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We are delighted to announce the birth of our sixth child and third daughter.  If a boy and a girl make a million-dollar family, that makes us multi-millionaires!

We are thanking God for his rich blessings to us!

This audiobook seems to have two purposes.  Firstly, to make Jesus the center of Christianity; and secondly to criticize today’s church for not doing so.  I have a few issues with the book.  There is a section which is written as though God were speaking to you.  This kind of thing annoys me because finite men are writing what they think God would say.  (Some admittedly may find this style of devotional writing inspirational and convicting.)  Another issue I have with the book is that it seems somewhat verbose.  In an effort to make Jesus the supreme message of the book, the authors tend to be a bit repetitive and flowery.

However, the central point of the book I believe really is needed today.  Christianity is more about the person of Jesus than about religion or dogma.  The authors really hammer this.  They criticize the church for replacing the worship and pursuit of Jesus with all sorts of other things.

I think the message of Jesus being the central point of Christianity is needed.  I think that the church today really does fail to make Jesus central.  So the core message of the book is right I believe.

However again I didn’t feel quite satisfied.  There are many and long passages of scripture cited in the book, but I feel that a message of the centrality of Jesus should include a lot of focus on what Jesus actually said and did when he was here.  This book seems to spend most of its time saying who Jesus was, which is highly important.  But I think they could have spent more time on his teachings and his life.

In total, I feel the book is worth listening to as a starting point for discovering our need to make Jesus central.  The reader does an excellent job and the recording is top notch, as usual.

This review was written for christianaudio.com’s reviewers program.

The audiobook can be purchased from christianaudio.com.

I liked this recent email by Peter Hoover.  It has to do with the myth of overpopulation and the blessings of having children.  Lots of them.

My sister Nancy, married to Bishop Menno Brubacher of the Orthodox Mennonites in Ontario Canada, with nine of her children, in 1983.

Twins Levi and Lydia Anne on the swings, another pair of twins Joseph and Mary feeling shy (with their fingers in their mouths) and a third pair, Menno and Nancy in the double stroller. All together Nancy had five sets of twins and six single births, sixteen children in total, of whom thirteen grew to adulthood. Now most of them are married and she already has around thirty grandchildren.

A classic case of an overworked, underprivileged mother in modern times? Nothing could be further from the case.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have come to appreciate books that attempt to teach biblical doctrine, and that manage to do so without being boring theological tomes.

The Hole in Our Gospel is a well-written book that combines biblical teaching, personal experience, and stories and facts about the world scene.  The subject of the book is the need for Christians to reach out to the world’s poor.

This book was what I would call a very heavy read if it weren’t an audiobook.  In fact, one of my main issues with this audiobook was the sheer volume of stories, scriptures, facts, and powerful statements that require thought to digest.  Because of this, I would recommend that if you want to get the most out of this book, purchase a hard copy.  I found myself wanting to underline or highlight statements of the author.

There is no doubt that attention to the needy is a hole in the gospel of western Christendom.  But  I think that there are plenty of other holes that could be addressed as well.  Richard Stearns, the author of the book and president of World Vision, is understandably in a position to speak to this particular “hole,” and is well worth paying attention to on this topic.

I’ve heard quite a lot of critique of the popular evangelical doctrine of salvation from the view of those who say it lacks an ethos of discipleship.  This book also challenges popular Christianity, but from a slightly different angle.  He calls into question the Christianity that does not produce a genuine love for the poor of the world.  I believe it is a valid point to be made.  You will be convicted by this book and will definitely be more accountable after listening to or reading it.

This review was written for the christianaudio.com reviewer’s program, which does not require reviewers to write positive reviews.

This audiobook can be purchase at christianaudio.com.

I noticed that Scroll Publishing was running a sale on A Change of Allegiance by Dean Taylor so I ordered it and read it. I enjoyed it very much and thought I would recommend it to others.

There’s something fascinating about a book that interweaves doctrine and good argumentation with personal experience.  I came away knowing not only what Taylor believes but why and how he came to his position.  In other words, you can sort of get to know him as a person through this book.  This particular aspect makes the book very enjoyable to read in my opinion – it’s not a dry religious tome.

The topic of the book of course is nonresistance, the view that Christians should not kill.

Dean and his wife were members of the US Army when they began to deal with this question.

They struggled through the hard issues related to nonresistance and the book offers his conclusions.  He came to see that, on the one hand, conservative evangelical Christians tend to negate the radical teachings of Jesus.  But, on the other hand, liberal theologians tend to remake the Old Testament God into a "nonviolent" deity.  He was not happy with either approach.

He walks through some of the church history that revealed to him that the thread of "nonresistance" runs as far back as the early Christian church.  He discusses the Two Kingdom concept and why he came to believe in it.  He describes the "Theology of Martyrdom" and its power.

Another useful thing he does is address the inevitable hypothetical questions.  I like his approach which you will have to find out by reading the book.

He shares the story of their discharge from the army as conscientious objectors.  Do not miss the incredible thing that happened to the army captain who read them their discharge.

This book is worth buying and reading.  Locals may borrow the book from me since I’m done with it for now. 

It can be purchased from RadicalReformation.net or from Scroll Publishing.

One of the advantages of an audiobook is that your eyes can’t skim text – you hear the narrator read every word.  Therefore, even if you have read the book before, you hear details that you may have missed when you listen to the audio version.

The Hiding Place is like that.  I read it many years ago, probably more than once, but I missed so much.  Our family listened to this entire book a few days ago while on a trip, and it has been a long time since a book moved me so much.

In a wonderful, “grandmotherly” tone, the narrator reads Corrie Ten Boom’s classic story of suffering and imprisonment at the hands of the Nazis.  This rendition will bring tears to your eyes even if the story is not new to you.

A very poignant moment in the story is one in which Corrie is standing before the chief of the Harlem police, whom Corrie learns is working with the resistance to the Nazi occupation.  He tells Corrie that there is an informer working for the Nazis that must be eliminated.  Could Corrie make connections with her underground friends to have him killed?

Her answer (not the exact words) is so typical of her life’s mission.  “Sir, I believe I am called to save life, not destroy it.”  Corrie’s sacrificial love for the Jews suffering under the Third Reich was only one part of the story of her lifelong love for her fellow man, including the handicapped, those scarred by imprisonment in concentration camps, and even the Germans in the postwar period.

This audiobook is not only worthwhile, but potentially life-changing.  Highly recommended as being among the best christianaudio.com has to offer.

If you want to learn facts and figures about the Rwandan genocide, read the encyclopedia.

If you want to learn what it is like to see hundreds of thousands of your own people slaughtered like animals in only a few short days, and to survive yourself only by a seeming accident of chance; if you want to learn how bewildering and worthless life can seem to be; if you want to grasp the struggle to believe in God and to forgive, then listen to this story.

It is unfathomable what human beings will do to one another.  The depths of hatred and of brutality make life seem not worth living.  How could one experience genocide and have faith in God and hope that life is worth living?

Eric Irivuzumugabe lived through the Rwandan genocide and came to believe in God.  Through Christ he gained a hope for himself and for his people as well.  This book is the story of his struggle to survive physically, and of his spiritual birth.  The book ends with him on a mission to reach out to his fellow Rwandans, particularly the orphans of the genocide.

This book is read very well by the narrator in a soft and gentle style.

This review was written for christianaudio.com, where you can purchase this book.

We had a fondue party tonight with the children.  We got the fountain at Goodwill last summer and it works great.

²² Everyone dies because all of us are related to Adam, the first man. But all who are related to Christ, the other man, will be given new life. ²³ But there is an order to this resurrection: Christ was raised first; then when Christ comes back, all his people will be raised.

²⁴ After that the end will come, when he will turn the Kingdom over to God the Father, having put down all enemies of every kind. ²⁵ For Christ must reign until he humbles all his enemies beneath his feet. ²⁶ And the last enemy to be destroyed is death. ²⁷ For the Scriptures say, “God has given him authority over all things.” (Of course, when it says “authority over all things,” it does not include God himself, who gave Christ his authority.) ²⁸ Then, when he has conquered all things, the Son will present himself to God, so that God, who gave his Son authority over all things, will be utterly supreme over everything everywhere.

Holy Bible : New Living Translation. 1997 (1 Co 15:21). Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House.

…

⁵¹ But let me tell you a wonderful secret God has revealed to us. Not all of us will die, but we will all be transformed. ⁵² It will happen in a moment, in the blinking of an eye, when the last trumpet is blown. For when the trumpet sounds, the Christians who have died will be raised with transformed bodies. And then we who are living will be transformed so that we will never die. ⁵³ For our perishable earthly bodies must be transformed into heavenly bodies that will never die.

⁵⁴ When this happens—when our perishable earthly bodies have been transformed into heavenly bodies that will never die—then at last the Scriptures will come true:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.

⁵⁵ O death, where is your victory?

O death, where is your sting?”

Holy Bible : New Living Translation. 1997 (1 Co 15:50). Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House.

Boyd made a few comments on Open Theism in a recent blog post.

…if it’s logically impossible for God to create a world in which the future is partly open, then those biblical authors who depict God as speaking and thinking about the future in terms of what might and might not come to pass (e.g. Ex. 13:17) or as changing his mind (e.g. Ex. 32:10-14) or as experiencing surprise and disappointment (Jer 3:7, 19; Isa 5:1-5) must also be asserting a logical contradiction, even if we interpret these depictions as “mere” anthropomorphisms. (Even anthropomorphisms must be logically coherent.) It is certainly difficult to see what it is about these depictions that’s logically contradictory, but not as difficult as it is to explain how passages presumably inspired by God could contain such impossible pictures of him in the first place.

If the above argument is valid, then the assumption that an omniscient God must by definition know the future as eternally and exhaustively settled is demonstrably false. God could create a world with an open future if he wanted to. The unique claim of Open Theism is that, not only is this kind of world possible, but scripture, experience and sound philosophy give us compelling reasons to think that, as a matter of fact, this is precisely the kind of world God created.

I don’t know much about open theism, but the little I have read intrigues me.