Book Review: “Come and See"

“Come and See: A History of Theology of Mission”

By Glen Scrivener and Justin Schell

Published by Union Publishing, 2022.

The aim of “Come and See” is laid out on page one: “to help you grasp what God is after in the world.” What a beautiful purpose with which to write. And what an amazing purpose to be on the receiving end of, because what Christian does not want or need a biblical reminder of what God is up to in the world?

After a brief introduction Scrivener and Schell set out to meet that purpose. Over the course of twelve chapters and one-hundred-twenty-three pages, they cover an incredible number of topics, all serving that one goal. They examine the doctrine of God and mission, the Old Testament and mission, the New Testament and mission, a history of mission, the influence of the reformation on mission, the church and mission and much more.

Now, if that sounds like a lot of different aspects of mission to cover in one book, it is. Through the years I have found a lot of reward in studying the mission of God and the missionary movements. By my own slow reader standards, I have read a lot of books on mission. Books about the history of mission, books about the Bible and mission and books about the different philosophies of mission. But I have rarely found a book like this one, that puts so many aspects of mission into the same book binding.

Of course, Scrivener and Shell are not able to go into the same kind detail that many of those single aspect books do. For example, they don’t have the space to examine the history of mission in the same detail as Stephen Neill does in a book like, “A History of Christian Missions.” Still, the detail that they are able to go into is beyond impressive, making for an exceptionally well-rounded book.

On top of that, they write in ways that exude experience, knowledge and white-hot passion for the subject at hand, and furthermore for the author of that subject. You cannot read what they write without catching their excitement on every page, for God and His mission.

Whatever you end up paying for “Come and See,” its worth it. You will get your money’s worth simply because of how much solid biblical content on such a variety of aspects of mission is packed into a short book. You will also get your money’s worth because they really do accomplish what they set out to accomplish. When I finally put this book down, I did so with a fresh, overflowing excitement for exactly what God is after in the world.

Another book I recommend to… every Christian (and non).

Book Review: “The God of the Mundane"

“The God of the Mundane: Reflections on Ordinary Life for Ordinary People”

By Matthew B. Redmond

Re-Published by Cruciform Press, 2021.

Equally convicting and encouraging.

I will be honest, I did not go into this book expecting too much. I am generally drawn to titles like “Radical,” “Crazy Love,” “Don’t Waste Your Life,” etc. Books that I expect are going to call me to some new and gnarly heights. Not ones that sound like they are aimed at comforting me in my normality. Well, 1) the aim of this book was definitely not to comfort me in my normality, and 2) this was truly the most radical book I have read in a long time.

I can’t remember the last time I finished a book and felt so laid bare, and yet so stoked at the same time. “The God of the Mundane” exposed so much of the unhealthy and ungodly ambition that has lived in me for so long. It also stirred up in me a new excitement for all that God has done and can do through the ordinary activities of my life and through all of the mundanity of my days.

The book is quite perfectly titled. Redmond’s mission in this book is, as the title suggests, is to talk about the God of the Mundane; to talk about how God is concerned with, involved with, and working in the things that take up most of our time on earth. He is not only involved with extraordinary accomplishments, as our ambitions often suggest, but He is also the God of the the diaper changes, the lawn mowings, the friend hangouts, the meal preps and the long drives. He is present and active in the big stuff, and He is right there in the little stuff.

This simple truth was so unbelievably reassuring to me. My sights are most often set on the crazy and the radical. So much so, that at times I forget that God even cares of about the quieter parts of my life, much less is active in them!

All this to say, I loved this book. I will repeatedly read this book. And I highly recommend this book.

My guess is that most of us get to focused at times on the radical and forget how much God cares about the mundane. Because of that, I think this this book will resonate will almost every Christian. And since its only 130 pages, it is accessible to almost every Christian too.

I seem to keep recommending every book I review lately, but I just keep reading books that are worth recommending. This is another one.

Book Review: “Weakness Our Strength"

BOOK REVIEW

“Weakness Our Strength: Learning from Christ Crucified”

By John Hindley

Published by Union Press, 2024

I started this book during a six-week sabbatical from my role as Pastor. I went into both the sabbatical and the book a little tired, a little worn out, and longing for some rejuvenation. As I sit today in my office typing, I am three days away from the end of my sabbatical, and honestly, I don’t feel too different than I did six weeks ago. Still tired, still worn out. And yet, I am excited to return to the pulpit. I am ready to go, like a horse in the starting gate. Not because my weakness has been suddenly turned into strength, but because I have been reminded through these six weeks that my weakness is a chance to witness and experience HIS strength.

That may seem like an obvious truth, especially for a pastor, but somewhere along the way I forgot it. Thankfully God is in the business of reminding us of the important things that we too often forget, and thankfully there are people like John Hindley writing honest and Christ-centred books that become tools in God’s hands.

All that to say, I have found “Weakness Our Strength” to be a tremendous book for several reasons. Right from the beginning John writes in such a transparent and relatable way that every paragraph feels like a coffee with a friend, and with a friend who is going through what I am going through. He also writes about biblical truths in such a simple, straightforward and Gospel saturated way that every chapter feels like its own devotional experience. It is not a long book, but it took a six-week sabbatical for me to read, having to keep setting it down in order to pray and open up the Scriptures.

I came away from “Weakness Our Strength” with one simple revelation. One that is all over the pages of the Scripture, and yet one that I forget so quickly. One that has made my sabbatical everything I prayed it would be. Simply this, that God is my strength.

Weakness proves to be a beautiful thing when it brings us to, “rely not on ourselves but on God” (2 Corinthians 1.9). Because then and only then can we know true strength. God’s strength. As the apostle Paul so perfectly wrote, “For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12.10).

J.I. Packer, a Skateboard and the Bible

When I was four my parents took me into my first skateboard shop and bought me my first skateboard. I guess it was a big moment in my little life, because everything about it has always stayed with me. I can still picture the layout of the room. I can still see the worker reaching up with some kind of long metal instrument to bring the board down off the wall. I can still remember the board itself, black and neon green with the words Hot Stick written across the bottom in a kind of Friday the 13th styled lettering. And most importantly I can still feel that feeling of pure excitement as I got on the board for the first time and headed down the hill with my parents jogging to keep pace beside me.

Ever since that early memory, I have always had in me this gnawing and drawing desire to find more and more adventure. I don’t know if my parents buying me a skateboard at four years old was the catalyst for it or if they were just responding to what they could already see growing in me; but either way, the yearning for and pursuit of excitement has never waned. I think it is for this reason that school always proved difficult for me. It just felt boring. Reading books and learning equations felt dull and tedious. I wanted to be outside on a skateboard, or up the mountain on skis, or on the water behind the boat. I wanted to be thrilled.

Now I tell you all that not for no reason, but because it has a lot to do with how and why I started really following Jesus and then how and why I became obsessed with studying God’s Word.

Half-hearted at best

I became a Christian like lots of little kids do who have parents and/or grandparents that love Jesus. Being maybe six or seven years old (a few years after the skateboard purchase), I sat on the side of the spare bed in my grandpa’s house and prayed along with him, asking Jesus to forgive my sins. For many years after that, based on that moment and prayer, I called myself a Christian. Whether I truly was or not I don’t know, but what I do know is that I definitely was not thrilled about any part of the Christian life. At best I gave it all a half-hearted effort. It was again the same situation as school, it just felt boring.

Skipping ahead a bunch of years and over a bunch of situations and circumstances, I ended up reaching the ripe old age of twenty-four years and I found myself back in school and sitting in a Bible College classroom. If you’re thinking that something must have drastically changed in terms of that need for excitement for me to have ended up in a college classroom, well you are wrong. Nothing changed. On a kind of whim, I followed some friends to Bible College just for something to do because I wasn’t doing anything else, and in every class I attended I wondered why I was there and how fast I could unenroll, get my surfboard and get to the ocean.

That Class on John

But then one day, against all odds, all of a sudden something did change. In fact, everything changed. I enrolled in a class simply called The Gospel of John. As I am sure you can guess by the course title, the class was aimed at one thing and one thing only: studying the Gospel of John. It was the first time I had taken a strictly Bible class, and it proved to be the most important class I would ever take. Just like remembering that skate shop when I was four, I remember everything about that class on John. I remember where I sat in the square seating arrangement. I remember where other people sat in the square, and what books we were assigned to read. And most importantly I remember the feelings that I felt from the first moments of the first class and on: pure, unadulterated thrill.

Having had spent my life up to that point incessantly pursuing the feeling of thrill, I knew exactly what it felt like so I knew precisely when I had found it. And while I never in a million years expected to find it in the confines of a second level classroom on the campus of a small Bible College, that is absolutely and completely what I found.

Just to be clear, the professor didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. He didn’t show up on a skateboard or drop down out of a hole in the ceiling. He just showed up, prayed and began teaching us about John’s gospel. He spoke about contexts and backgrounds; He unpacked terms and metaphors. He explained the double entendres and John’s literary techniques. And through all of it, He made the story of Jesus come alive; He made God’s Word and the Gospel story it tells come alive. For the first time in my life I realized some seemingly simple or obvious things, like that there was history behind the stories in the Bible, and history that I could learn about. That there was actual meaning in the texts that really could be uncovered beyond just what I thought or felt they meant. All of this was a new revelation to me, and the result was a realness to who God was and what He had done. And there arose in me a newfound obsession with studying the Scriptures, and seeking to know the God of whom they spoke.

I began everyday sitting down with the Bible, opening piles of commentaries and books and just reading and studying and meditating on it all, believing for the first time that I really could come to know Him through His Word. And as I would sit their sifting through the pages of the Bible, God seemed nearer than He ever had before, His gospel became more and more powerful and heavy on my soul, and I found that I could only explain what I felt in one way: as I drew closer and closer to Him through His Word I over and over discovered the same thrill, only magnified, that I had felt and chased for years on skateboards, on surfboards, on skis and behind boats.

Today

Fast-forward, I am now thirty-nine years old. I still skateboard every morning before work. I am still on the ski hill in the winters and still in the ocean whenever I find myself near one. And yet now I know that those things could all go away, and I would be fine, because the feelings they produce are no longer what I am after. Not because I got old and boring (though that is possible), but because I found the superior adventure and excitement. On that day in Bible College and through the classes that followed, I found an infinitely more satisfying, unfading, ever-increasing thrill of which I have never stopped pursuing, and it is this: knowing God.

Shocking new to some, I am still in school, still in Bible classes, and everyday the most exciting thing I do is to study God’s Word, aiming and desiring to come to know Him more and more fully. And it is without question the most exciting pursuit I have ever and will ever experience on this side of the new heavens and new earth.

You know I used to quote famous skateboarders to sum up my life. Now I quote men like J.I. Packer, because now I understand what they meant, and I feel what many of them so perfectly identified: “Knowing God is a relationship calculated to thrill a man's heart.[1]”

[1] J.I. Packer, Knowing God (InterVarsity: Chicago, 1973), 36.

To Live MUST Be Christ

Seasons of suffering do not always produce our clearest and most logical thoughts. The coming together of things like shock, sadness, anger, and confusion can sometimes lead to some wildly unhealthy and even irrational conclusions and decisions. And yet, I would argue that those difficult seasons of our lives can also end up being the moments when we see things with a surprising amount of clarity.

THE MONTH OF FEBRUARY

On February 4th, 2024, I went to the hospital to have a lump looked at. I expected to be home that evening with some medication to take care of a very mundane diagnosis. However, things do not always happen as we expect them to. That initial visit began for me a cascade of tests and appointments. The emergency room visit led to an ultrasound; the ultrasound led to another doctor’s appointment; that appointment led to a meeting with a specialist; the meeting with a specialist led to surgery; surgery led to more tests and scans; tests and scans led to lots of waiting, and all of which together led to the longest month of my life. Ill have you know that in my little part of North America, February is routinely the coldest month of the year, which seems to always make it the longest month of the year (even with only 28 or 29 days). As it would happen, February 2024 was the warmest February my town had experienced in ages, but the longest February I had ever lived.

Pretty early into the journey of tests and appointments I became aware of the expected diagnosis, and it wasn’t great. The effect of this knowledge was a flood of emotions and a spinning mind. I quickly called my elders team to request relief from preaching for the foreseeable future because I was finding myself unable to focus on anything except the situation before me. For days on end, I did nothing but walk. I would set out in the morning into the mountains and spend 8 hours of the work day walking in silence down dirt roads, petitioning the Lord and trying to come to grips with the likelihood of a shortened life. If you would have asked me in those days while I was walking those long dirt roads, if I was thinking clearly, I probably would have said “Unlikely.” Even while I was going through it, I could recognize in myself the list that I began with: shock, sadness, anger and confusion. This cocktail of emotions had me far too preoccupied to be imparting much wisdom or making any life-changing decisions. And yet, as I look back on my journal entries from that month, I realize that in some ways I was thinking about my life with a clarity that I’d never had before.

I won’t make a habit of sharing my journal on the internet, but for the sake of the topic let me share a brief exert. February 6th, while sitting on a flat rock on a mountain side with a Bible flipped open to Mark 8.34 and Philippians 1.21 on my mind, I wrote, “I have never been more sure that death is real. I have never been more sure that Jesus lives. This season of life has changed death for me. And it has changed life for me. To die is inevitably a gain. And to live must be Christ. Anything less makes no sense. If God died for me, if He lives, if I will be raised up with Him, if He is all satisfying, good and sufficient, how could He have half of me and the world have the rest? How could fear and worry have any place in me? How could my life not be surrendered completely in joy? Either I would I have missed who Jesus is and what He has done and promised, or I have would have failed to believe it.”

THE POWER OF facing your mortality

If you haven’t guessed yet, I was diagnosed with cancer. As I type here on the morning of March 11th, just over one month after the original diagnosis, I have been declared cancer free. I still have some hoops to jump through, but for the most part I have a clean bill of health, for which I am thankful beyond what words can even express. Maybe some what oddly though, I am also thankful for everything that has led up to this point. I wouldn’t trade February 2024 for anything. It was this trial and all the pain and uncertainty it entailed that led me to thinking about the gospel in ways that I pray I will never recover from.

You see, before this whole cancer thing, death to me was just other people’s reality. As a pastor I would go deal with it on their behalf, but it never felt too real for me personally. It was something abstract, even kind of theoretical. The result, I realize now looking back, was a very cavalier following of Jesus. No real urgency. No Psalm 42 like desperation. No comprehensive surrender. And it makes sense, because without a real sense of death and just how certain it is and deserving of it we are, how can we ever truly appreciate the life Jesus came to give us?

So, there I was, just casually following Jesus, trusting more in myself then not. Following Jesus at a safe distance. And then cancer hit, and suddenly death felt like it was on my doorstep, or I on its. For the first time the end felt absolutely real; my life felt fragile and finite, and the gospel, and in particular the cost of following Jesus, made more sense than it ever had.

Let me try to explain. In Mark 8.34 Jesus lays out the requirements of anyone that would want to follow Him, and it is nothing short of everything. He calls them to deny themselves and take up their crosses, which is to essentially say, “You must throw your life away and recklessly abandon yourself to God.” That is a steep price to follow. It couldn’t be any steeper. Who on earth would pay that price? Well, only the one who understands the value of what they are receiving. Jesus goes on to say in the next verse, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” In other words, what is being received in the relinquishment of our lives is not just some added happiness, it is life itself. True life, eternal life, new life in Christ. A gift of infinite value!

Well if you are receiving something that is worth more than anything, what happens to the cost of that something? It disappears. And when the value of the life Jesus offers is understood, then the cost of following Him is no longer even worthy of being called a cost. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer so perfectly put it, “Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life worth living.”

THE COST, NAY, THE GRACE OF FOLLOWING JESUS

Here’s the thing, I had loved and followed Jesus for many years. I had contemplated and rested in the Gospel for many years. But I had always wavered in how much of my life I gave to Christ and how much I held back. Simply, because while never really comprehending the reality of the death I deserve, I had never understood the value of and felt the consequent gratitude for the life that Jesus gives. But when death became for me a real reality and an immediate possibility, then the abundant life that Jesus died to give me (the already and not yet) finally appeared as the real, invaluable, undeserving, and infinite gift that it truly is. And when that happened, the incredible cost of following Him dissolved into worship. It became the only logical response. The cost, as Bonhoeffer explains, was transformed from cost into grace.

It is probably good that I wasn’t operating heavy machinery last month. But in terms of thinking about Jesus and about my living and dying, I don’t believe I have ever thought so clearly as when I sat on a mountainside and paraphrased for myself the apostle Paul, “To die is inevitably a gain. And to live must be Christ. Anything less makes no sense.”