New Reviews: Better Late Than Never

I've been remiss in not posting this DR review update until this weekend - Thanksgiving weekend in Canada, as it happens. Aren't you thankful the update is posted now?

In the past couple of weeks a couple of reviews didn't get 'frontpaged' because they were already in the DR database, sans actual review: Martha Peace's The Excellent Wife, reviewed by Leslie Wiggins, and Steve Keels' Transparenting: Mentoring the Next Generation, recommended by Scott Lamb. Locate copies of both and let your family life be enhanced by sound biblical teaching.

I (Mark Tubbs) have only generated one review in the recent past, an engaging biography: Agape Leadership: Lessons in Spiritual Leadership from the Life of R.C. Chapman by Robert L. Peterson and Alexander Strauch, a condensed 'taster' of the longer, more in-depth Robert Chapman: Apostle of Love.

Appropriate to the current economic climate, Jacob Hantla has reviewed Mark Zandi's Financial Shock: A 360º Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion, and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis. Behind the extra-long subtitle, and despite the unfortunate fact that Zandi misjudged the timing of the current financial episode, is a simple and helpful guide for those who are looking for an economist's recommendations to weather the economic storm.

Jacob also reviewed John Frame's classic Apologetics for the Glory of God and C.J. Mahaney's newest book, Worldliness: Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World. He recommends reading both for the purpose of equipping the Christian against the arguments and enticements of the world.

Also salient to the current socio-political scene is James Anderson's review of Francis Beckwith's book Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice. Beckwith, a former evangelical professor who recently converted to Roman Catholicism, makes the simple but convincing case, in James' opinion, that abortion is morally wrong in every respect.

Two books on the subject of the preached Word were reviewed last week. Tim Challies is an Albert Mohler aficionado, so it's no surprise he enjoyed and recommends He Is Not Silent: Preaching in a Postmodern World, while Trevin Wax describes Mark Dever's approach to evangelism in the Reformed tradition (with a Southern Baptist flavor, of course) in Dever's book The Gospel and Personal Evangelism.

Trevin also recently read and reviewed a relatively unknown historical book, Prayin’ to Be Set Free: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Mississippi, a collection of first-hand accounts from former slaves discussing the life of slavery, the American Civil War, and life after Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

Tim reviewed two other books last week. Death by Love: Letters from the Cross by Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears, is Driscoll's best-ever book, in Tim's opinion. Meanwhile, Tim deems novelist Anne Rice's spiritual autobiography Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession "interesting enough," but hampered by weak theology and a slow start.

Enjoy perusing the reviews of the above-mentioned books. We'll be back with another batch of reviews in just a couple of days, on Tuesday, October 14th: Canada's federal election day.

BlogThru: Future Grace (Chapter 5)

Two weeks ago Leslie Wiggins of Lux Venit and I began a month-long series on the 31 chapters of John Piper's book The Purifying Power of Living By Faith in Future Grace, better known as Future Grace. My deepest thanks go out to Leslie for her patience while I sought to apply faith in future grace to work situations last week. We now move on to Chapter 5, "The Freest of All God's Acts."

Be Free, Stanley, Be Free

In my four-year old son's runaway favourite motion picture, the animated feature Cars, the spooked protagonist Lightning McQueen rampages through the sleepy little town of Radiator Springs, believing the Sheriff chasing him is shooting at him. Sheriff's car, unused to high speed chases, is actually backfiring embarrassingly. As McQueen tries to outrun Sheriff, he knocks over a tower of tires, destroys the firehall flowerbed, somehow attaches himself to the statue of the town founder Stanley, and drags the statue free of its moorings. The conical base of the road-surfing statue furrows the pavement the length of Radiator Springs until McQueen suddenly throws on the breaks, flinging the statue into overhead electrical wires, which in turn catapult Stanley into the night air. On his way up, the resident hippie VW cab Fillmore is heard to say, "Be free, Stanley, be free!" In a moment that could only happen in movies, Stanley plunks down squarely onto his original base outside the firehall.

In this post, before I grapple with the nitty-gritty of Piper's chapter, I want to reiterate via paraphrase a conversation on a DR reader's blog that touched on the issue of God's nature: is God a risk taker or not? Those who have read Wild At Heart by John Eldredge, or DR's review of it (total disclosure: I did not write the review in question) will be familiar with this line of thought and its extreme version, Open Theism, which posits that God does not actually know the future but makes extremely well-informed guesses.

The conversation came about because the blogger mentioned he appreciated reading DR's review after having read Wild at Heart and being captivated (pun intended) by the book. This blogger was convinced of the need to hold said book up to the light of Scripture, and found the book wanting. Soon, a Wild At Heart apologist had posted in response, declaring that the blogger's first impulse to love the book had been the correct reaction because "God is a risk taker." The blogger responded with Scriptures pointing to the omniscience of God and the sufficiency of Scripture. Unable to resist, I weighed in, pointing out a helpful article by John Piper (yes, him again) and Robert Reymond's excellent discussion of the dynamic way God works in the world and in time in the book What Is God?

Now let's tie some loose ends together. What was the point of telling the story of Stanley from Cars and summarizing the comment thread from a DR reader's blog? Simply this: when we attempt to release God (as if we could) from the moorings of His own self-disclosure and self-revelation, we do violence to the character of God, and the Scriptures in which He has shown Himself. Even one of the current presidential nominees is on record as stating there are many ways to God, which is tantamount to universalism and denies the "one way" teaching of Jesus Christ. It goes without saying this nominee's claim of God's universal election has no scriptural basis and no effectual power. We cannot release Him from the moorings of His character by wishful speaking: "Be free, Lordy, be free!" His moorings are His character as revealed in His Word, and His Word is Truth.

That said, "God's grace toward sinners is the freest of all God's acts." Far from being frustratingly reigned in from extending universal election because He made rules He cannot break,

Canadian singer Roch Voisine asks (not of God) in one of his songs, "But how can you be so free?" We might well ask this of God. Note especially in the above quote that "He is never trapped by his own wrath." Rather, God's character allows him - nay, motivates him - to be the freest being of all. Risk taking on God's part is not a logical outcome of His character; electing grace is. God is free to explode in grace towards repentant sinners due to the riches of his grace (Eph. 2:6-7). Jerry Bridges further explores God's unsearchable riches in his book The Gospel for Real Life - highly recommended.

I realize, as Piper does, that this discussion begs the question, "But how can electing grace be a totally free kind of grace? If it's sovereignly extended to only those God chooses, it's not free, is it?" Well, Piper says, that's because it's conditional. As one of his subtitles in the chapter puts it, God extends "Free, Unmerited, Conditional Grace." While grace cannot be earned or merited, it still comes on conditions of repentance. "Whoa," you may be saying, "there's the condition - repentance." But it's tacitly not a meritorious condition because Scripture makes it plain that even the repentance itself is a gift of God's grace, which in turn guarantees the freeness of grace. "God's freedom is not reduced when he makes some of his graces depend on conditions that he himself freely supplies." At the end of the day, God is God and will be gracious to whom He is gracious. O how marvelous, how wonderful, is God's sovereign grace extended to sinners!

Please read Leslie's reflections on this chapter.

BlogThru: Future Grace (Chapter 4)

Last week Leslie Wiggins of Lux Venit and I began a month-long series on the 31 chapters of John Piper's book The Purifying Power of Living By Faith in Future Grace, better known as Future Grace. We now move on to Part 2, "Free and Future Grace," beginning with Chapter 4, "The Life That's Left Is Future Grace."

One Life to Live

All of us have only one life to live, and I'm not talking about the ABC soap opera. Furthermore, as John Piper says at the outset of Chapter 4, the only life we have left to live is future life. As such, all promises of God are future promises, and all expectations of God are future expectations. The Christian life is lived in the current moment, but as every future moment becomes the present moment, God's future grace promised becomes present grace endued. And that is a splendid promise in itself.

However, many of us live in the present moment as though present grace endued cannot strengthen, never mind future grace promised. This Piper answers with a startling statement: "You can't be a Christian without faith in future grace." He clarifies: "Our standing as Christians is as secure as God's supply of future grace," meaning that the same faith that justifies both sanctifies us and empowers us to put one foot in front of the other. For support, Piper turns to the New Testament example of the Church in Macedonia, who gave freely to the poor of the Church in Jerusalem not out of wealth, but despite extreme poverty. How did they know that God would provide for them once they turned over their meagre riches to support the Church in Jerusalem? Only faith. And yet, full of faith. Faith is sometimes all we have, but faith is all we need.

How often do we place faith in God contingently? "I will trust you, Lord, when you put enough money in my bank account to stop me worrying." Like Gideon, we lay out our fleeces, when we should be prostrating ourselves on our faces! But Macedonian, expectant faith is not arrogant, it is confident:

We are gathered together because of the grace of our God and Father, visited upon us through the work of our Lord Jesus Christ, and made our possession through the ministry of the Word. Amen.

All that we do flows from His grace; we deserve nothing through what we have done in preparation, or anything we have done as a result of grace...

We are here in Jesus' name, not in yours, and not in ours. We are here because He is good, not because you are, and not because we are. We are here because He is the Lord, and we are not. Bow down to Him now. (from Douglas Wilson's Exhortations)

Conscious of Christ as their supreme possession, the Macedonians confidently, faithfully, and humbly disposed of their possessions to provide for the temporal needs of the Jerusalem Church. The lesson here is that we are grace to others when we are nourished by the grace of God through His Word. In other words (the Apostle Paul's words, actually), grace be to us today, and grace be with us tomorrow. Amen.

Leslie has posted what she has learned in Chapter 4 here.

BlogThru: Future Grace (Chapter 3)

Leslie Wiggins of Lux Venit and I are completing Part 1 of 10 in a month-long series on the 31 chapters of John Piper's book The Purifying Power of Living By Faith in Future Grace, better known as Future Grace. Join in, won't you? It's still early days yet.

God Meant What He Said

I don't know how many times I've heard people say, "I know the Bible says, 'Be holy, as I am holy' (I Peter 3:15, echoing Leviticus 11:44), but God can't have really meant that." I've heard the same logic applied to Christ's words in Matthew 6:34,"Do not be anxious about tomorrow," and Luke 12:22, "Do not be anxious about your life," and Paul's words in Philippians 4:6, "Do not be anxious about anything." But if there are three things that we feel we have a right to worry about, they are these exact three things, are they not?

Let's look at the grammar quickly (I can't help it; I teach high school English). All three injunctions are delivered in the imperative tense; they are commands. Incidentally, in a more recent Piper book entitled What Jesus Demands from the World, Demands #14 and #15 are, respectively, "Do Not Be Anxious About the Necessities of Daily Life," and "Do Not Be Anxious About the Threats of Man." In these chapters, Piper further unpacks a topic he can only spend a relatively brief chapter on in Future Grace.

So he commands and demands we not be anxious. But surely these commands and demands don't rank up with the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, and the Great Commission? We need to be careful here. Much like the narrative segments (i.e.,"Jesus Feeds the Ten Thousand") and the chapter divisions that editors have imposed upon the text in sincere efforts to aid the reader, our conception of the relative importance of these passages have been somewhat skewed by such quick-reference nomenclature. Can we really parcel out what is more important than what? Wouldn't it be far more biblically faithful to take all Christ's commands - and by extension, all apostolic commands - at face value? With relativistic thinking removed, we end up with the injunction "Do not be anxious" at the same level as "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might" (Deuteronomy 6:5, revisited and clarified by Jesus in Mark 10 and Luke 12). Not only are they on the same level of importance, Piper would contend, but they are one in the same command. Since anxiety is at its core a type of unbelief, the injunction to love the Lord your God with all your being implies the eradication of anxiety by believing and trusting in Him; namely, placing faith in future grace.

Leave It with God

One of the sections in the third chapter that affected me greatly was under Promise #3, anchored by Matthew 6:27-28: "And which of you by being anxious can add a single cubit to his life's span? And why are you anxious about clothing?" This is when the rubber hits the road. We can have all our theology down, but when the temptation to anxiety creeps up, we need to be ready to deploy the promises of God. Here is Piper: "This is a promise of sorts - the simple promise of reality: anxiety will not do you any good. It's not the main argument, but sometimes we just have to get tough with ourselves and say, 'Soul, this fretting is absolutely useless. You are not only messing up your own day, but a lot of other people's as well. Leave it with God and get on with your work.' Anxiety accomplishes nothing worthwhile." Even in an age in which pragmatism is practiced almost religiously, it's amazing how we (myself very much included) can succumb to anxiety, although it's ultimately impractical.

I hate to leave this discussion dangling, but we've still got 28 chapters to go. In the meantime, please read Leslie's Scripture-saturated discussion of Chapter 3 and check out a highly recommended book, Edward Welch's Running Scared: Fear, Worry, and the Rest of God.

BlogThru: Future Grace (Chapter 2)

Leslie Wiggins of Lux Venit and I are in the beginning stages of a month-long series on the 31 chapters of John Piper's book The Purifying Power of Living By Faith in Future Grace, better known as Future Grace. We welcome you to join us in the journey.

Mere Gratitude Won't Fill Your Tank for the Next Hundred Miles

In yesterday's post, I ruminated on the danger of 'mere gratitude.' Its only orientation is backwards. Reflecting on our Saviour's finished work on the cross is paramount, of course. Remembering who I once was before the saving blood of Christ purchased me is is important, of course. We must not forget what our eyes have seen (Deut 4:9), nor forget the works of His hand (Ps 78:7), nor forget the covenant of God (Prov 2:17), nor forget the shame and affliction of separation from the father that Christ endured on our behalf (Heb 12:2).

But in Philippians 3:12-16, Paul evidently does want to forget something. But what is that something exactly? What lies behind. That's pretty exhaustive. Paul is using what as a pronoun to imply whatever. Now, I'm no Piper, but I have reason to believe that Paul may be referring to what I previously referred to as 'mere gratitude.' When a runner looks back, he or she is only looking back, which results in athletic tragedies such as John Landy's "Miracle Mile" loss to Sir Roger Bannister in the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games. Landy lost because he looked back; while he was looking back, he couldn't help but fail to see Bannister pass him on the other side.

We shouldn't look back, we should press on. But how does this fit in with Piper's discussion of faith in future grace? Back to Philippians 3, where in verse 16 Paul exhorts his hearers, "Only let us hold true to what we have attained." To paraphrase, let us keep on with more of the same. The grace that has sustained us thus far is fuel for the faith to take us through the next lap and beyond. We can drink the same bottle of spiritual Gatorade for the next 5000 metres, even into eternity.

Again, I'm reminded of Piper's admonition to live between two lines of 'Amazing Grace':

You can also see it in Thomas Chisholm's famous hymn, 'Great Is Thy Faithfulness':

Where's My Backup?

In this chapter Piper takes pains to show how the New Testament, even more so than the Old, identifies faith as the Christian motivator to passionate obedience. The oft-quoted Hebrews Hall of Fame notably enumerates those biblical figures whose faith drove them to obedience. He goes on to exonerate gratitude from the bad rap he subjected it to in these first two chapters, but makes no excuses about dismissing it as a motivator for radical Christian obedience.

I'm left with three observations.

Firstly, in our church we sing many, many songs which portray us as debtors to Christ, debtors to grace, debtors to mercy alone. In light of Piper's effective puncture of The Debtor's Ethic as motivation for obedience, are we right to sing that we owe God all we are? In one sense, yes: we belong to Him, we have been bought with a price (1 Cor 6:20). In another sense, no: we can never repay Him, so it would be supremely dishonourable to Him to attempt to remunerate Him for ransoming us from the wages of sin. It's a poor example, but it's akin to foisting a five-dollar bill on your parents who have just bought you a car for Christmas. It's insulting, is what it is. I suppose I have some heavy thinking to do about some lyrics.

Secondly, I get the distinct impression that even after multiple printings, possible revisions, and superb editing by Steve Halliday, Piper is sometimes left grasping for words with which to express concepts too lofty for the English language. At one point he says, "What honors never-ending, inexhaustible future grace is moment-by-moment 'payments' (not a good word) of trust." Those are his own words in his own parentheses. I was struck once again how difficult it can be to articulate heavenly realities in imperfect, human speech. No wonder Piper needs 31 chapters to explain 'faith in future grace' to us.

Thirdly, and most significantly, 'mere gratitude' doesn't magnify God to the extent that future grace does. It is easier, both experientially and theologically, to look back and say, "yes, God was in that, and that, and that. I can see how Romans 8:28 has worked in my life." But Romans 8:28 isn't solely about the past, but about the present, and...gulp...the future. In Piper's words, "faith in future grace is constantly saying to gratitude, 'There is more grace to come, and all our obedience is to be done in reliance on that future grace. Relax and exult in your appointed feast. I will take responsibility for tomorrow's obedience.' "

Leslie has posted her thoughts about Chapter 2 here.