Summer Reading - 2012

Summertime and the living is easy, or so goes the song!  Let me pass along four great books that I’ve read recently for great pleasure and benefit.  They are each perfect for pool or beach.  They taught me about grace and what it might look like to live more deeply from that source.  Three of the four are great stories that would do well on CD while you drive to your vacation destination.

Dallas and the Spitfire: An Old Car, an Ex-Con, and an Unlikely Friendship by Ted Kluck and Dallas Jahncke (Kindle Edition).

So just what is a “dsicipling/mentoring relationship?  This is a great story and a genuine “guy book” that answers that question for men.

Ted Kluck is a former athlete now sports-writer whose family worships at the church in Lansing, MI pastored by Kevin deYoung – one of my favorite gospel-centered bloggers.  Ted is asked to “disciple” Dallas – a young, ex-con, recovering drugs/sex/alcohol abuser who has come to faith in a rescue mission and decides to head off to a fundamentalist Bible College to grow in his faith.  They meet once in Starbucks and realize immediately that they are not “let’s-meet-weekly-at-Starbucks-to-share” people.  They are guys – with EVERYTHING that could mean.

Instead, they find an old car to rebuild, text one another, call each other at all hours of the day, smoke cigars together and share the ups and downs of life through the course of a full year.  They learn to pray, trust God, laugh, challenge one another, deal with anger and so much more in very real ways.  And when all is said and done, they share a great little sports car.

I would want every man I know to pick up this book and read it.  You’ll get a great story, and get to look over the shoulder of two guys sharing life and growing in grace.  You’ll understand what two men in an “iron sharpens iron” discipling relationship can look like. 

Ladies, I’m sorry, but we all really do think like that.

  

Same Kind of Different As Me: A Modern-day Slave, An International Art Dealer, And the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together by Ron Hall and Denver Moore (Kindle Edition).

Another great story that pulls you in and takes you through the whole book.  Mary Lynn read it to me as we were driving, and when we arrived home, we each read it to the end!  It is the book that God used to move her to join our New Orleans Mission Team, develop our reading clinic and take a week away from work to teach impoverished African-American kids to read.  Be careful, it can open your heart to take risks for God!

Kisses From Katie: A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption by Katie Davis (Kindle Edition).

If you have plans for your children to grow up drug-free, go to college, get a job and a mortgage and give you 2.3 grandchildren then avoid this book like the plague.  It’s a compelling story of everything you do not want.

Katie takes the year after high school graduation to go to Uganda and work in an orphanage.  But after adopting 14 Ugandan girls, she never quite gets back to college or the status quo.  Hers is a story of deeply experiencing God’s love in Jesus, and then living life out of that love wherever God puts her.  It is grace experienced and lived out in ways I have never seen before.   The depth of her experience of grace, and then living out of that grace is profound and moving.

It’s not a rose-colored glasses book either.  She’s honest about her losses, confusion and pain.  But she always comes back to the God that has loved her from the cross and then returns to life and its challenges in that grace.  Her family back in the US continues to be a huge part of her life and her own family of 14 children.  Imagine your daughter half a world away becoming a single mother to 14 kids before she was 21!

It was Katie’s Gospel of grace perspective that made the book inspiring for me.  She never left me feeling inferior or condemned.  She never seemed self-righteous, angry or insane.  Katie was loved by God and then shared that love with others.  It was that agape love of God that was the power.

If you wonder what it might look like for you or your children to live daily out the grace of Jesus then I suspect that you won’t be able to put the book down.

The Transforming Power of the Gospel by Jerry Bridges (Kindle Edition).

This is the only book of my four recommendations that is not a story.  It is simply the most lucid, refreshing and encouraging presentation of the Gospel of grace that I have ever read in a short, simple volume.  Jerry Bridges has been writer with Navigators known for his spiritual depth, balance and clarity for years.  This may well be his best book yet.  Christ Covenant is using this to equip men to lead Bible studies in the Rappahannock Regional Jail.  

 If you want to break free from the legalism and moralism that permeates our hearts and churches, this is a great place to start.  Contact me by email, I’d love to find a time to talk with you about it.

The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment With the Wisdom of God by Tim Keller (Kindle Edition).

Okay.  So this is a fifth book, but it really is as good as I’ve been saying and whether single, engaged or married, it is worth the read for your life and for the life of people you can share this with.