My recent sabbatical was a gift in many ways, one of which was unhurried time for reading good books. I thought I would share some gleanings with four recommendations for your reading list.
- Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools by Tyler Staton, Zondervan Books, 2022.
Tyler Staton is the lead pastor of Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon, and he is the National Director of the 24-7 Prayer movement in the United States (24-7 Prayer produces the Lectio 365 App that many at Waterstone enjoy for their daily time with the Lord).
Pete Greig, founder of 24-7 Prayer International, wrote this endorsement of Tyler’s book with which I wholeheartedly agree:
I particularly appreciated the practical exercises at the end of each chapter, as well as the closing section about the lost art of praying for the lost. Tyler serves up the full menu of prayer—from deep contemplative practices to teaching about the power and necessity of intercessory prayer. There’s something here for everyone. It’s both an on-ramp for those new to faith who are seeking to grow in a conversational relationship with the Lord and a master class for Christians who are seeking to be stretched and inspired.
I found the book to be a fresh invitation and application of the ancient and proven paths of prayer to our hurried, scattered and distracted lives today.
Here’s an excerpt from his chapter, “Ask, Seek, Knock” where Tyler writes about persistence in prayer.
Scripture makes it clear that God collects two things—prayers and tears. This world in its current form is passing away, but our prayers and tears are eternal.
God collects our prayers. In Revelation, we are offered a glimpse at the receiving end of our prayers: “The twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls of incense, which are the prayers of the God’s people” (Revelation 5:8). Do you realize what this means? It means every prayer you’ve ever whispered, from the simplest throwaway request to the most heartfelt cry, God has collected it like a grandmother who scrapbooks a toddler’s finger paints and scribbles. God has treasured up every prayer we’ve ever uttered, even the ones we’ve forgotten, and he’s still weaving their fulfillment, bending history in the direction of a great yes to you and me…
At the proper time, God is tipping the bowl (see Revelation 8:3-5), pouring out our requests on the earth. He has collected every prayer we’ve ever prayed, and redemption comes when he rains down those prayers on the earth once and for all. The renewal of the world, heaven and earth restored as one, begins with God pouring out all the prayers of his children like a purifying fire with one great, resounding yes. Every prayer in the end is an answered prayer. Some are still awaiting that yes, but it’s coming. That’s the kind of “judge” we’re dealing with.
God collects more than just the words wedged between “Dear God” and “Amen” though. He also collects our tears. Psalm 56:8 reads, “You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?”
Prayer is asking, looking down from the vantage point of heaven and pointing God into the mess. But prayer is also weeping—in the middle of a mess so thick we can’t see up, but can only scream through tears, “Lord, I can’t bear it any longer!”
The psalmist tells us in Psalm 126:5, “Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy.” Not only will God collect every tear, but he’ll redeem every tear. God is not merely bottling up our tears. He also promises that when they touch the earth, they will bring renewal. Every tear of ours that falls to the ground will grow the fruit of redemption. God bends history so that the moments of greatest pain become the moments of greatest redemption, twisting the story to be sure that the pain we feel releases the power of new life, and the tears we cry become the foundation of a better world. We are promised that a day is coming when the Father himself will wipe away every tear from our eyes. But until then, we live on an in-between promise: “I will not let a single one of your tears be wasted” (pages 177-178).
One more thing to add: 24-7 Prayer has produced a compelling course on prayer called Lectio that Waterstone staff enjoyed during the first half of 2024.
- How To Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told by Harrison Scott Key, Avid Reader Press, 2023.
This book was referred to me this way by a friend: “It is the most compelling book on marriage I have ever read.”
Compelling is accurate. I read it in three sittings (of course, I was on sabbatical).
This is not your usual marriage book—some good techniques for keeping your marriage strong. It’s a memoir of a marriage failure that is redeemed—a marriage resurrection. And by the end of the story, you find yourself more committed to a marriage covenant—your marriage covenant—because Harrison Scott Key has shown us what one is.
It is quite a story. It begins: “What happened was, my wife for a billion years—the mother of our three daughters, a woman who’s spent just about every Sunday of her life in church—snuck off and found herself a boyfriend. Not cool. Her boyfriend, I mean. He has a decorative seashell collection and can’t even grow a beard. I am not making this up.”
Key goes on to reveal his worst decisions, his friends’ best advice, the well-meaning but ineffective prayers of pastors, and the faults he’s been too afraid to name. He discloses a litany of sins from A to Z. And this is where the laugh out loud is most audible. He starts with “Assface,” divulging how he regularly ruins family movie night with his unrequested commentary. Then he ends with “Zinger,” an exploration of his hurtful wisecracks: “Life had turned me into a lethal comedy hedgehog, with quills I could aim with deadly precision.”
And he leans on God for grace: “I knew that the only way this could work was for me to own my part in whatever wicked thing had happened and then do the harder thing: to use this information to become a less s—ty person.”
“They say God is love,” Key writes. “I’d heard this remarkable axiom all my life, and I think I finally understood. Heaven and hell and smitings and virgin births and fishes and loaves, it was all a story to celebrate and make sense of the strangest fact of all: love is what saves you.” In spite of rejections, lies, and personal limitations, Key learns the true nature of love. And when all of his pitiful attempts fall flat, God—as the source of love—overwhelms him.
Jessica Hooten Wilson, reviewing How To Stay Married in the magazine Christianity Today, writes:
If I could, I’d give everyone a copy of How to Stay Married. As I was reading it, my husband listened to me laugh aloud and begged to hear what was so funny. I read most of it in one night because the drama kept me flipping pages. When I’d finished the book—after reading at least a third of it aloud to my husband—we both wanted to try marriage counseling. “Like a tune-up,” my husband said. Every marriage should have checkups…
The “prophets of this present age,” as Key calls them, want us to believe that marriage “should exist solely for the benefit of the people in it.” But, Key asks, “What if the prophets are wrong? What if marriage, at its very best, exists to remake us into beautiful new creatures we scarcely recognize? What if, in some cosmically weird way, escaping a hard marriage is not how you change? What if staying married is?”
- The Rise And Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl R. Trueman, Crossway, 2020.
Trueman, professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College, begins the book:
The origins of this book lie in my curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.” My grandfather died in 1994, less than thirty years ago, and yet, had he ever heard that sentence uttered in his presence, I have little doubt that he would have burst out laughing and considered it a piece of incoherent gibberish. And yet today it is a sentence that many in our society regard as not only meaningful but so significant that to deny it or question it in some way is to reveal oneself as stupid, immoral, or subject to yet another irrational phobia…
And yet that sentence carries with it a world of metaphysical assumptions. It touches on the connection between the mind and the body, given the priority it grants to inner conviction over biological reality. It separates gender from sex, given that it drives a wedge between chromosomes and how society defines a man or a woman. And its political connection to homosexuality and lesbianism via the LGBTQ+ movement, it rests on notions of civil rights and of individual liberty. In short, to move from the commonplace thinking of my grandfather’s world to that of today demands a host of key shifts in popular beliefs in these and other areas. It is the story of those shifts—or, perhaps better, of the background to those shifts—that I seek to address…
Then Trueman provides a long yet accessible ride through the work of Charles Tayler, Philip Rieff, Alasdair MacIntyre, British Romantic poets, and Continental philosophers to trace the history of expressive individualism from the eighteenth century to the present. This is the account of the modern self, and how it has shaped twenty-first century culture. These are our times, and we cannot respond appropriately to them without understanding how and why our times are defined such as they are.
Near the end of the book, Trueman shares three things that should mark the church as she moves into the future. The first is that “the church should reflect long and hard on the connection between aesthetics and her core beliefs and practices” (italics his). Trueman’s point is that what most marks today’s ethical discussion is its dependence on personal narratives. The highest form of authority in an age of expressive individualism is personal testimonies. This form draws on the power of sympathy and empathy in shaping morality.
Truman writes:
The church needs to respond to this aesthetic-based logic, but first of all she needs to be consciously aware of it. And that means that she must herself forego indulging in, and thereby legitimating, the kind of aesthetic strategy of the wider culture. The debate on LGBTQ+ issues within the church must be decided on the basis of moral principles, not on the attractiveness and appeal of the narratives of the people involved. If sex-as-identity is itself a category mistake, then the narratives of suffering, exclusion, and refusals of recognition based on that category mistake are really of no significance in determining what the church’s position on homosexuality should be. That is not to say that pastoral strategies aimed at individuals should not be compassionate, but what is and is not compassionate must always rest on deeper, transcendent commitments… The biblical narrative rests on (and only makes sense in light of) a deeper metaphysical reality: the being of God and his act of creation (pages 402-404).
- Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents – and What They Mean for America’s Future by Jean M. Twenge, Atria Books, 2023.
This book was just plain fun to read. And it is helpful for the church do what the apostle Paul commends: “Do not rebuke an older man but encourage him as you would a father, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, in all purity” (1 Timothy 5:17). Love generationally!
“Twenge is professor of psychology at San Diego State University so, as she says, generational love is her daily calling. The book is packed with charts and research, but what I found most helpful was her descriptions of each generation by their various “traits.” Here is one sample trait of my generation:
Boomers (Born 1946-1964) Trait: Self-focus. The Big Bang of Modern Individualism
One way to document the cultural shift toward individualism is by using the Google Books database, which tracks word use in books. For example, we’d expect an increase in self-focused words—like those relating to uniqueness and identity—as the culture emphasized the journey to the inward self and self-expression, especially in the 1960s through the 1980s. That’s exactly what happened. After changing little between the late 1800s and the 1950s, the words unique and identity surged in use after 1960. Interestingly, the increases in unique slowed down in the 1980s after many Boomers grew out of the more self-focused years of young adulthood, but identity continued to shoot upward.
Or consider the use of the word give (collectivistic, given its focus on sharing with others) compared to the word get (individualistic, given its focus on what the individual receives). Give clearly won out until 1940, after which the two danced around each other for a few decades. And then, right on time in 1970 in the middle of Boomer youth and young adulthood, give dipped below get permanently, and get soared to new heights from the 1980s onward. By the 2010s, the individualistic get was more than twice as common in American books as the collective give…
Another intriguing way to document the cultural shift toward individualism is in the names parents give to their children. When parents want their children to fit in, as they do in a collectivistic culture, they are more likely to give them common names that many other people also have. When parents instead want their children to stand out, as they do in individualistic culture, they are less likely to bestow common names because individualism values uniqueness. The Social Security Administration maintains a database of the first names of every American who has a Social Security card…
In the 1880s, almost half of boys were given one of just ten names and nearly 1 out of 4 girls received one of the ten most popular names. Names were a way to fit in. That was still true in 1946, when the first Boomers were born, especially for girls, who were actually more likely to receive a common name in the 1940s than in the 1800s.
Then the change begins: Common names became less and less popular, falling precipitously as the decades went on. Names became a way to stand out. By the time Boomers were naming their Millennial children in the 1980s, only 1 out of 5 received one of the ten most common names. Common names faded from there, with Gen X and Millennial parents choosing progressively fewer common names in the 21st century. Since 2010, only 1 out of 14 received one of the ten most popular names. Imagine a large first grade class at recess, with 36 children running around the playground. In 1952 you’d find at least one boy named Jimmy in the average class (James was the most popular name for boys born in 1946). In the 2020s you’d need three classes to find only one Liam, even though that was the most popular name for boys born in 2017 to 2020. The Boomer individualism revolution, eventually brought to further heights by Gen X’ers and Millennials, made its mark: Parents no longer worried about giving their child a name that was too unusual, but worried about giving their child a name that was too common (pages 86-89).
1 Comments
Thanks for sharing Larry. Very good reads.