Shelf Life

Concerning the True Care of Souls By Martin Bucer 218 p. Banner of Truth (November 2009) "When you join our church, don't expect traditional shepherding care from the pastors. You must understand that we've made a conscious decision to direct our primary attention upon the unchurched, not upon...

Michael Horton is a talented theologian and communicator, able to write for those with delicate digestive systems, as well as for the more robustly constituted. This one-volume, one thousand-odd paged systematic theology is somewhere in the middle of the field. Effort had been made to make it...

Servant of the Word and Flock , by Iain H. Murray (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2011), HB 246 pages. In the concluding section of his first letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul challenges the brothers to "Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, [and] be strong" (I Cor. 16:13), not...

Tony Reinke, Lit! A Christian Guide to Reading Books . Wheaton, IL: 2011. 202 pgs. In full disclosure, I was really excited when I first heard about Lit! . The idea is genius--writing a book about reading books. It made me stop and think about reading, a crucial part of life that I had done for...

Even before the book came out, Jesus + Nothing = Everything had the perfect formula for a popular book: a catchy title that "just sounds right" (p. 25), an author with an intriguingly unique name (Tullian Tchividjian, pronounced cha-vi-jin), his blog at The Gospel Coalition to prime interest for...

Trevin Wax, Counterfeit Gospels: Rediscovering the Good News in a World of False Hope , (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2011). Introduction If you asked ten different churchgoers to define the gospel, you may very well receive ten substantially different definitions. Increasingly, churchgoers are...

Steven J. Lawson, The Gospel Focus of Charles Spurgeon (Orlando, FL: Reformation Trust, 2012). 127 pages. Introduction Some years ago, Dr. Al Mohler observed that, "We read biographies because worthy portraits of our fellow human beings help us to make sense of the world. We are especially...

Philip Graham Ryken, Loving the Way Jesus Loves (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2012), 224 pp. Every once in a while, a book comes along that immediately becomes a "must read." Phil Ryken's Loving the Way Jesus Loves is one such book. As a lover of old books, I do not say this lightly. Yet, it does...

Lydia Brownback, A Woman's Wisdom: How the book of Proverbs Speaks to Everything , (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012). "A woman's wisdom? But Proverbs was written to young men!" God has given us special challenges in the wisdom literature of Scripture, in the puzzles of poetry and artistry these books...

Iain D. Campbell and Malcolm Maclean, eds., The People's Theologian: Essays in Honour of Donald Macleod . Ross-shire: Christian Focus Mentor Imprint, 2011. Iain D. Campbell, ed., Heart of the Gospel: Meditations on Christ and the Christian Life, Ross-shire: Christian Focus, 1995. One day early this...