Review: “Invest Your Suffering”

Review

Invest Your Suffering

Paul Mallard, Inter-Varsity Press, Nottingham, 2013, 192 pp.Invest_your_suffering_1024x1024

 

Every writing pastor seems to put out a book on two themes. One is marriage. Another is suffering. Judging from the prologues, the process goes something like this: they give a sermon series; it’s popular (who isn’t interested in these topics?); they turn the series into a book. (more…)

Reviewing Hope Beyond Cure

Review, Sola Panel

Cancer has become the leading cause of death in Australia and almost every other country, according to a major international World Health Organization (WHO) study (link to report). Everyone knows someone who is impacted. Sadly too many! And—to state the obvious—not everyone gets better from a cancer diagnosis. (more…)

Book review: “The Intolerance of Tolerance” by DA Carson

Review

 THE INTOLERANCE OF TOLERANCE

DA CARSON, EERDMANS, 2012, 186PP.

Intolerance of Tolerance

You might have noticed a strange kind of double-speak going on around us. If you dare to hold a different opinion to the broader culture on a contentious issue, whether on marriage, sexuality, God or something else, you have a reasonable chance of being told to keep quiet because you’re being intolerant. I’m not talking about sanctioning or acting against those with whom you disagree; just holding a different position. If you dare to point out that perhaps your alternative views ought to be tolerated—well, heaven help you. (more…)

Book Review: “Loving the way Jesus loves” by Philip Ryken

Review

LOVING THE WAY JESUS LOVES

PHILIP RYKEN, CROSSWAY, 2012, 224PP.

LovingTheWayJesusLoves

I’m doing everything I can to stop a particular phrase that’s going around my part of the world: “we just need to love on those people.” I don’t mind when we try to express a sentiment in a shorthand way, even if it is grammatically horrific. But when it comes to exhorting people to love others, I am convinced that most of us have not a clue what that actually means. I really don’t know how or what it is to “love on” people. (more…)

Review: Outreach and the Artist

Review

Con Campbell is a man of diverse talents: he is a respected jazz musician, a world class New Testament scholar, and a gifted communicator. He was an artist before he was a Christian. All these things make him one of the best people I can think of to write a book on evangelism and the artist. (more…)

Book review: “Modest: Men and women clothed in the gospel”

Review

If the Holy Spirit was my personal shopper I wouldn’t have a problem. Long pants: modest. Short shorts: immodest. Long sleeve shirt: modest. Plunging neckline: immodest.
Modesty seems obvious, and would be simple if I could just get the right skirt length and be done with it—unfortunately the heart issue is more complicated. This is what Tim Challies and RW Glenn explore in Modest. (more…)

Bookstall on Holiness

Life, Review, Sola Panel

I’m compiling a reading list for the bookstall on our church conference (camp, house party or whatever you call it!) on the topic of holiness and santification. (more…)

Review: One Forever

Resource Talk, Review

Sam Freney: Your new book One Forever: The transforming power of being in Christ is about ‘union with Christ’. This is a topic that theologians get excited One Foreverabout, but why should the rest of us care? (more…)

Chappo and the magic potion

Pastoral Ministry, Review

I’m not sure John Chapman would have approved of this article, on two counts. For a start, it speaks more positively of him than he would have been comfortable with; but more particularly, this article tries to do two things at once, a vice that Chappo decried in many a trainee preacher. (more…)

Child-bearing for the uninitiated

Resource Talk

Last time I wrote something for this column, I wrote about a book that deals with problems and questions I face in my own life (God’s Good Design). This time I’m writing about a book that’s not really for me. In Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: Ethics and the beginning of human life, Dr Megan Best writes about the stuff that married (or about-to-get married) people need to know—things like contraception, pregnancy, infertility and IVF. She wrote the book “in response to many requests from Christians who are struggling to find the information they need to think clearly about the morality of reproductive technology” (p. 9). I’m not married and I have no children. I’m hardly the target audience for this book, yet it fascinated me. (more…)

The devil made me read it?

Review


Silencing Satan: Handbook of Biblical Demonology

Sharon Beekmann and Peter Bolt.

Wipf and Stock, 2012, 234 pp.

The Sam Freney who first came to know Christ was an arrogant young man in late high school, thoroughly self-assured, and convinced of the rightness of Western modernism and the superiority of reason above any kind of mysticism or kooky spirituality. In other words, a pretty typical white Anglo-Saxon Australian teenage male. (I like to think I’ve changed since then, at least a little. At minimum, I’m not a teenager any more.) (more…)