Dec 9, 20224 min read

What I’m Reading…November-December 2022

Life being what it is, I forgot to post a reading update for November, so I’ve combined these last two months into one. The end of the year is so packed full of life, activities, festivities, and more! It’s a great time of year in many ways, and it can also be a challenging time of year. Nonetheless, we keep the pages turning!

As I mentioned in my last post, I am working on a project that has dominated my reading time, and I am mostly consuming more heavily theological works for this present time. I usually like to read somewhat widely, and I still try to explore and get some non-theological reading done.

Theology

Shepherds after My Own Heart by Timothy Laniak

I’m still working through this book. I read it last month, but I am still digesting it, still trying to comprehend and understand the rich and meaningful picture of the Pastor that the Bible provides. Too often, I think the modern Church—and many modern pastors—fail to grasp just how deeply rooted and richly informed the office of the Pastor really is. Timothy Laniak faithfully walks his readers through the intricate details of the Bible’s picture of God’s Shepherds. And, more than anything, in His shepherds, God wants His people to know Him and to experience His goodness.

How People Change by Timothy Lane and Paul Tripp

This is a Christian Counseling book, but it is primarily a discipleship book. In this book, Lane and Tripp discuss and talk through the various aspects of our hearts, minds, and lives, and how the gospel gets into us, and reshapes us little by little into the image of Jesus. With stunning clarity and searching questions, Lane and Tripp move their readers to a compelling look at King Jesus.

Most of us tend to look only at the surface issues of our lives: Anger, lust, greed, abuse, sarcasm, mean-spiritedness, etc. without going to the root of these issues. Lane and Tripp help us to follow the roots of these surface issues deep into our hearts; our hearts that are broken and ruined by sin. Only Jesus can help people to change.

A Theology of Biblical Counseling. by Heath Lambert

In this book, which is more of a textbook, Lambert provides a biblical robust and theologically rich treatment of the practice of Biblical counseling. Counseling is big business in our world, and biblical counseling can get easily overlooked in a counseling world focused on the self and flooded prescriptions.

Lambert helps us to see how the whole Bible speaks specifically and helpfully to the human condition, tackling many of our most common struggles in the light of King Jesus’s gospel.

Christian Devotion

Be Thou My Vision, A Liturgy for Daily Worship by Jonathan Gibson

I have never really found a daily devotion that attracted me until Gibson’s book hit the market. In this wonderful resource, Jonathan Gibson provides his readers with 31 days of daily worship liturgies. A liturgy is a planned out practice of worship created to guide the faithful to God through prayer, song, and reading.

The first two chapters of the book provide a biblical basis for the practice and format of daily worship, and the rest of the book provides the liturgies themselves.
Each day, the book leads the reader through practices such as: Call to Worship; Prayer for Adoration; Reading of God’s Law; Confession of Sin; Assurance of Pardon; a Historical Creed from Church history; teaching from Christian Catechisms; and Daily Bible Reading.
The book layout and design are beautiful!
I would highly recommend this resource…

The Christian Life

Raising A Modern-Day Knight by Robert Lewis

There is a crisis in our world today (among many crises), and that is the lack of faithful fathers. Fathers who are intentionally raising their sons into godly manhood are disappearing from our landscape. In a culture that cannot seem to determine the difference between a man and woman, now, more than ever, we need strong godly men raising their sons into manhood.

In his book, Raising Modern Day Knights, Robert Lewis gives a clarion call for fathers to take up this call. And not only fathers, but all Christian men have a role to play in the raising of boys into godly men. In the book he notes, “Boys become men in the presence of a clear vision of manhood.”
The book itself appeared in 1997, and was updated in 2007, but since then, it has become prophetic with the downward spiral of American culture. Now, more than ever, we need men to be men.

Farming

Perilous Bounty, The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We can Prevent It. - Tom Philpott

Tom Philpott has been writing about agriculture and farming since 2011, covering all aspects of food and its production. In this book, he covers what he sees as a looming disaster for agriculture in our country because of modern day farming practices. Philpott covers issues such as drought in California, topsoil loss in the heartland of the Midwest, the influence of pesticide organizations that drive the industry, and more. If you are interested in farming, this book will be of interest to you…