Category: Book Reviews (Page 1 of 2)

I’m delighted to announce the release of No Road Too Far: Encounters with the Christ.

Andrew Peterson loves to say, “If you want someone to know the truth, tell them. If you want them to love the truth, tell them a story.” This is my attempt to move others to love the truth that with Jesus there is No Road Too Far for the reach of God’s love.

It is currently available in paperback and electronic (Kindle, etc.) formats. I’m working on the possibility of an audio version in the future.

You can help others love the truth that there is No Road Too Far for the reach of God’s love by buying a copy, sharing it, giving copies as Christmas gifts, posting on your social media accounts about it, rating it (after reading it!) on Amazon, better yet, also writing a review of it on Amazon, Goodreads, or other bookseller sites. Thank you for spreading the word and for holding forth to others the gospel-hope that there is No Road Too Far for the reach of God’s love.

In Factfulness Hans Rosling has offered us an engaging, easy-to-read book on a subject that could otherwise be tedious at best and perhaps even condescending. But Factfulness comes off as neither. Rosling feels chummy and relaxed as he puts the reader at ease in digesting a lot of information that might otherwise be a snoozer. His basic point is a good and worthy one – we don’t look at the world very accurately. We have some default notions that prohibit us from reading the facts accurately. We end up thinking the world is worse than it is.

It is a good point and needed observation. He makes it well. For that I give him high marks. Of course the point is that Rosling has landed on what no one else is seeing. He alone has the correct view of the data, the facts. “So, let me inform you!”

OK, fine. Experts are supposed to be able to do that sort of thing. But what might get lost in the friendly atmosphere of his information transfer is that Rosling himself does not dig deep enough in his quest for a right reading of the facts/data/statistics.

It has long been said that there are three kinds of lies: Black lies, white lies and … statistics. It’s all in how one reads them and how one uses them. And too often we do “use” them—to make a point we’ve already decided upon prior to engaging the facts.

There is something beyond the statistics—something beyond Factfulness—that determines how we read the data and interpret the statistics. Something that Rosling does not address. That something may lead us into blind assumptions, misreadings of what the facts mean, where they lead us, and how we extrapolate meaning from them.

Rosling, for all his Factfulness, repeatedly buries unsupported statements in the mix of his chummy pedagogical methods. If one is willing to notice them along the way and stop and wonder over them, one is left questioning where are the facts for this? Where’s the supporting statistics that tell us this?

As I continued past halfway and made my way toward two-thirds of the way through the book, these unsupported, but foundational assumptions kept piling up. And more and more they came off with a snarky, holier-than-thou tone. What began ever-increasingly to shine through was the unsupported moral assumptions through which Rosling reads the data he and his team has accumulated. It became clearer and clearer that Rosling—like the rest of us whom he accused of misreading facts for our own subjective, unexamined reasons—was doing the very same thing.

Rosling rightly cries for a reworking of our worldview. Worldview, he correctly cries, is the vital matter of our day. This must be shaped, he says, by the facts; there needs to be a Factfulness about our worldview. The trouble is he never seems to realize or if he does, he fails to call out, the fact that our worldview does not merely arise from the facts … it informs how we read the facts and the facts to which we assign the most weight. Sadly, in this regard, for the book’s many otherwise fine features, it stumbles and falls in the end. Not because Rosling has done a poor job at what he most obviously tries to do, but because he doesn’t push far enough back to examine his own underlying worldview that moves him to read the fact as he does.

Occupy Until I Come: A.T. Pierson and the Evangelization of the World

In this well written and engaging biography Dr. Dana L. Robert masterfully depicts the life of a key figure in both 19th Century American Christianity and in the movement of mission mobilization that was sweeping across the western world. Pierson’s ministry navigated the dramatic currents of cultural change that shaped America from the Civil War through the industrialization that dawned with the first decade of the twentieth century. The convictions that guided A.T. Pierson and the spiritual depth of his relationship with God carried him through tumultuous waters and are worthy of our emulation today. In Pierson we discover the too-often-odd matrix of Biblical proclamation, social concern, evangelistic drive, mission mobilization, and a vision for Christian unity. Soon after his death these passions would splinter into the separate movements of fundamentalist, evangelical, and liberal Christianity, but in Pierson they were held simply, purely and without conflict in the heart of one sincere and mightily used servant of God.

I encourage pastors to carefully read this important work, for it holds forth a model of the kind of God-honoring faithfulness needed in our day as we too navigate cultural forces and spiritual winds that are no less threatening to the advance of God’s Kingdom.

Anxiety, at least in my life, is seldom a sudden thing. It doesn’t spring up like a mushroom from the ground—full grown overnight. Rather, anxiety in my experience is a subtle and insidious thing; something that builds slowly over time. Though the feeling of anxiety may appear suddenly, it is the product of hundreds of small things—unquestioned assumptions, unexamined thoughts, errant valuations of things. It has long been at work. Anxiety establishes its stronghold like the growth of a stalagmite or stalactite—one drip at a time over a long period of time.

That’s precisely why deliverance from anxiety seldom happens in one fell swoop. It is a matter of renewing the mind (Rom. 12:2; Eph. 4:23), day-by-day, hour-by-hour, moment-by-moment. It is a matter of deconstructing the lies that are at the root of anxiety and of replacing them with the truth that brings in “peace like a river” (Isa. 48:18; 66:12).

That is precisely why Paul Tautges’ Anxiety: Knowing God’s Peace is so helpful. It is not only insightful; it delivers the truth to us day after day in doses that enable us to make substantive progress in the renewal of our minds and in pursuit of God’s peace in a steady progression toward wholeness. A month’s worth of daily investment in truth really will establish a pattern that will make a difference in your battle against anxiety.

I testify to the help it has been to me and to the aid it is to those with whom I have shared it.