Update on Reading Goals for the Year

At the start of the year I posted some 2013 reading goals here.

It is amazing what a non-sleeping-infant can do to reading goals (our third child, born Jan 2013, has just begun sleeping through the night in the last month). It's hard to read ancient works when you are sleepy. I hope we can chalk this year up as a loss on reading, but an investment in eternity (amen).

But it wasn't a total loss, as some progress was made. So here's what i've covered so far from the original post:

PLUTARCH: Have progressed steadily through volume one. probably 3/4ths of the way through. Long way to go, but making progress. Have found some fascinating stories along the way.

CHURCHILL: Not much progress here. Read a couple of a pages last week. Maybe 50 pages total.

JOSEPHUS: Have read very little from this. Maybe 20 pages total. But this one isn't the same kind of loss. My daily goal is to read regularly from a church history work. Instead of reading from Josephus, I've turned my attention to finishing a book begun a few years ago, Turning Points in Church History by Mark Noll. Tremendous read and a great overview of some of the most significant events in the history of the Christian Church. 1/2 way through that. Also about 1/2 way through Paschal's Penses (which I have quoted from a few times on this blog and likely will continue to do so), which isn't technically church history, but definitely significant historically.

SCHAEFFER: Currently re-reading How Shall We Then Live? From Volume 5. Discussing with a co-worker.

GREEK NT: Almost through the book of Matthew. Far below the desired amount, but some progress. 

I plan to post soon about reading goals for the coming year as well as some book reviews from the previous year, my top books from 2013.

The little moments that touch the soul

Last night, as my daughter was preparing for bed, she said the following:

"I really really love you daddy." 

Then she paused and said, "And I love purple and blue and pink." Okay...

Then, after a longer pause, she whispered with a sheepish little smile, "And I love Jesus!"

Then she said "I like that people share. I like that momma shares her things with Holly (neighbor) and Holly shares her things with momma."

Man... did I just hear that? What a blessing.

On a related (i.e. touching) but different level, a friend sent me this video emphasizing the power of passing down a legacy:

And this apple add has a similar punch. Definitely moved my tear glands to action.

A visit from the good Doctor

One of my favorite people on the planet was in town today to talk about his new book, The Poverty of Nations. Dr. Wayne Grudem was my mentor, professor, and friend at Phoenix Seminary. Thankfully, we've been able to keep in touch since returning to Little Rock. After picking him up from the airport, he joined us for dinner last night in our home.

Caroline, Dr. Grudem, and John Isaac

Some wonderful conversations with a brilliant man with a deep burden for prayer and a sincere love of Jesus Christ.

In studio

He recorded a few radio programs today with Dennis Rainey and Bob Lepine.

Bob - Wayne - Dennis

And here's the book. Make sure to pick it up. Very insightful. Our friend from Rwanda, Alphonse, has read it and found it to be a helpful assessment of the problem and an encouragement that things might be able to improve one day.

Kon-Tiki

My wife posted this excellent overview of the book Kon-Tiki. You'll be glad you checked it out.

Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert

Rosaria Butterfield was a self proclaimed lesbian and feminist working as an English professor at Syracuse University. When Promise Keepers came to town in the 90's, she wrote an article for the local paper criticizing the event being held on campus. What happened next is a wonderful display of the power of the gospel at work through hospitality and friendship. Here's some of the transcript from her interview on FamilyLife Today:

[NOTE: I've excerpted and edited a longer section of the transcript. If you don't make it to the end, make sure to skip ahead for the links to the audio!!!!]

Bob: Your editorial said: “Syracuse should have nothing to do with these patriarchs coming to our campus.”

Rosaria: I got all kinds of responses and had two boxes— One, I kept for hate mail. One, I kept for fan mail. Then, this one letter came in. It wasn’t hate mail, and it wasn’t fan mail. I had to figure out what to do with it.

Bob: And the first thing you did with it was wad it up and throw it away?

Rosaria: Yes, absolutely; absolutely.

Bob: Well, what did this letter, that didn’t fit either box, say?

Rosaria: Well, it was kind; and it was gentle. Yet, it was also clearly written from a Christian world and life view. It was from Ken Smith, who is my dear friend and became my first pastor. But at that time, he was just this dude who wrote me a letter. It asked me some basic questions that were genuine questions, and he wasn’t answering those questions for me. I admired that. I really liked that.

I [also] admired the fact that here was somebody who knew a lot about the Bible. I was going to need to read the Bible for my new research project; and I thought, “Well, you know, I’ll bet this is somebody who could help me with my research.” At the bottom of the letter, Ken asked me to call him back; and so, I did. I thought these were questions that needed to be aired on the phone. We had such a lively conversation on the phone—that he invited me to come to his house for dinner.

Sometimes, people don’t know this—but the gay and lesbian community is also a community quite given to hospitality. I tell people this—that I’m a pastor’s wife now. I believe, strongly, that hospitality is just the ground zero of the Christian life, and of evangelism, and of everything else that we do, apart from the formal worship of God. But I tell people that I honed my hospitality gifts in my former queer community. So, when Ken invited me to have dinner with him—that seemed really like a great idea. He already seemed like my kind of people.

Here’s what I discovered in Ken’s house. That door was ALWAYS opening and closing. People, from all walks of life—I met them at that table. I did not meet Christians who shared a narrowly-bounded, priggish world view. That is not what I met. I met people who could talk openly about sexuality and politics and did not drop down dead in the process.

But you have to understand that was normal for Ken. Ken didn’t say: “Oh great! We’re going to have the lesbian over for dinner. Let’s be sure to share the Gospel as soon as she walks through the door!” or, “Let’s....” He—this was normal for Ken. Ken cares about the heart. In fact, I found Ken’s business card in one of the books I was looking at for some writing that I’m doing. The business card said: “When you’re ready to talk about God, give me a call.” That’s what the business card says. It’s just—that’s how Ken was. It is how Ken is.

They did two startling things the first time I had dinner at their house—two things that were against the rule book that I believed all Christians followed. They did not share the Gospel with me, and they did not invite me to church. But, at the end of our dinner, when Ken extended his hands, and I closed mine in it, he said: “We’re neighbors. Neighbors should be friends.” I found myself being in complete agreement with Ken.

Also, Ken had a way of asking questions; and he had an authority—you know, I had been in a queer community. I had been in a feminist community. In my community, women ran the show. I had not encountered a man like Ken in my whole life.

I found that his gentle authority—that when he asked me a question—in fact, I left his house that night and I thought: “I cannot believe you said those things, Rosaria! Why did you give him all that material?!” I found myself actually answering his questions honestly instead of answering with the programmed party line.

[Later Bob asks if Ken prayed before the meal...]

Rosaria: That’s right. And you know what? I had heard plenty of prayers before—Planned Parenthood, gay pride marches—you know the prayers that the crumbs are there for the heathen, like me, to hear.

That was not Ken’s prayer. It was vulnerable and honest. He prayed to a God Who is not a god I had ever been introduced to. One of the things Ken asked me that night— and I still cannot believe I actually answered him honestly!—I mean, it was just so—it was so out of character for me—but he asked me—he said: “Well, what do you really believe? I mean, do you really—you know, you just really don’t believe in anything? What do you really believe?” I said: “I don’t know what I believe. I was raised Catholic, and I’m now a Unitarian. I don’t really know what I believe,” which was true but not anything I had said out loud. 

As promised, that was a long excerpt. All three days of the programs are just amazing to listen to.

MAKE SURE TO CHECK THEM OUT HERE: 
The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert audio and transcripts

You can also order her book by the same title here.

And read her interview with Marvin Olasky in World Magazine.

The powerful part of all this is the example it sets for all followers of Jesus. Open your door and your table. Don't vilify those who have made different lifestyle choices, instead, reach out to them and love on them. Get to know them, sincerely, and, as Ken Smith said, be a neighbor.

A Restored Marriage

FamilyLife Today recently aired an inspring and moving program on the power of the gospel to change a marriage. It is a series of interviews with a couple on staff here at FamilyLife, Sandy and Cheryl Spangler (Cheryl passed away earlier this year). The story is primarily about how God used the Weekend to Remember to rescue their marriage from the brink of divorce. And the last is a touching tribute from her step-son given at her funeral. I listened to all four programs during a bike ride one morning and was crying like a baby through the last two. Yes, it was embarrassing. 

Program Links

First three programs about their marriage: Parts 1,2 & 3

A tribute from Cheryl’s step-son after she died from cancer: Part 4

Expulsive Power of a New Affection

The Expulsive Power of a New Affection - Thomas Chalmers Quote

"It is seldom that any of our bad habits or flaws disappear by a mere process of natural extinction at least it is very seldom that this is done by the instrumentality of reasoning, or by the force of mental determination,

But - what cannot be destroyed may be dispossessed, and one taste may be made to give way to another and to lose its power entirely as the reigning affection of the mind.

The boy, who ceases at length to be a slave to his appetite does so because a more mature taste has brought it into subordination. The young man may cease to idolize sensual pleasure, but it is because the idol of wealth has gotten the ascendancy, so the love of money can cast out the love of sloth. However, even the love of money can cease to have mastery over the heart if it is drawn into the world of ideology and politics and he is now lorded over by a love of power and moral superiority. But there is not one of these transformations in which the heart is left without an object.

The heart's desire for an ultimate object may be conquered, but it's desire to have SOME object is unconquerable. The only way to dispossess the heart of an old affection is through the expulsive power of a new one.

It is therefore only when admitted into the number of God's children through faith in Jesus Christ that the spirit of adoption is poured out on us -- it is then that the heart, brought under the mastery of one great, predominate, and supreme affection is delivered from the tyranny of all its former desires and the only way that deliverance is possible.

Therefore, it is not enough to hold out to your people the mirror of their own imperfections. It is not enough to come forth with a demonstration of the effanecent character of their enjoyments, or to speak to their consciences of their follies.

Rather, make every legitimate method of finding access to their hearts for the love of him who is greater than the world."

Paschal on Identity in Christ

"Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves. Thus without Scripture, whose only object is Christ, we know nothing and can see nothing but obscurity and confusion in the nature of God and in nature itself."

Paschal on tensions

"Christianity is strange; it bids man to recognize that he is vile, and even abominable, and bids him want to be like God. Without such a counterweight his exultation would make him horribly vain or his abasement horribly abject. "

"There is no doctrine better suited to a man than that which teaches him his dual capacity for receiving and losing grace, on account of the dual danger to which he is always exposed of despair or pride."

Pensees p110 - folio edition

Plutarch on the Centrality of Character in Leadership

From Plutarch, on Pericles' (c.495-429 BC) character and leadership in ancient Greece

After this [i.e. overseeing the building of Athens] he was no longer the same man he had been before, nor as tame and gentle and familiar s formerly with the populace, so as readily to yield to their pleasures and to comply with the desires of the multitude, as a steersman shifts with the winds. Quitting that loose, remiss and, in some cases, licentious court of the popular will, he turned those soft and flowery modulations to the austerity of aristocratical and regal rule; and employing this uprightly and undeviatingly for the country's best inters, he was able generally to lead the people alone with their own wills and consents, by persuading and showing them what was to be done; and sometimes, too, urging and pressing them forward extremely against their will, he made them, whether they would or no, yield submission to what was for their advantage. In which, to say the truth, he did but like a skillful physician, who, in a complicated and chronic disease, as he sees occasion, at one while allows his patient the moderate use of such things as please him, at another while gives him keen pains and drugs to work the cure. For there arising and growing up as was natural all manner of distempered feelings among a people which had so vast a command and dominion, he alone, as a great master, knowing how to handle and deal fitly with each one of them, and in an especial manner making that use of hopes and fear, as his two chief rudders, with the one to check the career of their confidence at any time, with the other to raise them up and cheer them, when under any discouragement, plainly showed by this, that rhetoric, or that art of speaking, is, in Plato's language, the government of the souls of men, and that her chief business is to address the affections and passions, which are as it were the strings and keys to the soul, and require a skillful and careful touch to be played on as they should be. The source of this predominance was not barely his power of language, but, as Thucydides assures us, the reputation of his life, and the confidence felt in his character; his manifest freedom from every kind of corruption, and superiority to all considerations of money. Notwithstanding he had made the city Athens, which was great of itself, as great and rich as can be imagined, and though he were himself in power and interest more than equal to many kings and absolute rulers, who some of them also bequeathed by will their power to their children, he, for his part, did not make the patrimony his father left him greater than it was by one drachma.

Plutarch contemplating his letters, a bust of a bearded man in a toga, and a two handled bowl.