My Top 10 Favorite Books I Read in 2012

I read about 55 books during 2012, some required for seminary and some that were not. This list is a mix of those two categories. Out of those 55 books, these are the 10 that I found most interesting, entertaining, edifying, enlightening, challenging, and/or simply enjoyable.

1. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Worthy of the title of classic. Fascinating look at a murder and the psychological, sociological, and religious perspectives on the nature of sin. Some tough parts to get through due to the culture gaps, but very well worth the effort. 

2. The Meaning of Marriage – Tim Keller

• The best book on marriage I've ever read, hands down. Theological, practical, philosophical, pastoral, and eminently helpful. The book I really wish I had read 8 years ago before getting married and the one I will give to everyone I know who's getting married or plans to one day.

3. The Man Christ Jesus – Bruce Ware

• Simply fantastic look at the humanity of Jesus Christ. Ware takes on some of the most difficult questions about Jesus' humanity (When did he know he was God or the Messiah? How did he learn? Could he have sinned?) and answers them with stunning clarity. A few heavy theological passages, but written at the level of the layperson who wants to understand his savior's humanity more deeply. Really, really good.

4. God’s Glory in Salvation Through Judgment – Jim Hamilton

• Beautiful vision of the big, central theme of the Bible - God's glory - achieved by his salvation of us through judgment. Hamilton walks through each book of the Bible, developing these themes and connecting them to the whole. Grand vision of God as revealed in his word.

5. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – C.S. Lewis

• So much better than the movie version. The "conversion" scene of Eustice alone makes the entire book worth reading.

6. The Gospel According to John – D.A. Carson

• D.A. Carson on the Gospel of John - a really good combination and probably my favorite commentary I've ever read.

7. When Sinners Say “I Do” – Dave Harvey

• Very practical and theologically sound picture of what marriage looks like when 2 sinners decide to live together in the covenant of marriage. His experience and examples are very helpful, as is the picture of marriage he attempts to build. 

8. Christianity and Liberalism – J. Gresham Machen

• Simply one of the best defenses of orthodox Christianity over and against Liberalism ever. Hard to believe it was published in 1923. Sounds like it could be talking about specific things today. Stellar.

9. Covenant of War – Cliff Graham

• Excellent second book in the Lion of War series from Cliff Graham. I'm really enjoying the balance he strikes between adherence to the Biblical story lines and a creative, theological interpretation of some of the events related David's "Mighty Men."

10. 40 Questions About Interpreting the Bible – Robert Plummer

• Excellent introduction to most of the topics involved in reading and understanding the bible. Accessible but not simplistic. Highly recommended. 

Others of note:

Gospel Deeps – Jared Wilson
Exegetical Fallacies – D.A. Carson
Fellowship with God – Martyn Lloyd-Jones
God's Greater Glory – Bruce Ware

My Top 10 Favorite Albums of 2012

There are tons of these out there, but thought I'd go ahead and share my top 10 albums of 2012. These are not necessarily the best albums of 2012, and there are surely many good ones that I never even heard this year. I also don't claim to be a music expert, just a fan of lots of kinds of it. I tend to enjoy much of the music that the "music snobs" tell me I should, but I also like ones they tell me I shouldn't (see my #1, for example). Anyway, here are my favorites from this year.

1. Mumford and Sons - Babel

2. The Gaslight Anthem - Handwritten

3. Of Monsters and Men - My Head is an Animal

4. Andrew Peterson - Light for the Lost Boy

5. Beautiful Eulogy - Satellite Kite

6. Propaganda - Excellent

7. KB - Weight and Glory

8. The Lumineers - The Lumineers

9. Phillip Phillips - The World from the Side of the Moon

10. Jill Phillips - Kingdom Come

I Like Adoption

This is really good.

New Film Premiere - I Like Adoption. from ILikeGiving.com on Vimeo.

HT: Challies

Music Video of the Week: Sojourn

The guys from Sojourn - "Joy to the World"

Performance: "Joy to the World" from Ed Stetzer on Vimeo.

Google's 2012 Year in Review Video

Raising Kids the World Will Hate

Adam Griffen:

In 2011 my dream of being a father came true when my son, Oscar, was born. Since that day my hopes and dreams have shifted to what Oscar will be when he grows up. Of course, I like to imagine him growing up handsome, talented, godly and kind, but there’s no way to really know yet. I can be fairly certain he’ll have an affinity for Texas A&M and the Green Bay Packers. There’s little doubt that he’ll have a disappointing hairline, love to eat and sweat even when it’s cold. For the most part, however, I’ll just have to wait and see who he grows up to be. 

I often daydream about what a great guy he might be and how well loved he’ll be by others. I daydream that coaches, teachers and pastors will approve of him and even be impressed by him. I envision his peers holding him in high esteem, wanting him around all the time. I imagine that the generation that follows him will admire him. I hold tightly to the thought that, as he becomes a man, he will grow in favor among any and all he comes into contact with. Some of these desires are healthy, and some are prideful. 

I have a strong, and certainly not uncommon, desire for my child to be validated by the love of other people. Most parents want their son or daughter to be a lovable person, and it’s that desire that makes John 15:19so important and so transformative when it comes to the way we prepare our children for the future. Christ tells His disciples, “If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” It’s not just John 15:19, either. There are many Scriptures that describe the adversarial relationship that God’s followers will have with those who are not believers. 

Reading this, I realized that if God answers my prayer for my son to be a follower of Christ, people will hate him. People will absolutely, unquestionably be repulsed by my son. 

If God graciously saves my Oscar, people will call him a bigot and a homophobe. Some will ridicule him as a male chauvinist as they scorn his “sexist” beliefs. He’ll be despised as closed-minded for saying that Jesus Christ is not only God but the only God. He will probably meet a girl who insults his manhood or considers him old fashioned for waiting until marriage to have sex. His peers will think him a prude. Bullies will call him a coward. His integrity will draw insults like “goody two shoes” (I don’t even know what that means). 

Teachers will think that that my son ignores scientific facts about our origins, prompting his classmates to mark him an idiot. People will tell him he has been led astray by his parents down an ancient path of misguided morality masked as a relationship with God. Financial advisors will think he’s irresponsibly generous. When he takes a stand, there will be those who will not tolerate his intolerance. He will be judged as judgmental. He will have enemies, and I’ll be asking him to love them, and even for that he’ll look foolish. 

If you’re like me and hope for your kids to be fully devoted followers of Christ, then we need to be raising up a generation who is ready to be distinctly different from their peers. In a lot of ways, that’s the opposite of my natural inclination in how to raise my son. Raising kids who are ready to be hated means raising kids who unashamedly love God even in the face of loathing and alienation. Regardless if the insults of the world are naive or legitimate, I pray our children will be ready to stand firm in the midst of a world that hates them.

A Few Things to Remember Before Supporting Gay Marriage

Kevin DeYoung:

I’ve heard it many times. Last week was only the most recent. A pundit on the radio opined that opposing gay marriage is “Neanderthal” because he believes, “people should be able to marry whoever they want.” This was a well known talking head giving voice to a sentiment shared all across this fruited plain. On college campuses, around dining room tables, and in not a few of our churches, gay marriage marches on by the simple logic that says: what business do we have telling people who they can or can’t marry? 

As impressive as the argument sounds–barreling down at us with the strong force of moral superiority and the implicit charge of intolerance–the logic is less than meets the eye.
Let’s think about what is not at stake in our culture’s debate over gay marriage. 

• The state is not threatening to criminalize homosexual behavior. Though many Americans believe the behavior is wrong (and until fairly recently homosexual acts were against the law in some states), the debate at present is not about whether homosexuality is legal or not. No one questions that it is.

• The state is not going to prohibit homosexuals from committing themselves to each other in public ceremonies or religious celebrations.

• The state is not going to legislate whether two adults can live together or profess love for one another.

The issue is not about controlling “what people do in their bedrooms” or “who they can love.” The issue is about what sort of union the state will recognize as “marriage” and confer all the benefits thereof. The state doesn’t tell us who we can be friends with or who we can live with. You can have one friend or three friends or a hundred. You can live with your sister, your mother, your dog, or your buddy from work. You can celebrate your relationship with your grandma or your college roommate however you want. But none of these relationships–no matter how special–are marriages. The state’s refusal to recognize these relationships as “marriage” does not keep us from pursuing them, enjoying them, or counting them as significant. 

The debate is often cast as freedom (those who support anyone marrying anyone) versus oppression (those who want to tell you who you can marry). Conservatives are losing the debate because that’s the narrative being told in a thousand television episodes, in a thousand songs, and by an increasing number of politicians and educators. But in the long run, the triumph of gay marriage (should it triumph as a cultural and legal reality) will mean the restriction of freedoms for millions of Americans. 

This will happen in obvious ways at first–by ostracizing those who disagree, by bullying with political correctness, and by trampling on religious liberty. Surely, Christians must realize that no matter how many caveats we issue, not matter how much we nuance our stance, no matter how much we encourage or show compassion for homosexuals, it will not be enough to ward off the charges of hatred and homophobia. We will have many opportunities in the years ahead to walk in the steps of Jesus who when reviled, did not revile in return, and when he suffered, did not threaten but continued to entrust himself to him who judges justly (1 Peter 2:23). 

But gay marriage will challenge our freedoms in others way too. It’s not just Evangelicals, traditional Catholics, and Mormons who will be threatened. Once the government gains new powers, it rarely relinquishes them. There will be a soft tyranny that grows as the power of the state increases, a growth that is intrinsic to the  notion of gay marriage itself.

Is the Culture at War with Christmas?

Russell Moore:

Flipping through magazines on an airplane the other day, I found myself sighing with irritation. An advertisement for Budweiser was tagged with the headline, “Silent Nights are Overrated.” A few minutes later, in a second magazine, I came across an ad for a high-end outdoor grill, which read: “Who says it’s better to give than to receive?” 

My first reaction was one that I’ve critiqued in others, to take some sort of personal, or at least tribal, offense: “Would they advertise in Turkey during Ramadan with the line, ‘Fasting is Overrated?’ or by asking in India, ‘Who says everything is one with the universe?’” 

I was missing the point—and that matters. 

Every year about this time, there’s a lot of hubbub about a so-called “war on Christmas.” In some instances, there are legitimate questions of religious liberty involved and complicated church/state questions that we ought to be concerned about. More commonly, though, the outrage is directed toward the commercial marketplace, for replacing “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays” and so on. 

As Christians, we ought to recognize that a militant pull toward what Richard John Neuhaus called a “naked public square” is bad for people of any and all religious traditions. But there’s a difference between, for instance, standing against a school system penalizing a child for writing “Merry Christmas” on her “holiday card” and the kind of huffing and puffing we do when commercial marketers don’t “get” our Christian commitments. 

I should have thought about the fact that the advertising agencies behind this beer company and this grill corporation are trying to sell products, not to offend constituencies. Taking shots at any group’s religious beliefs isn’t good economics, and that’s just the point. I’m willing to bet whoever dreamed up these ad campaigns didn’t “get” at all that they might be making fun of Jesus Christ. 

Madison Avenue probably didn’t trace through that the song “Silent Night” is about the holy awe of the dawning Incarnation in Bethlehem. It’s just a Christmas song, part of the background music in our culture this time of year. Saying it’s overrated probably didn’t feel any more “insensitive” to these copywriters than making a joke about, say, decking the halls or reindeer games or Heat Miser and Cold Miser. 

And they probably never thought about the fact that the statement “It is better to give than to receive” is a quotation from Jesus (Acts 20:35). It probably just seems like a Benjamin Franklin-style aphorism. It’s the same kind of thing that happens when someone says “scarlet letter” without recognizing Hawthorne or “to be or not to be” while not knowing the difference between Hamlet and Shrek. 

We ought not to get outraged by all that, as though we were some protected class of victims. We ought to instead see the ways that our culture is less and less connected with the roots of basic knowledge about Christianity. Many, especially in the culture-making wing of American life, see Christmas in the same way they see Hanukkah. They know about Menorahs and dreidels, but not about the Maccabean fight. 

That ought not make us angry. It ought to instead give us an opportunity to understand how we look to our neighbors.

Matt Papa: The Story of God

The story of the Bible in 10 minutes. So completely and totally worth the time...



HT: Timmy Brister

D.A. Carson on the Chick-fil-A Fiasco

D.A. Carson has an article in the new Themelios where he details some more examples of the "intolerance of tolerance," following up on his latest book. He spends some time looking at the events surrounding Chick-fil-A this year.

By now, the bare narrative is well-known. When Dan Cathy, president of Chick-fil-A, a man known for his Christian commitments, declared that he supported traditional heterosexual marriage, he was soon attacked in the press, in blog posts, and in some talk shows as homophobic, a hate monger, and worse-despite the fact that he himself had never used the word "homosexual" and despite the fact that no one seemed able to tell of a credible instance when Chick-fil-A staff at any of their outlets had ever treated any class of customers with less than the courtesy in which the staff were trained. Protests by the LGBT crowd followed at some sites, while supporters bought countless tens of thousands of meals in a show of support. More interesting, perhaps, was the announcement by several big-city mayors, Washington D.C.'s Vincent Gray, Chicago's Rahm Emanuel, and San Francisco's Edwin Lee, that they would prevent Chick-fil-A outlets from opening in their cities since they did not want to encourage any business characterized by such intolerance. They were soon joined by the mayor of Boston and the mayor of Philadelphia. By contrast, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, declared that however repellent he found Dan Cathy's views to be, government should stay clear of such pronouncements and interference with businesses that were not in any sense breaking the law. 

How should we think about this little drama? 

That some conservatives like Dan Cathy articulate their beliefs, while some liberals respond with their own voice, is not intrinsically problematic so far as issues of tolerance and intolerance are concerned. That the debate grabbed media attention and escalated into demonstrations against Chick-fil-A and counter movements that voiced approval for the organization by flooding the outlets with orders is part of the give-and-take of any society that cherishes free speech, no matter how much each side thinks the other is morally wrong. Somewhat troubling is the way several big-city mayors hopped on the band-wagon and declared that they would use their powers to keep Chick-fil-A out of their cities. By definition, that is a form of intolerance of the older kind, i.e., use of the coercive powers of the state to punish those who step outside the norms the state approves. Of course, these mayors could argue that Dan Cathy and those he influences or represents are trying to maintain or promote laws against those who practice homosexuality-for example, laws that refuse to assign the category of "marriage" to homosexual unions. In other words, conservatives no less than liberals want to use the powers of the state to exclude behavior of which they do not approve. 

There is, however, one fundamental difference. By and large the conservatives defend their position and try to advance it by arguing the merits of the case in the public arena. It must be said that in recent years, they have not made much headway, but that is what they try to do. On the other hand, the LGBT voices barely address the merits of their case or engage the substance of their opponents' arguments; rather, by and large they defend their position and try to advance it by dismissing their opponents as intolerant bigots, religious fanatics. That is one of the signs of the new tolerance. While the old tolerance was in some ways a parasitic virtue-that is, it depended for its life on decisions as to how much leeway might be allowed to a person who wished to advocate or take up a position outside the accepted norms and laws of a society, before state sanctions were imposed, and thus depended on the existence of a larger structure of accepted values and morals-the new tolerance is not parasitic on a larger structure. Rather, the new tolerance is itself the highest good, the ultimate virtue, trumping everything else, and therefore able to shunt to one side any serious moral discussion of important matters once the label "intolerant" has been attached to it.

Igniter Media: The Christmas Scale

Mark Driscoll's New Book: Who Do You Think You Are?

Excited to read this new one from Mark Driscoll:

The Schreiner Family: An Amazing Testimony to God's Grace

My wife and I moved down to Louisville, KY over the summer. I have been attending Southern Seminary since August of 2011, but had commuted from Cincinnati for the first year. In July of this year, we moved and planned to attend Clifton Baptist Church, where Dr. Tom Schreiner, whom I had taken for a New Testament class, is one of the preaching pastors.

One of our first Sundays at Clifton followed a tragic Friday. Tom Schreiner's wife, Diane, had been in a serious bike accident, and there were numerous unknowns, including whether or not she would fully recover and even whether or not she would live. It was a strange time to be new in a church, not really knowing anyone and observing a congregation suffering so much. We hadn't yet met Diane and feared we may never have the privilege.

Over the next months, my wife and I were immensely encouraged by the congregation of Clifton, the entire Schreiner family, and specifically Tom. Their confidence in God throughout the entire ordeal has been uplifting and powerful to see. Tom's updates on Diane's Caring Bridge site were some of the best devotional writings I have ever read. The congregational prayers for Diane on Sundays were filled with sadness and pain yet confidence in the love and glory of God, regardless of what might happen.

Miraculously (and from what I understand about the medical issues involved, there is clearly no other explanation), the updates continued to be positive and Diane has recovered quite well. She still has more to go ahead of her, but she was in chapel at Southern when Tom preached this Fall (an amazing event to be able to attend), and she has been attending Clifton again. Tom is back preaching and I feel amazingly blessed that my family gets to attend that church and hear him preach.

Tom is the best theological teacher I have ever had, and I praise God that he allowed Tom to demonstrate that theological, biblical knowledge is not simply an irrelevant, academic exercise. When suffering showed up, Tom had a biblical backbone and unshakable confidence in his God. It was simply beautiful to behold. I pray that I would approach theology this way, so that should God ever call me to suffering of that kind or another, I will be able to say, "Blessed be the name of the Lord."

Music Video of the Week: Andrew Peterson

Andrew Peterson - "Matthew's Begats"