A Sufferer’s Cry: Intimacy

In chapter nine of the book When God Weeps, Joni hits on the primal cry of a sufferer’s heart when she says that it’s intimacy (first with God, second with others). This chapter alone is worth the price of the book.

“Reasons reach the head, but relationships reach the soul. It’s the relationship of God reaching out to us through our trials that draws the bottom line of suffering” (126). 

“Suffering has no meaning in itself. Left to its own, it is a frustrating and bewildering burden. But given the context of relationship, suffering suddenly has meaning” (127). 

“Intimacy happens as two souls rub together. It’s what we long for more than anything else. To know and be known. Even in the best relationships, we are still left aching for someone to comprehend our world and enter our struggle—to embrace us with a passion that seizes and melts us into a union that will never be broken. God answers that ancient longing.” (128).

Four Portraits, One Jesus

If you, like me, have read the four gospel accounts wondering why there are four of them and not a bit perplexed as to the point of each one, this is a must read. 

Or if you wonder, why the different genealogies to start Matthew and Luke, while Mark and John have no genealogies at all? And then there is the gospel of John, which seems so different. 

Strauss does an excellent job presenting each gospel as a literary unit with key themes and structures honed to display Jesus in a certain light that is both helpful and, dare I say, life-changing in the way you read the gospels.

The book is written very clearly and non-technically, using charts, diagrams, and breakout boxes, making this a wonderful selection for non-theologians like myself.

Finally, as a personal note, I am falling in love with the gospels for what feels like the first time because of this wonderful resource. It is helping me see the unity of each gospel in context of their literary and theological purpose(s), and as a result is, I hope, making me fall in love with Jesus in a deeper way. And knowing Jesus is life. 

“And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 Jn 5:11-12).

Buy it HERE.

Thinking Deeply Gives Greater Conviction

While most of the men who fought in the air war over Germany were simply doing their job, men like Lt. Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal had a far deeper purpose. 

A successful New York lawyer before World War II began, Rosenthal read Hitler’s biography, Mein Kampf, watched the propaganda films that Germany produced, and pondered closely the unfolding events of escalation. 

The day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, Rosenthal signed up for the air corps. 

Because Rosenthal had spent so much time thinking about the deeper truths of democracy and what the Nazis stood for, he had a far deeper purpose for fighting in the war. 

“When I finally arrived, I thought I was at the center of the world, the place where democracies were gathering to defeat the Nazis. I was right where I wanted to be” (p. 13).

And then Donald Miller gives us this astounding insight into Rosenthal’s heart:

“Rosie Rosenthal didn’t share these thoughts with his crewmates, simple guys who distrusted what they called deep thinking. They never learned what was inside him, what made him fly and fight with blazing resolve” (p. 14).

Rosenthal is good example for all of us: thinking deeply helps form convictions, and convictions lead to a resolved will and a sticktuitiveness in life that is absent from much of the Christian world. The church, like the world, is full of people who just show up, and whose resolve for Christ, like what fills their minds, is empty and thin. 

So, think deeply on the things of God in Scripture, because it is by so doing that we gain a “blazing resolve” to enjoy and spread a passion for Jesus Christ. If you won’t learn the lesson from Scripture, learn it from Rosie Rosenthal. He knew what it was to believe in something so strongly that it shaped who he was.

Summer Thriller

For someone who reads theology all year round, it’s nice to have a light, non-note-taking summer read that gets the heart racing and strains the eyeballs in afternoon-long episodes of reading on the porch. And thanks to C.J. Mahaney’s recommendations, I found a book for that exact purpose.  

Riveting, sorrowful, and well-worth the time, James L. Swanson’s book takes an historical, hour-by-hour look at the events following Lincoln’s assassination. There’s so much I didn’t know, like the fact that John Wilkes Booth’s team of conspirators also targeted William Seward and Andrew Johnson. 

This quote, from Boston Corbett, the man who shot Booth, fascinated me (I hope it doesn’t give away too much):

“While Booth’s body lay before me, yet alive, but wounded, and when I saw that the bullet had struck him just back of the ear, about the same spot that his bullet hit Mr. Lincoln, I said within myself, ‘what a fearful God we serve’” (pp. 340-41).

Wherein Lies the Problem

With amazing insight and searing exposition of biblical texts, J.C. Ryle’s volume on Holiness is a breath of fresh, Scriptural air in an age of selfishness that has left the modern church, and the Christian, trapped in its own nightmare of repulsive sin.

As I reflect on the last few days in which I’ve loaded boxes, driven half way around Louisville, and spent a lot of time in the company of others—away from the regular silence and solitude I enjoy—one thing has become glaringly obvious: I am more sinful than I thought.

It’s easy to treat my own wounds lightly, to soft-pedal my own sins and to say, in essence, ‘Oh, you’re not that bad.’ And it doesn’t work. Ryle makes the point perfectly with an illustration about a boy:

“Of all the foolish things that parents say about their children, there is none worse than the common saying, “My son has a good heart at the bottom. He is not what he ought to be; but he has fallen into bad hands. Public schools are bad places. The tutors neglect the boys. Yet he has a good heart at the bottom.” The truth, unhappily, is diametrically the other way. The first cause of all sin lies in the natural corruption of the boy’s own heart, and not in the school” (Holiness, p. 4).  

The problem isn’t with my busy schedule. It’s not with the limited amount of time to spend with God. And it isn’t because I’m tired or because I’m not in my own house. It isn’t even because there’s been more pressure lately. It’s because of my heart. The first cause of all sin lies in this boy’s heart.