about the Bible, has her book reviewed by The New York Times and The New Yorker, as well as Christianity Today and The Gospel Coalition.

I was introduced to Robinson’s writing in seminary. A professor assigned us the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead, the first book in a series of four novels. I loved then and still love now so much about the central character John Ames, an aging pastor in rural Iowa, and how Ames cares for his flock, his young son, and his unlikely wife. I’ve read all the novels in the series at least twice. In fact, for a few years, one of my favorite things on YouTube was to listen to Marilynne Robinson read her own novels. You can hear this example when she reads an extended excerpt from the third novel in the series, Lila. Robinson reads so monotone that her words become engrossing, like a rock ballad that constantly feels on the verge of a big crescendo.

Buy on Amazon

Robinson also has had a key role in carrying forward the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a group connected to the University of Iowa’s master in fine arts program. (You can think of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as a kind of Harvard Law for writers.) I don’t imagine my life will ever allow the opportunity, but many times I’ve wanted to apply to the Writers’ Workshop and experience the legacy of writers such as Flannery O’Connor and teaching from instructors such as Robinson.

I cannot do a full review of her latest book Reading Genesis because, as I mentioned above, I might not be smart enough to write that review. I am, however, very familiar with Genesis itself, having preached slowly through different subsections of the book and having worked on an extended writing project that engages with the Abraham narrative. So here we go.

A Close Reading of Genesis

I can say positively that Reading Genesis offers a close reading of the first book in the Bible. Robinson trains her attention on the details using the tools of great literature: repetition, parallelism, inclusio, characterization, foreshadowing, intentional ambiguity, authorial intent, and so on.

I also appreciate how—in the best sense, not the worst—Reading Genesis stands on the author’s own authority. Even when Robinson mentions intricacies of cultures that paralleled Israel’s culture, stories from ancient Canaanite and Babylonian religious texts, her book has zero footnotes and almost zero referencing of “so-and-so” said “such-and-such.” This omission makes for a refreshing departure from traditional commentaries.

And her close reading often leads to profound insights. I’ll quote in full this extended paragraph from near the end of the book, a paragraph about the importance of Genesis for the rest of the Scriptures juxtaposed with the strikingly ordinary lives of the key families within Genesis.

Genesis can hardly be said to end. In it certain things are established—the nature of Creation and the spirit in which it was made; the nature of humankind; how and in what spirit the Creator God enters into relation with His human creatures. The whole great literature of Scripture, unfolding over centuries, will proceed on the terms established in this book. So Genesis is carried forward, in the law, in the psalms, in the prophets, itself a spectacular burst of light without antecedent but with a universe of consequences. This might seem like hyperbolic language to describe a text largely given over to the lives of people in many ways so ordinary that it is astonishing to find them in an ancient text. This realism by itself is a sort of miracle. These men and women saw the face of God, they heard His voice, and yet life for them came down to births and deaths, love, transgression, obedience, shame, and sorrow, everything done or borne in the course of the characterization of God, for Whom every one of us is a child of Adam, made in His image. God’s bond with Jacob, truly a man of sorrows, is a radical theological statement. (224)

I could go on quoting many instances of her helpful insights, the fruit of her close reading, but I’ll only note three final appreciations.

First, when you read between the lines about who she imagines to be her typical audience, you get the sense that she’s probably not only a bit odd to evangelical readers but also odd to liberal readers as well. “If you mapped Robinson’s novelistic reading onto contemporary scholarship of the Bible,” writes Francis Spufford in his New York Times review, “you’d find her in several camps at once.” Frequently when I expect her to endorse without qualification some stronghold of liberalism, such as skepticism toward supernatural elements within Genesis or the documentary hypothesis (which tries to discern supposed multiple authors of Genesis), she doesn’t. Instead of endorsing the skepticism of the supernatural or the documentary hypothesis, she critiques them, or at least nuances the views in a better direction. Indeed, part of the impetus for her in writing the book came from her own frustrations with these modern readings.

To give another example of this, Robinson concurs with modern, liberal understandings that the Genesis flood narrative is downstream and derivative from the creation and flood stories from other religious texts, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. At the point where the stories have the most similarity, however, she argues that Genesis intentionally subverts and betters the picture of God’s character than what is found in the other religious texts. “The Genesis narrative as a whole can be thought of as a counterstatement of this kind,” she writes, “retelling the Creation in terms that reject in essential points the ancient Near Eastern characterization of the divine, of humankind, and of Creation itself” (28).

Second, I appreciate that Robinson does a good job noting the faults of those in the Bible, especially the faults of the patriarchs, rather than casting them as heroes of the stories. “Readers can be shocked by the fallibility of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” she writes. “But the patriarchs are not offered as paragons.” These faults highlight the “breadth of God’s loyalty to all the descendants of Adam” (84).

Finally, I appreciate that all two-hundred and thirty pages have no chapter breaks, having only a gap in the prose every so often, signaled by a blank space or a few asterisks to mark the beginning of a new line of thought. I love it. Robinson uses this same structure in each novel of her four-part series. Rather than finding this breach of convention daunting, I find it aesthetically enjoyable.

A Confusing Reading of Genesis

I also find her reading of Genesis confusing. Sometimes Robinson feels confusing because she seems to simultaneously hold a high view of Scripture along with a view of Scripture so nuanced that I can’t quite understand her view.

I also find her confusing because some sentences get so contorted that I can’t figure out what she is affirming or denying. For example, consider this sentence from a section about the meaning of life. “If [life] is the essence of everything, a breath of the very Spirit of God, it is fit and right that, first, as the basis of all understanding, of all righteousness, life itself should be properly felt and valued” (47). You can try to read that sentence a few more times, and you might get closer to the meaning than I can, but I’m still puzzled. I think she’s saying something like, “If life from God is everywhere, we should respect life more.” But I don’t really know. And so go many such sentences, sometimes even full paragraphs—alas, even full pages. On page 64 there sits a single paragraph that begins on the previous page and extends to the next page. Woof, that’s a big paragraph. All this, again, leads to my confliction.

I’ll give another example, this time from the copy on the jacket cover of the book. I know authors themselves often do not write the promotional material on the jacket cover, but it accurately illustrates the kind of “almost-orthodox-view-but-maybe-not-at-all-orthodox-view” that appears throughout the book.

The cover states that Robinson intends to appreciate Genesis’s “greatness as literature, its rich articulation and exploration of themes that resonate through the whole of Scripture.” Great, I think to myself. I’m here for that. Genesis is not less than great literature, and I’d love to learn more about the many ways the themes at the beginning of the Bible ricochet right through until the end.

Then the promotional blurb continues, “Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis . . . is a powerful consideration of the profound meanings and promise of God’s enduring covenant with humanity.” I’m here for that too.  

But then notice the twist at the end of this final sentence. “This magisterial book radiates gratitude for the constancy and benevolence of God’s abiding faith in Creation.”

Wait, wait, wait—“God’s abiding faith in Creation”?

Reading Genesis well should indeed lead us, I believe, to gratitude. But does reading Genesis produce gratitude for “God’s abiding faith in Creation”? It does not. The dysfunctional family that left Eden clothed in animal skins soon sees one brother kill another brother. And on and on each member of the original family tree goes, sinning spectacularly right through to the end of the book. The only good reading of Genesis is the reading that sees God, in his long-suffering of his loving-kindness, as abiding with a humanity that merits no faith at all. A reading of Genesis that attempts to foreground God’s supposed abiding faith in humanity is not a good reading of Genesis, even when done so with beautiful prose.

Another example of this “almost orthodox” view is seen in a quote I used above. She wrote about how the faults of the patriarchs highlight the “breadth of God’s loyalty to all the descendants of Adam” (84). Later, in a beautiful section of the book on this same theme, she writes “of God’s loyalty to humankind through [all of humanity’s] disgrace and failure and even crime” (174). But the Scriptures do not teach God’s broad loyalty to all humanity and to every person born of Adam, so much as they teach God’s special loyalty and gentleness to the special line of chosen people, a chosen subset within all people. In other places, Robinson seems to know this distinction well. “Out of the inconceivable assertion of power from which everything has emerged and will emerge there came a small family of herdsmen who were of singular interest to the Creator.” Can you see why reading Robinson can be so difficult?

Evangelical readers will also be frustrated by Robinson’s cryptic comments about the historicity of Genesis. At times she seems to suggest that she believes Genesis gives us real history. “From this point in Scripture,” she writes about Noah’s family, “we begin to enter history” (66). But what is she implying about the historicity of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel? At one point in an aside, she writes, “[King] David, whom I take to be historical . . .” (79). Okay, she takes David to be in some sense historical, but do we have a true, historical account of him and others in the Scriptures? It’s not as easy to tell how she views this. Speaking of the exodus, she writes, “Debate about whether these events actually occurred, whether the figures involved are in any sense historical, can never be resolved and need not be” (199). I disagree. When the Bible presents stories as though they did happen in history, it matters whether they did.

I’ll also mention Robinson’s book also has little mention of Jesus. One might respond to this comment with pushback, saying, Yeah, neither does Genesis itself, and it’s only my evangelical gospel-preaching impulse that “needs” to see him everywhere.

I can receive that. I neither expected nor would I require each section of her book to read like a good Christian sermon. But I would have appreciated hearing more about how all these meandering stories in Genesis of nomadic tribes only find their ultimate meaning in the promise and fulfillment of the serpent crusher with a bruised heel prophesied in the third chapter of the book. This is not merely my reading of Genesis but Jesus’s reading. To an audience more familiar with Genesis than any of us, Jesus once said, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness about me” (John 5:39).

Robinson claims in the opening sentence, “The Bible is a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil” (3). And what the Bible is generally, Genesis (as well as the book of Job) is specifically, a work exploring the tensions between the goodness and sovereignty of God in a world filled with evil. Yet without a robust engagement with the cross of Christ, his resurrection, and the second coming, I am not surprised Robinson struggles to present satisfactory answers to the problem. Yes, she is correct that the story of Joseph underscores with literal words that what his brothers meant for evil, God meant for good (Gen. 50:20). Behold the beauty of providence. But where the story of Joseph only points through the theodicy glass dimly, the New Testament streams in 4k. God the Father put Jesus forward as a propitiation for sins, writes Paul, “to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom. 3:26).

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In the end, I can’t say whether you should buy and read Robinson’s book, which I know makes for an admittedly strange and unsatisfying ending to my review. My own reflections echo the both-and in the title and sentiments of Jared Kennedy’s review, “What Marilynne Robinson Sees and Misses in Genesis.”

Like many other brilliant individuals God has blessed with oodles of talent, Robinson can be hard to pin down and put into convenient, tidy categories. It’s not fair for evangelicals to dismiss her as a mere liberal, as I’m sure some will certainly do. It seems to me that as Robinson ministers in her own context, her audience would see her as advocating many views that are more often associated with fundamentalism and evangelicalism. We need to appreciate what she does see so well.

At the same time, here is the best I can say: if you do the hard work of giving her words a close reading, as she gives a close reading to Genesis, you might end up as I did, both blessed and conflicted.

* Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

I Signed My First Traditional Book Contract (And Sort of a Second Book Contract)

Over the years I’ve written a lot of articles and a few books. Those books were either self-published or published by a small, independent Christian publisher. So this summer was a first for me. I just signed my first contract with a traditional publisher. I’m writing for Baker Books. It won’t come out until the summer of 2026, but I’m trying to find moments to work on the manuscript as much as possible.

The book explores the promise of the second coming of Christ, and how his return brings encouragement to believers, especially for those suffering. The working title is The Last Shall Be First: How the Return of Christ Makes Everything Sad Untrue. Here’s what we came up with for the summary:

Despite the confusion and controversy that often exists around the topic of the end times, the writers of Scripture believed that the promise of Christ’s return should comfort believers. With vivid imagery and passionate appeals, the biblical authors announced to Christians the happy ending of our story: justice for the wronged, family for the forsaken, new bodies for the broken, peace for the persecuted, feasting for the famished, and, best of all, faith in Christ becoming sight.

The First Shall Be Last explores seven aspects of Christ’s return, primarily from the amillennial perspective. But the book is not mainly about one specific view. Rather, pastor and author Benjamin Vrbicek encourages Christians to make the biggest and brightest truths about the return of Christ the biggest and brightest truths in our hearts. Every Christian, especially those suffering, needs the hope of the end. We need the good news that what we see now in part, we will soon see in full. When the trumpet sounds, the last shall be first, and, to borrow from Tolkien, everything sad will come untrue.

I started this project almost five years ago, and got seven rejections from publishers along the way. But as I’m getting back into the material, I’m slowly starting to remember why the topic matters so much to me and, I trust, all believers.

When I’ve worked on books in the past, the associated deadlines mainly were self-inflicted. I could hit the deadline or not and little consequence would follow either way. I did not expect the anxiety that would come with a real contract on a real book with a real publisher. Woof. I feel the pressure now.

I’ll share more about the books over the next few years. Please, if you know me and are so inclined, say a prayer for me. Pray that the words would come and that they would bless readers with the truth and hope that in Christ one day everything sad will come untrue.

As an aside, there were no pictures of me signing a contract on social media. Signing the contract was humorously anticlimactic. After months of working on the agreement (after years of working on the proposal), the actual contract took a literal four seconds to sign. It was through the Adobe electronic sign feature. It wasn’t even my signature. I just clicked a button and generic cursive showed up. Oh well. It’s probably better for my heart this way.

I also signed a book contract with Gospel-Centered Discipleship, the company I work part-time for as the managing editor. On this book, I’m not the writer but the editor. We’re publishing some of our best essays from the last few years about the local church. It’s called Broken but Beautiful: Reflections on the Blessings of the Local Church. This book will be released later in the fall. There’s so much bad press out there about the local church. I hope this book shines a light on how the true church still shines bright in the midst of all the junk.

Finally, let me just mention that I wish I wrote more essays on my blog. I still think of article ideas all the time and even make notes about what I would write if I had time. Unfortunately in this season of pastoring and coaching sports and sending children off to college next year and buying our first puppy, I mainly just drop monthly book writing and guest post and podcast updates in the blog. But I thank you for reading and rooting for me nonetheless. It means so much.

* Photo by Dominik Dancs on Unsplash

Two Podcast Interviews: How Improvement in Writing Is Like Bench-Press & How Our Church Stayed “Front-Edge of the Middle” During Covid

I have two podcast interview updates to share. One interview was about writing and the other about pastoring.

First, the podcast about writing. I was a guest on Amy Simon’s podcast, The Purposeful Pen. The episode released yesterday. It’s a podcast to encourage Christian writers.

On the episode we talk a little bit about what makes for good writing, the article submission process, and some specifics to writing for Gospel-Centered Discipleship, the website I help manage. You can find it here, “Episode 63: Improving the Craft of Writing with Benjamin Vrbicek.”

A piece of advice I give is that finishing one piece of writing often develops a writer more than starting five pieces of writing but not finishing any of them. My metaphor for this comes from the gym. Something about finishing a last set of bench press, especially if you go until failure, produces more physical gains than simply doing a few sets and not going to failure. Pushing individual pieces of writing to the final, public form forces authors to identify problems and find solutions in a way that merely jotting down the “good stuff” and moving along doesn’t do.

Second, the podcast about pastoring. The other week I was a guest on the MemeLord Monday podcast, which often takes a humorous (and sometimes serious) look at the Christian subculture. You can find it here, “What Happened to the Post-Pandemic Church?”

The podcast actually released a few years ago, but the host and my friend, Matt Matias, just released the interview to the public. Previously, the episode was only available to his paid subscribers.

Now, you probably have a legitimate question coming to your mind: Why in the world would I want to listen to a podcast about churches and Covid, especially when it’s so old? I get it. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to listen to it either—and I was the guest! Who wants to relive that era, I thought. Let’s forget about Covid and move on.

But I did listen to the interview, and I found it fascinating.

I know, I know, you could say I’m an egomaniac and just love listening to my own voice. I don’t think that was the reason I enjoyed the interview so much. Listening to the interview felt like opening a strange time capsule. I had honestly forgotten all we went through as a church. Our church even had a malicious hacker ruin our online “reserved seating” by signing up fake names. Crazy weird and super aggravating. We had our guesses who hacked us, but we could never confirm it.

You probably remember, too, how there was something of a bell curve regarding how churches handled Covid. In the interview, I explained our unsophisticated guesswork about how to keep our church on the “front edge of the middle” regarding the “uncautious-to-cautious” spectrum. This involved prayer reading the Bible, arguing among ourselves, and talking to doctors, church members, and other pastors—as well as doing exactly whatever the government told us to do without question. Oh, we also cast lots a few times.

Well, maybe we didn’t do all of those. I’ll let you listen to figure it out. But our “front-edge of the middle” strategy was our version of the Goldilocks approach, our plan to hit the bell curve just right. This proved challenging as the backdrop matrix of Covid, culture, and churches kept shifting, and not always in the same direction. Alas, we did our best to be faithful to the Lord. He knows our hearts.

In the interview we also discuss pastoral abuse and why our church has a plurality of pastor-elders, rather than “the guy.” And we tell a few jokes.

If you listen to either podcast, let me know what you think. I’d love to hear your best tips to improve at writing and what your church did that was helpful during Covid.

The Purposeful Pen: “Improving the Craft of Writing”
MemeLord Monday: “What Happened to the Post-Pandemic Church?”

* Photo by ConvertKit on Unsplash

The Reason I’m Most Thankful to Have Timothy Keller as One of My Spiritual Fathers

I went through all my seminary education largely oblivious to whatever pastor or author was currently deemed the most popular in evangelicalism—or, conversely, which pastor had most recently done something silly or sinful and thus immediately needed to be talked about by everyone. It’s a great way to go through seminary, and maybe life. Sure, I had a few favorites even in the early years of my ministry training, but they were literally just a few. And none of them, back then, were Timothy Keller.

I only met Dr. Keller once in person. He came to my seminary as a visiting preacher and lecturer. I didn’t really know who he was, even though it was about the same year he was co-founding The Gospel Coalition and lots and lots of other people apparently knew him. That anecdote speaks of my blissful ignorance.

Yet now, some fifteen years later, when I think over his ministry and the blessing he was to me and so many others, I’m thankful that God extruded him to a place of prominence. I’m thankful for books like Counterfeit Gods that gave me the language to name and renounce my idolatry, the language of “a good thing becoming an ultimate thing.” I’m thankful for those in our congregation who became Christians as we led a study through The Prodigal God. And I’m thankful for the textbook Center Church, and the way it prepared our leaders to plant a church in our city. In short, I’m thankful for the publishing and church-planting empire the Lord built through him.

The one-year anniversary of his death was last month. Christianity Today published a reflection I had about his life and what I’m most thankful for. This may come as a surprise. It wasn’t his writing or preaching, despite the above picture being from the bookshelf in my office which prominently features most of his books.

If you’d like to read the post, you can do so here, “Would Tim Keller Care If We Weren’t Still Talking About Him? Probably Not.” Christianity Today used this line as the excerpt for sharing, which I think gets at the point of my article: “For all his greatness, we should most seek to imitate the late pastor’s humility and indifference to fame.” The article also talks about the little-noticed detail of a brown banana peel that sat next to Keller in a famous photograph of him.

I can’t republish the whole article here, but I will include the first three paragraphs below. I’d love for you to read and share the article.

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In spring of last year, many of us saw a photo of the late Timothy Keller sitting on a park bench. The photo was used on the cover of Collin Hansen’s biography of Keller, and it circulated around the internet in May when he passed away—on social media, blogs, and even Keller’s personal website.

What most of us didn’t see, however, was the banana peel lying on the bench only a couple feet from Keller. The peel has been cropped from most versions of the photo, and understandably so. Who wants to see an ugly brown bit of organic waste in an author’s photograph?

I confess that if I were a world-famous pastor and best-selling author having my picture taken by a professional photographer, I would most certainly have moved the banana peel before someone took my picture. Who wouldn’t? But Keller didn’t seem to care . . .

To continue reading on Christianity Today’s website, click here.

Thoughts on Coaching Sports as a Christian

It’s been almost twenty years since I was competing in college athletics. Since then I have continued to run and cycle and lift weights and all of that—sometimes more and sometimes less. I was talking with a sports medicine doctor last spring after yet another injury, and he said “weekend warriors” like me make for good job security. I bet we are.

Over the last few years, though, I’ve been more involved in sports as a coach. My children attend a small Christian school, and the school has let me help on several teams. Our track and field season is just about over. We had districts last weekend and had great success. One athlete will compete in states this weekend. Super fun.

Last month The Gospel Coalition was kind to publish some reflections I have about coaching sports as a Christian. The title of the article is, “Christian Coach, Help Athletes Cultivate Rightly Ordered Loves” and engages with a concept developed by Augustine a long time ago. I know that can make for an odd mashup, but I think it works.

I can’t post the whole article here. But I’ll include the first few paragraphs. I’d love for you to click over to the full article, give it a read, and share it with others. Maybe you know a coach who would find it a blessing.

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Christian Coach, Help Athletes Cultivate Rightly Ordered Loves

Benjamin Vrbicek, The Gospel Coalition, April 26, 2024 

Track and field athletes want to run fast, jump high, and throw far. I’m a varsity coach at a small Christian school, and I want this for our athletes too. I even want them to win.

This may sound strange, but I hope other schools want to win against us too.

I don’t say this because rivalry draws out better performances, though often it does. I want to coach in a way that cultivates intensity because our effort to win is part of what it means to glorify God in athletics.

Trying to win, however, is only part of glorifying God in sports. And not the biggest part either.

Whether coaches have full-time jobs in athletics or are parent volunteers, they have a wonderful opportunity to cultivate Christian maturity.

A coach can help an athlete rejoice with her teammate even though that teammate beat her in a close race. He can draw out respect for opponents, encouraging harmony with those an athlete is competing against. A coach can cultivate an athlete’s identity in Christ such that she could win the state championship and not become haughty, or tear an ACL and not be devastated.

We could simply call these lessons “coaching,” but this kind of coaching is an opportunity to cultivate what Augustine called “rightly ordered loves.” . . .

* Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash

Peace Be with You: The Surprise of the Risen Lord’s First Words

Both men and women have certain things that can be difficult to admit in public. Sometimes what we find difficult to admit are the same things that we all have difficulty admitting. Sometimes they are different, perhaps even specific to gender.

I won’t give you anything too provocative, but I will tell you one thing I’d rather not: for too long after I got my driver’s license, I was what most people would call a bad driver. I know, as a guy, I’m not supposed to tell you that, but it’s true. At least I think it was true, in the past tense.

In the last twenty years, I’ve not had an accident, and I’ve only been pulled over three times. One of them happened when one of my daughters was very young. We struggled to get her to sleep and only driving her would help, so I drove the neighborhood but didn’t, apparently, come to a complete stop. That one got me a ticket. The point is I have twenty years of safe driving. Praise the Lord.

My first five years of driving? Not so much. I had accidents that totaled into the double digits. Seriously. A few thousand cars were in my high school parking lot, and several of my accidents happened there. My first major accident involved hitting the brand-new Ford F-150 owned by my father’s best friend. That was a wild one because the friend just happened to be in the lane at a stoplight when I moved over without looking. Once I hit part of our garage. Stuff like this. Almost all of them, however, were at low speed. But one was not.

On a rainy Saturday morning in the spring of my sophomore year, I came around a turn too fast. I would tell you that cars had just passed me up the hill and were, thus, going faster than me. Nonetheless, I skidded or fishtailed three times, scraping the guardrail with the front right nose of my car. I slowed down, pulled onto the shoulder, got out, and saw my front right headlight hanging like a detached eyeball. And the door of the minivan looked like someone had taken a knife, jabbed it in the side, and pulled.

I got back in, drove to the high school parking lot, five minutes away, parked my car at the far far edge of the lot, and walked to the locker room. I had driven to the school to catch the bus to a track meet. Reluctantly, I called my father from the phone corded to the wall. I remember staring at the red brick wall, wondering what he would say. 

“I messed up, Dad,” and I told him what happened.

His first words were not, “You stupid son. How many times have we told you?” Instead, he first said, “Are you okay?”

He said other things after that, but he said that first.

I could write a whole lot of true things about the Easter passage of John 20. But what stood out to me this Easter are the four words repeated by Jesus three times: “Peace be with you.” After all their failures, these are the first words to these men (John 20:19–21, 26).

While the greeting “peace be with you” (shalom aleichem) may have been customary in their day and even still today, peace makes for strange first words to these men.

These men have bumbled along throughout the Gospels. They often take Jesus literally when he meant something more poetic (cf., “Lazarus is asleep” in John 11, cf., “he is Elijah who is to come” in Matt. 11, and “beware of the leaven of the Pharisees” in Matt. 16). In Matthew 17, they could not drive out a demon, even though they tried. In Matthew 18, the disciples argued about who the greatest disciple was. In John 6, after a big confrontation where many followers of Jesus stop following, Jesus knows the disciples are grumbling and asks the twelve if they want to stop following. Their response is okay, but it’s not as great as we might hope. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life,” Peter says (John 6:68). This implies they might like to leave but must stay. Again, they just seem to bumble along.

Then consider the final weekend. On the night of the arrest, they can’t stay awake when he tells them to pray. Every single disciple leaves him. In one brave moment, Peter, a leader among the twelve, cuts off the ear of a soldier. But then Jesus rebukes him for fighting as the world fights. An hour later, Peter denies even knowing Jesus.

We receive their failures as familiar material, hardly shocking because we’ve read it all before. But think of what it meant for these men to admit to all this. Think of what it meant to write what they wrote. Think of what it means to show the world you’re a bumbling sinner, not in genric, benign ways, but in specific and ugly ways.

Their failure is only more pointed when you consider the contrast with the women in the story. It’s apparently dangerous to be a follower of Jesus, which is why they hid in a locked room (John 20:19). But not the women; they go early to the tomb looking for his body. In a culture where women were not as valued as they should have been, they were the first to witness the resurrection. They are the first to tell the other disciples that Jesus is alive.

Right or wrong, this would have stung far more than me telling you I’m a bad driver.

These are some of the reasons Christians believe in the reliability of the Gospels. Had it not happened this way and had Jesus not been alive and received them so well, they would never have written the story so transparently.

But the main reason I bring this up is to establish the context for the four words that Jesus says three times: peace be with you.

How can he say that to them?

Well, maybe Jesus is a nice guy, so that’s why he says peace. If we’re talking about whether Jesus is a nice guy or not, and those are the only two options, then yes, Jesus is a nice guy. He’s not a mean guy. He’s not un-nice.

But can a nice judge just let criminals go? Niceness has nothing to do with it. So, how can Jesus say peace to them? How can he say peace to you? It has everything to do with a little phrase in John 19:30. From the cross, just before he dies, Jesus says, “It is finished.”

On Easter morning, even more so than other Sundays we can come to church looking our best and putting on a good show. But the Easter Sunday version of yourself can trick us into thinking we should hear peace from God because we’re not so bad.

On that Easter morning, however, these men were not in their Sunday best. There were no illusions. They knew they had failed, and they knew they had deserted, and they knew they were not the disciples Jesus wanted them to be. This allowed them to experience Easter with more joy than when we come with our religious pretense.

Jesus can say, “Peace be with you,” only because he also said it is finished.

Why was the cross so bloody? Why was the cross so painful? The bloody, painful crucifixion was so physically violent to dramatize the violence of the spiritual reality: when Jesus died, he took upon himself all these sins of his followers. But when he died, it was finished—really finished. No more wrath.

And when he rose, he can preach peace to them and to you.

Many years later, Paul, a man who experienced this peace from God wrote to a church these words:

For he himself [Jesus] is our peace, [and speaking of Jews and Gentiles who didn’t get along, he writes that Jesus]  . . . has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. (Eph. 2:14–18)

All of Paul’s letters begin with some variation of a greeting using the word “Peace”—every one of them. The letters of Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon all begin with peace because they all go on to describe how it is finished and how he is risen indeed.

For all the excitement the disciples would have had to see Jesus on that first Easter Sunday morning, they likely wondered, Does Jesus want to see me? Maybe you have wondered the same.

The gospel of John was written, John tells us, so that you would believe that God the Father wants you to have life and peace through the risen Son of God (John 20:30–31).

When I crashed my car on that highway, I mentioned I parked at the far end of the parking lot. I did that so no one would see. When the bus drove away, we went right past my car. Everyone laughed. It hurt to have them see my failure, as I’m sure it hurt the disciples.

But their laughter hurt me less knowing my father loved me unconditionally.

And Jesus loves us even more.

* Photo by Warren on Unsplash

A Boring Preacher Is a Contradiction in Terms

For the last few years I’ve had a growing desire to study more intently the craft of preaching. I get regular reps on Sundays, typically over thirty a year, and I have the responsibility of mentoring our other preachers. Yet I still feel the gaps between the preacher I want to be and the preacher I am. I say this even as people often compliment my preaching and notice improvements, particularly in the areas of boldness and confidence. In short, after ten years in one church, I’m hungry.

So, this is the year it begins. In January I grabbed all my preaching books that were scattered in alphabetical order on my bookshelves and created an entire shelf devoted to the topic. I’m buying other books and making Amazon wish lists of books to buy in the future. I signed up for a six-week cohort course with The Gospel Coalition led by Jeremy Treat. I’ve also committed myself to writing each week a five-hundred-word entry in a preaching journal about what I’m learning. The journal has nearly seven thousand words so far. I even have a working title and even a preface written for a book on preaching. I do this not because I’m necessarily going to write the book, though I want to, but because I learn best as I write and dream and pray and envision. I’m calling the book Hammer Fire Rain: Reflections on the Life of the Word of God in the Life of the Preacher. It would major on the many metaphors for God’s Word and how those affect not merely the sermon but the preacher across his life. I consider this book a “ten-years in the making” type of project. Preaching books, like marriage books, are best written by those with a long obedience in the same direction, unbroken vows, some gray hair, and a few ugly scars—yet also with a community of people who love them anyway.

The volunteer pastor at our church who did my annual review heard some of these rumblings and got me a gift for Christmas: the famous book Preaching and Preachers by Martyn Lloyd-Jones. I’m glad he did. I’d never read it before. The book is adapted from a series of lectures he gave in the late 1960s. Lloyd-Jones had a long and celebrated career. He’s famous for several things, including being a medical doctor before a pastor and preaching through book of Romans at Westminster Chapel from 1955 to 1968. Those sermons have been published in a fourteen-volume series and have a page count of over five thousand.

I’d love to tell you more about what I’m learning from Lloyd-Jones, what I’m learning as I preach, and what I might someday write about preaching. For now, I just want to pass along a little section from the book in a chapter titled “The Art of Preaching,” in which Lloyd-Jones suggests that boring preachers should not be. In fact, they cannot be, he says. Even the idea of a boring preacher he calls “a very serious matter.”

Whether you preach or lead any Bible studies at all, I hope you’ll find the words encouraging and challenging.

Buy on Amazon

The preacher must never be dull, he must never be boring; he should never be what is called “heavy.” I am emphasizing these points because of something I am often told and which worries me a great deal. I belong to the Reformed tradition, and may have had perhaps a little to do in Britain with the restoration of this emphasis during the last forty years or so.

I am disturbed therefore when I am often told by members of churches that many of the younger Reformed men are very good men, who have no doubt read a great deal, and are very learned men, but that they are very dull and boring preachers; and I am told this by people who themselves hold the Reformed position. This is to me a very serious matter; there is something radically wrong with dull and boring preachers. How can a man be dull when he is handling such themes?

I would say that a “dull preacher” is a contradiction in terms; if he is dull he is not a preacher. He may stand in a pulpit and talk, but he is certainly not a preacher.

With the grand theme and message of the Bible dullness is impossible. This is the most interesting, the most thrilling, the most absorbing subject in the universe; and the idea that this can be presented in a dull manner makes me seriously doubt whether the men who are guilty of this dullness have ever really understood the doctrine they claim to believe, and which they advocate. We often betray ourselves by our manner. (Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers, 85–86, paragraph breaks added)

At church on Monday our staff discussed this long paragraph in our weekly “preaching debrief” meeting. We, of course, agreed. But our solution for having less boring sermons was not so much that preachers should rack their brains on how to add more pop and pizazz, say, by adding spicy illustrations or dramatic gestures or having the tech booth turn up the volume to eleven.

Instead, we believe that Lloyd-Jones—and more importantly the Bible—tells us to focus more on our personal intimacy with God and rightly divided doctrine, and this, in time, will lead to riveting preaching, the kind of sermons that cause people to put down their phones, lean forward, and listen with their face. This is the view Paul takes when he writes to the church in Colossae. “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly,” Paul writes, “teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.”

Our teaching and admonitions—and for that matter our singing—should overflow from “the word of Christ dwelling in [us] richly.” When Paul speaks of the word of Christ, he means a kind of shorthand for the gospel, the good news story of the life, death, resurrection, and promise of the second coming. When this good news dwells in us richly, good things happen.

In a recent podcast episode of the Expositors Collective, seasoned pastor Ray Ortlund shared some cautions about focusing too much on preaching. The cautions felt timely as all these grand thoughts about preaching bubble up within me and spill out in my journal entries, and as I add books to my shelf and enroll in courses. Ortlund said early in his pastoring he essentially overestimated the singular role of preaching. He has since learned, he told listeners, not that preaching is less important but that gospel preaching is always meant to exist within a broader pastoral and warm relationship between preacher and people.

To this, I say amen. As I give all this time to preaching and thinking about preaching, I don’t want to overestimate the singular role of preaching. To consider again Paul’s words in Colossians 3:16, he says “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.” The you is plural. The relationship of preacher and parishioners—both immersed together in the gospel—matters.

So I’ll press on, encouraged but cautioned, striving not to be a boring preacher by dwelling more and more richly in the word of Christ among a congregation dwelling in the same.

And what I learn about the craft of preaching and word of Christ, in time, I hope to share with others, maybe with you.

* Photo by Kristina Paparo on Unsplash

Reading List 2023

My first post of each new year always contains the list of books I read the previous year. If you’d like to see the previous posts, you can do so here: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. Mostly I do this for accountability. But I also know a few other book nerds who enjoy these sorts of posts.

As has been the trend over the last few years—as my children have gotten bigger and my responsibilities in life and at church have also gotten bigger—I read fewer and fewer books. I hate the phrase “it is what it is,” but . . . it is what it is. I’m content to know that, before the Lord, I’m making the right choices.

Small as the totals were this year, I had a few favorites. Twice in the early months of the year I read Timothy Keller’s book Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I?. And, yes, that means I count the book on my list twice. Such a great book, by the way. I also enjoyed Collin Hansen’s biography of Keller. If you happen to listen to the audiobook, Hansen included a few classic Keller sermons.

I typically read several books about writing. This year the best two were Stein On Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies and Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg. The Stein book has some PG-13 rated content, so be aware. And the Klinkenborg one has an interesting structure, but I loved it.

I reread All the Light We Cannot See in anticipation of the Netflix series and my article on the book for Christianity Today. No, I didn’t love the series as much as the book, but it did get better and better across the four installments. I also had a cool email exchange with Anthony Doerr after the article, which made my day. . . or maybe my week.

Also a re-read for me was Everything Sad Is Untrue: (a true story) by Daniel Nayeri. Oh man, this is a good book. I read it again for our church book club, and I’m glad I did. It can be a little goofy, but it makes serious points.

I’m a sucker for books about fathers and sons, and I already love Bret Lott, so I really enjoyed his book Fathers, Sons, and Brothers, which is a memoir of his growing up as the son of an RC Cola salesman. The book is not new, but new to me. Related to this theme of father and sons, I also re-read The Road by Cormac McCarthy around Father’s Day, which has become something of a semi-annual tradition for me.

Probably my favorite book of the year, although it came out last year, was Rembrandt Is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art through the Eyes of Faith by Russ Ramsey. I know so little about the art world yet I’m fascinated by it. The phrase “in the wind” from the title has a double meaning. Rembrandt painted himself into the disciples’ boat on the Sea of Galilee, so that’s one meaning. The other meaning comes from the art world. For a painting to be “in the wind” means that it’s stolen, which happened to that particular Rembrandt. Ramsey’s chapter on Rembrandt, along with the epic story of Michelangelo carving the epic David statue, made the book for me. Ramsey is a top-shelf Christian writer, and I echo what one of my writing friends said of Ramsey: “I want to be like him when I grow up.”

I don’t want to skip over the handful of books I endorsed, so I’ll mention those as well. I wrote endorsements for Memorizing Scripture: The Basics, Blessings, and Benefits of Meditating on God’s Word by Glenna Marshall, Trading Faces: Removing the Masks that Hide Your God-Given Identity by John Beeson and Angel Beeson, A Time to Mourn: Grieving the Loss of Those Whose Eternities Were Uncertain by Will Dobbie, and A Call to Contentment: Pursuing Godly Satisfaction in a Restless World by David Kaywood. I’ll say that Will’s book is particularly interesting in that it’s a book written on a needed but underrepresented topic, the time when a believer has someone close to them pass away who likely was not a believer. Will brings pastoral and biblical wisdom to the topic.

I also wrote a review for The Gospel Coalition of Drew Dyck’s excellent book Just Show Up: How Small Acts of Faithfulness Change Everything (A Guide for Exhausted Christians). Drew loves his books with two subtitles, but I don’t hold that against him because so do I.

Did you have any favorites from last year? Let me know in the comments below.

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Books per Year

Pages per Year

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In order of completion, this year I read . . .

1. Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I? by Timothy Keller (272 pages)

2. The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden (368 pages)

3. Fathers, Sons, and Brothers by Bret Lott (208 pages)

4. Emotionally Healthy Spirituality: It’s Impossible to Be Spiritually Mature, While Remaining Emotionally Immature by Peter Scazzero (240 pages)

5. Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I? by Timothy Keller (272 pages) [Yes, I read this twice and I’m counting it twice.]

6. Recovering Eden: The Gospel According to Ecclesiastes by Zack Eswine (264 pages)

7. The Author as Abram: Writing to the Land He Will Show Us (currently unpublished) by Benjamin Vrbicek (160 pages)

8. Stein On Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies by Sol Stein (320 pages)

9. The Bible: Romans to Revelation, Part 6 of 6 by God (300 pages)

10. Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End by David Gibson (176 pages)

11. The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis (160 pages)

12. All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir by Beth Moore (304 pages)

13. Memorizing Scripture: The Basics, Blessings, and Benefits of Meditating on God’s Word by Glenna Marshall (160 pages)

14. Trading Faces: Removing the Masks that Hide Your God-Given Identity by John Beeson and Angel Beeson (248 pages)

15. The Bible: Genesis to Deuteronomy, Part 1 of 6 by God (300 pages)

16. Spare by Prince Harry The Duke of Sussex (416 pages)

17. Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir by William Zinsser (240 pages)

18. The Word within the Words (My Theology, 3) by Malcolm Guite (96 pages)

19. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (592 pages)

20. Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making by Andrew Peterson (224 pages)

21. The Road by Cormac McCarthy (287 pages)

22. Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg (224 pages)

23. On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) by William Germano (208 pages)

24. Church History 101: The Highlights of Twenty Centuries by Sinclair B. Ferguson, Joel R. Beeke, Michael A. G. Haykin (100 pages)

25. The Bible: Joshua to Esther, Part 2 of 6 by God (300 pages)

26. Go Outside: ...And 19 Other Keys to Thriving in Your 20s by Jared C. Wilson and Becky Wilson (144 pages)

27. Understanding and Trusting Our Great God (Words from the Wise) by Tim Challies (244 pages)

28. Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel by Anthony Doerr (608 pages)

29. The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase by Mark Forsyth (256 pages)

30. The Winners: A Novel (Beartown Series) by Fredrik Backman (688 pages)

31. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (416 pages)

32. The Gospel Waltz: Experiencing the Transformational Power of Grace by Bob Flayhart (255 pages)

33. The Bible: Psalms to Song of Solomon, Part 3 of 6 by God (300 pages)

34. A Time to Mourn: Grieving the Loss of Those Whose Eternities Were Uncertain by Will Dobbie (96 pages)

35. Where the Light Fell: A Memoir by Philip Yancy (320 pages)

36. Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation by Collin Hansen (320 pages)

37. Just Show Up: How Small Acts of Faithfulness Change Everything (A Guide for Exhausted Christians) by Drew Dyck (192 pages)

38. Abiding Grace: Unmerited Favor for Salvation and Life by Glen Whatley (158 pages)

39. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (531 pages)

40. Diary of a Pastor’s Soul: The Holy Moments in a Life of Ministry by M. Craig Barnes (240 pages)

41. A Call to Contentment: Pursuing Godly Satisfaction in a Restless World by David Kaywood (176 pages)

42. Everything Sad Is Untrue: (a true story) by Daniel Nayeri (368 pages)

43. The Chosen by Chaim Potok (272 pages)

44. The Bible: Isaiah to Malachi, Part 4 of 6 by God (300 pages)

45. Rembrandt Is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art through the Eyes of Faith by Russ Ramsey (272 pages)

46. Creationland (a currently unpublished play) by Stuart Reese (150 pages)

47. Christmas Uncut: What Really Happened and Why It Really Matters by Carl Laferton (80 pages)

48. The Bible: Matthew to Acts, Part 5 of 6 by God (300 pages)