Maximum Mandatum

It’s hard to believe that today is the last day of 2024. It’s been a great year. While our church plant has become independent and continues to grow, I, too, am growing as a pastor. This means that I’m learning to balance shepherding, sermon prep, administration, counseling, fitness, and family life with good reading habits. I’ve added some audiobooks to keep up with my goals. Reading is necessary and formative. Good books are timeless and timely. They engage the mind by interacting with and challenging influential modern assumptions that we unconsciously imbibe on a regular basis. I need good books to awaken me from my slumber and arouse me from my stupor. I need good books to challenge my thinking and sharpen sharpen my skills. I need good books to motivate me to live for the cause of Christ and truth in a world committed to neither.

Here are the top ten books that I enjoyed the most and have had a profound impact on my life and mind—

10. From Embers to a Flame by Harry L. Reeder III

“If you make [the gospel of grace] your primary focus and fight to keep less important issues from overshadowing it, you will see the hand of God at work in your midst.”

With the passing of Dr. Reeder last year, I decided to finally read his book on church revitalization that had been on my list since seminary. And what a wonderful treasure trove of wisdom it is! From cover to cover, this short book is centered on Christ—maximizing his glory through his means in his Church. While aware of and conversant with the modern, man-centered pitfalls of the revitalization movement, he offers a refreshingly biblical paradigm. It acts as both a philosophy and a practical guide—a personal memoir and a manual. Whether you are involved in planting, revitalization, pastoral ministry, or lay leadership, this book will be a great encouragement to your soul as you seek to bring vitality to your church life. Reeder has a way of making the fundamentals of ministry so thrilling once again by reminding us of the potential transformative power they hold as God’s ordinary means of grace.

9. The Gospel for Disordered Lives by Robert Jones, Kristin Kellen, and Rob Green

“While both biological and social factors can influence human behavior, assigning causation to nature and/or nurture excludes this essential, deeper, Godward factor—the soul in relationship to God. We must never look at people apart from their relationship to God.”

As a biblical counselor, I’m always looking for resources to help sharpen my understanding of people, the human heart, typical human experiences, and my skills in the counseling process. I desire to live on the cutting edge of current issues and to be prepared for the next case God sends my way. While Paul Tripp’s Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands remains the gold-standard introduction to biblical counseling (even after two decades strong), I believe this is a close second. It is a tour de force in the Christ-centered biblical counseling field—relevant, practical, and comprehensive. Broken into five sections, it provides an overview of biblical counseling, the theological foundations, the process and methods, common individual problems and procedures, and specific age groups. The evident strengths of this resource are its rigorous theological foundations, its concrete, step-by-step overview of the counseling process, and its dissection and treatment of specific problems. Whether brand new to biblical counseling or a seasoned counselor, I guarantee you that upon completion of this book, not only will you be better equipped but furnished with a practical resource you will consult time and time again.

8. Reformed Preaching by Joel Beeke

“Reformed experiential preaching uses the truth of Scripture to shine the glory of God into the depths of the soul to call people to live solely and wholly for God. It breaks us and remakes us. it is both exhilarating and humbling.”

What a glorious privilege preaching is! I never take for granted the fact that I get to stand before God’s people each week, explain God’s Word, and apply it to their lives. Like counseling, preaching is a skill that can become stagnant if one gets stuck in autopilot mode. It is essential to refresh oneself now and again on the fundamentals. I need a reminder of what I’m called to do and why; and I need sufficient motivation to persevere with greater depths of joy, expectation, and excellence. I need to be pushed out of the rote, redundant, monotony of study. The first four chapters and the last five flesh out what reformed experiential preaching looks like in practice. The middle fifteen chapters illustrate his thesis and through historical examples of faithful preachers from the reformation and beyond. This manual on preaching was equally constructive as it was compelling. It was exactly what I needed to arouse me from my comfort and call me to greater resolutions in my preaching ministry this new year.

7. Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age by Rosaria Butterfield

“The world offers false beneficence in place of real care when it fails to use God’s law to apply God’s love.”

I have so much love and respect for Rosaria. I’ll never forget the profound beauty and simplicity of her first memoir as it brought me to tears. Her distinctively Christian voice remains one of forcible courage and stunning clarity in a confusing culture. In this new book, she tackles five of the most influential allurements our age—homosexuality, spirituality, feminism, transgenderism, and immodesty. These issues have become so celebrated and normalized in the culture that Christians are becoming tantalized by them. What makes this book so effective is her ability to dissect these lies showing how closely they resemble the truth, and, therefore, precisely why they are so attractive to us. She exposes them as counterfeit gospels, saviors, and versions of the good life—lies that cannot coexist with the truth. Lies that are never passive, but always actively working against truth—undermining it, attacking it, eroding it. She presses us to examine these issues more closely and ask ourselves: “Who are you going to believe? Confused people and their secular priests? Or the God of all comfort and his eternal word?” Her reasoning is so biblical, Christ-centered, rational, without compromise, and therefore, inspiring.

6. Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie

“The way academic research is currently set up incentivizes problems encouraging researchers to obsess about prestige, fame, funding, and reputation at the expense of rigorous, reliable results.”

“Lies, damned lies, and [science].” Science, like statistics, is pliable. It is the new persuasive power that can be misused and manipulated to make an argument more believable. Every truth claim today is backed by science to the point where it has become white noise. Obvious lies are now backed by science. Contradictory claims are now backed by science. Propaganda is now backed by science. On the heels of the pandemic and the debate about mental illness, I was drawn to read a few books related to the unreliability of modern research. I read this resource alongside Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier, The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, The Trouble with Trauma by Michael Scheeringa, Mental Disorder Diagnosis by Julie Chen, and The Psychologies by Ernie Baker. While all of these were illumimating, I found Science Fictions to be the Occam’s Razor, providing the simplest and clearest explanation for the untrustworthy nature of modern scientific methods. Ritchie exposes a whole host of perverse incentives that spoil the integrity of what we call science—politics, popularity, funding, publishing, etc. The way science is done today often encourages its opposite. The reason we are so easily persuaded by the most strongly held beliefs in our culture backed by science is because we do not review the processes behind the research. Much of what we call “science” today is simply pop-culture and pop-psychology—simplistic, immutable, unfalsifiable claims we blindly accept. Ritchie makes a cogent case for why we must remain vigilantly critical and skeptical of scientific studies. He doesn’t only reveal the problems, he shows the necessary reforms that need to be made to get back on the right track.

5. Here Are Your Gods by Christopher J. H. Wright

“Idolatry is abandoning a guaranteed source of hope for a guaranteed source of disappointment.”

I’ve read a lot of books on idolatry, mostly from a biblical counseling perspective. This short book—addressing the subject from a more biblical-theological, redemptive-historical approach—had a profound impact on me. I got my toes stepped on and my heart handed to me. It is probably one of the most insightful books I’ve read on the topic. Wright is not content to confront the idols of our hearts, but goes even further to show us how those idols are cultivated in the larger culture and captivate us more than we realize. He helps us see that more is going on out there than simply inside our hearts. There are powerful forces competing for our affections and security. Ultimately, he shows that false gods are destructive and destructible, they never fail to fail us, and we never fail to forget. Ironically and illogically, we end up defending our gods—something we should never have to do if they are what they claim to be. They promise hope but only bring harm. Only the one, true and living, transcendent God can satisfy us, bring security, and defend us. This is what the Scriptures reveal from beginning to end. This is what our experience reveals time and time again.

4. Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier

“Everything we were doing felt so virtuous. Everything we were producing seemed so broken.”

Ours is an age of therapy. Psychology, mental-health, abuse, and trauma are concepts that creep and expand. It seems that having a diagnosis and a therapist is a badge of honor and how we fit in. In this insightful book, Shrier exposes the iatrogenic effects of therapy warning that professional treatment can often harm rather than help an individual by reinforcing a false identity and/or compounding negative feelings. With all the investment that’s been made in mental health for children, she simply asks the obvious question: why have the problems exponentially increased rather than gradually improved? She warns that the identities that arise out of labels can be reductive, demeaning, and damaging. Overall, she observes that our kids were doing so much better when they had less distractions, less stimulation, less supervision, less intervention, less accommodation, less parenting, and more independence, more risk-taking, more autonomy, and more real friendships. She claims our children were better off when we acted like their parents rather than their therapists. She encourages parents to wake up and step up and to be in control of their children’s well-being. Our kids are more resilient than our culture wants us to believe. And more often than than not, as their parents, we are better equipped to help them than the professionals and experts.

3. The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

“Nothing is quite such an eerie sensation as when something you thought long dead and buried suddenly approaches you again in its old form and figure.”

Imagine living through two world wars and having insightful observations about the times before, between, and after those wars. That’s what makes Zweig’s autobiography so fascinating and gripping from the first page to the last. He grew up in in Vienna, Austria during the Golden Age of Security—the idyllic time of modernity, self-sufficiency, pride and optimism. The world was at its peak of prosperity and innovation, but it was all a delusion. Terrifying storms were gathering. Zweig details the “unimaginable relapse of mankind.” This is a story of longing and belinging. His life was uprooted and his world destroyed not once, but twice—all of his works also. Throughout the book, he offers personal stories of his childhood, education, his rise to success as a writer, his interactions with other prominent people, his journeys to various countries during the conflicts, and his observations of the pride, fear, and bloodlust that so easily infiltrated everyone’s lives. The book is worth the six-page foreword alone. This is the kind of personal historical prose—a first-hand account of politics, culture, and war—that we must read to make sure we avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. It’s also worth noting that his memoir was the basis for Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel, which I am now due to watch again.

2. To Change All Worlds by Carl Trueman

“Critical theory does not so much provide Christians with a useful tool to think about the world as clarify a set of questions to which we already have the answers already, if only we open our eyes to see them.”

For the past decade, critical theory has become the spirit of the age. It has been an inexorable force undergirding the ideas that shape our culture—especially in the political realm. While it rose to the level of mainstream somewhat inconspicuously, we have now begun to understand its problematic foundations. Even as it moved from the inconspicuous to our suspicious consciousness in 2020, it can be misunderstood. The temptation is that of reduction. It can easily become something we love to hate without fully understanding it. Trueman, in his ordinarily precise fashion, delineates the development of critical theory from Marx to Marcuse, making insights into its progress and ultimately revealing how inconsistent it has become as an ideology. To put it simply, it’s become everything it has historically hated. It has become an influential political tool to wield power rather than dismantle it. Overall, he reveals that critical theory is far more critical than constructive and bent on dismantling rather than providing a compelling version of humanity. This is an enlightening story and critique of critical theory. He offers a fair and balanced Christian response, one we should all pay attention to. He brings clarity to so many issues that affect our lives today.

1. Remaking the World by Andrew Wilson

“Ours is a forgetful age. The rate of change in the last two centuries makes the past feel much further away than it actually is, which inclines us to fawn over the future, and either patronize the past or ignore it altogether.”

Don’t let the 1776 in the subtitle pigeonhole your perception of this book. It’s not about America. The author is not even from the U.S. The thesis of the book is much larger in scope. It is is a book about the post-Christian West and how we got here. We often fail to see how small the world is and how close the past is to the present. Wilson profoundly brings time and space so closely together to show us how we got to be so Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic (expanding on the acronym coined by Joanthan Haidt in The Righteous Mind). I think this might be my second favorite book ever and the perfect companion to my all-time favorite, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman. While Trueman’s book focused almost exclusively on the ideas that brought about the post-Christian West, Wilson focuses more on the events that did the same. What an incredible journey through space and time! His observations and connections will leave you dumbfounded. I need to read this one again really soon.

Honorable mentions: The Hole in Our Holiness by Kevin DeYoung, Slow Productivity by Cal Newport, Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, The Trouble with Trauma by Michael Scheeringa, Shepherds for Sale by Megan Basham, That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis, Get Married by Brad Wilcox, The Holy Spirit: An Introduction by Fred Sanders, Defeating Evil by Scott Christenson, and Expositional Leadership by Pace and Shaddix.

This is now the seventh year that I’ve been doing these posts on the best books I’ve read. You can see the ones from years prior by following the links at the bottom of each post. You can find last year’s post HERE.