By Daniel Nayeri
This is a marvelous book! Daniel Nayeri tells the story of his family background and his growing up years in Edmond, Oklahoma, after fleeing from Iran with his mother and older sister. It is a most unusual book with the directness that he addresses the reader, in telling one story after another of their family background, and events both in Iran and in Oklahoma. So good!
By Charles Spurgeon
Lectures to My Students is a classic book by the classic preacher, Charles Spurgeon. Written in the late nineteenth century, it is somewhat dated now. Some chapters are of little use, such as his two chapters on open air preaching and three or four chapters on illustrations. However, there is gold in those hills! Spurgeon was so godly, so close to Christ, so brilliant, so good with words that from time-to-time there are classic gems.
The book is mostly on preaching as opposed to pastoring in general, though it does include pastoring. I read this as a young preacher and now listened to it in my older years. It is worth going through once by every devoted preacher.
By Jason Grimsley
This is a riveting biography of a Major League Baseball pitcher, who experienced the highest highs and the lowest lows.
Jason has lived an incredible life. This is his story.
He was an unusual boy who lived life at full speed and reckless abandon. He should have died many times. But God. He was abused by a neighbor boy, and that abuse would be buried and poison him.
He made the majors. He married a wonderful woman. He was part of two World Series Championships with the NY Yankees and spent 17 years in the majors. But did he ever crash. Alcohol, drugs, infidelity, a suicide attempt.
But at his lowest God delivers him. God uses the forgiving love of his wife Dana to rescue him.
This is a powerful book: The grace of God. The love of a good woman. The healing of a man and his family.
(The book will be published this fall – 2022. )
By Philip Yancey
Philip Yancey has written a score of brilliant, best-selling books. Billy Graham called him the world’s best living Christian author. I have been a huge fan of his writing.
This is his memoir. It is a tough book. An incredibly sad story in so many ways. The memoir focuses on his childhood through college, and afterwards, on his older brother Marshall and his mother.
His dad died of polio when Yancey was an infant. His impoverished mother remains single and tries to raise her two sons as a Bible teacher in the Atlanta area. They forever struggle with money. Mostly live in a small trailer home. They attend fundamentalist and racist Baptist churches. Their mother is angry, self-righteous, verbally abusive and hypocritical. She inflicts deep wounds on her two sons. The oldest, Marshall, never recovers. That Philip Yancey became an influential Christian writer, the most influential of his day, is a gift of grace.
The memoir is searingly honest, vulnerable, transparent. That’s Yancey.
He takes us through the pain of his childhood, the ungrace of the fundamentalist churches, his doubts and wanderings during his years at a legalistic Bible college, the brilliance of his gifted older brother, the incredibly sad life of that tormented, unforgiving, wounded brother (he hasn’t spoken to his mother in 50 years), Yancey meeting his future wife in his college years and falling deeply in love (they’ve been married now for 50 years), and God’s grace in his life, revealing his love and mercy.
One reviewer says: This “could be a Faulkner novel, with racist preachers, off-kilter parenting, tormented siblings, and religious hypocrisy right and left.”
Another: This “is a stunning memoir – beautifully written, transparent and vulnerable, raw and honest, evocative and unforgettable. It is the book Philip Yancey had to write, and the book we needed him to write.”
By Richard Bauckham
The Theology of the Book of Revelation is a brief but scholarly book on the theology of the Book of Revelation. This is not a commentary. It is a theology.
Richard Bauckham is a superb British scholar, and he does a masterful job in this brief book. He takes five or six key things or ideas and unpacks them masterfully.