I still remember the very first time that I was hurt by someone in a church that I attended. Even now, I can still remember how it felt people to have leave with hurtful words on their lips, when decisions have been made that felt like a knife being straddled in my back and when I have felt abandoned in times of need.

Most of the writing in the New Testament exists because the church has never been perfect. In fact, most of the New Testament letters and epistles were written specifically because there were significant pastoral issues in the church. 8Help In Overcoming Church Hurt

• Galatians was written to combat legalism (Galatians 1:6-7, 3:1-3, 4:9, 5:1)
• Colossians was written to fight heresy (Colossians 2:4, 8)
• 2 Timothy was written to ease tension in pastoral succession (2 Timothy 4:9-16)
• Philippians was written to resolve conflict and selfish ambition (Philippians 2:3-22)
• 1 and 2 Corinthians were written to mediate a whole host of problems centred around the issues of human pride in gifting and speaking that led to arrogant and love-less religious activity.

That’s not even to mention the letters to the churches in Revelation (Ch. 2-3), one of which is so unhealthy, it makes Jesus want to vomit (Revelation 3:16).  Martin Luther King writes,

“I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion… Consequently, everyday I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust’ | 2 Why We Can’t Wait, P 103-105

In light of these struggles, it’s understandable why those whose faith has been damaged by the church would want to leave it. Many victims of abusive and neglectful church cultures feel that the church has robbed them of faith. That experience is both traumatic and tragic, and perhaps to some degree, true. God himself has become too painful for them to behold in their mind; his face and words have been merged with the harmful faces and words of flawed and harmful people they know too well to be incomplete and shallow. 3Has The Church Hurt You? 

For those who find their faith mangled in a head-on collision with the church, is there the way forward?

The Often Untold Story

The only issue with the narrative above is the untold reality that I am a part of the problem. I have contributed to the pains and hurts of other people, as they have contributed to mine. I have not loved the church as Jesus has told me to.  I have not loved His people as Jesus has told me.  I have not treated my neighbour as myself.  I have taken my leaders for granted and let them bleed spiritually dry and then turned around and blamed them for not feeding the sheep well.  I have been part of the problem.

Christianity may be the only faith with a public, dramatic, open and honest declaration of our own incompleteness as the marker between those who follow Jesus and those who do not. To follow Jesus you must declare that you have fallen short of the glory of God, that you have not desired God as you ought and that your rebellion against God has not only defied your sovereign creator but resulted in the brokenness we see around us.

The narrative of pointing the church whilst turning a blind eye to our own inadequacies and shortcomings is unhelpful at best, and most likely far worse.  Yes, let us put to death the too-often polished veneer hiding rotting floorboards that has overcome the Church, and let us be truth-tellers filled with the courage and conviction of the scriptures, but let us not become white-washed tombs ourselves (Matt 23:13-15), outwardly appearing beautiful whilst inwardly full of dead bones.

The Flesh and Bones

Our experience of the church has too often shaped our theology of the church, leaving us with the assumption that any gathering of people who believe in Jesus and who do churchy things together resembles the church.  But if that’s all the church is, you don’t need the church at all. You can probably learn more about Jesus from your favourite podcasts and preachers than your local church, and there are many places to give to that do incredible work throughout the world.

You can get a meal with friends any day of the week, but the church is the one place you can publicly proclaim a transformation from death to life in front of a newly adopted family filled with brothers and sisters.  You can be captivated by the latest band, but church is the only place you can stand alongside the ‘cloud of witnesses’ and saints of old and affirm the creeds of centuries.  You can put on the latest threads and have the freshest cut, but the church is the only place you can be laid bare by the confession of sin as you are embraced by the church and a loving father who has sent His Son to redeem a lost humanity.

The Scriptures paint a picture that is far richer than a minimalist theology of church can describe.

The Church is not a dispensable footnote in God’s plan to repossess and redeem the world 4Michael Bird, Evangelical Theology, p. 706 . The church is filled with fishers of men (Matt 4:19), the salt of the earth (5:13), branches of the vine (John 15:5-10), ambassadors of reconciliation (2 Cor 5:20), exiles in a foreign land (1 Peter 1:1) 5Michael Bird, Evangelical Theology, p. 706 .  It is a colony of the coming global reign of Christ (Eph 1:22-23) and a preview of what His kingdom will look like in the end (1 Cor 6:1-8).  The church is where Christ gets glory (Eph 3:21).

The Scriptures reveal to us what we would never discover on our own. The church – not an ideal congregation but the real one that you go to every week,  with the man who falls asleep, and the lady who talks too much about herself, and the kids who run around during the service and bang on the drums – is the flesh and bones of Jesus. It’s his body, he tells us – inseparable from Him as your heart and lungs and kidneys and fingers are from you (Eph 5:29-30; 1 Cor 12:12-31). 6 Why You Need The Church (Not Just A Campus Ministry)

The Gospel and Church

When Christ died for the church, he made it his own. He identified it with himself. He put his name on it and uses the most intimate kind of language to describe how it is connected to him: His body, His people and His bride.  That’s why persecuting the church is persecuting Christ (Acts 9:5).

Think about what that means. It means that Christ has put his name on the immature Christians, and the Christians who speak too much, and the Christians who don’t sing during praise songs.  He put his name on the sleepers during sermons, and the grumpy sound desk guy, and the young person who can’t sit still for four consecutive minutes.   He puts his name on the drunk, and on the tattered, and on the rich and on the every week attender.

How wide, how long, how high and deep God’s love is for us in Christ Jesus! It covers a multitude of sins and embraces the sinner. Oh, what a saviour.  Yet, still, many people claim to love Jesus, but not His people.  We do not like His church. We do not like His bride.  Yet, it is our love for Jesus that should lead us to loving His people.  When we are reminded of who we are, stone-cold wretches, the foolish, the lepers and the sinners, it should be no small thing to embrace those who are just like us: saved solely by grace through faith.

It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who said:

“If my sinfulness appears to me to be in any way smaller or less detestable in comparison with the sins of others, I am still not recognising my sinfulness at all. My sin is of necessity the worst, the most serious, the most objectionable.  Those who would serve others in the community must descend all the way down to this depth of humility. How could I possibly serve another in unfeigned humility if their sins appear to me to be seriously worse than my own” 7 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, P. 74

If we see sin in our brothers and sisters, we should throw ourselves to the feet of the father. Quick, remember the gospel!

God’s Means of Stirring Our Affections

Church is the one time that God’s people gather together as one and combine multiple means of grace to not only stir our affections, but to stir the affections of those around us.  We were made to worship Jesus together. Amongst the multitude. With the great horde.  God didn’t fashion us to enjoy him as solitary individuals but as happy members of a countlessly large family of adopted orphans. 8 David Mathis, Habits of Grace: Enjoying Jesus Through the Spiritual Disciplines, P. 155

This is no chummy hobnob with drinks and a game on the TV. It is an all-in, life-or-death collective venture in the face of great evil and overwhelming opposition. 9 David Mathis, Habits of Grace: Enjoying Jesus Through the Spiritual Disciplines, P. 145 True fellowship is less like friends gathered together to watch the Super Bowl and more like players on the field in blood, sweat and tears, huddled together for the next down. 10 David Mathis, Habits of Grace: Enjoying Jesus Through the Spiritual Disciplines, P. 145

Hebrews 10:24-25 says:

‘And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works,  not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near’

In the same way, the church is our greatest weapon in our fight for satisfaction in Christ, by gently encouraging us to stir our affections. When our hearts are cold and our ears are closed, God’s community sings to us, prays for us and reads with us as God himself opens our wooden hearts.  They stoke our affections when our fire grows low.

There is no room for believing that we can follow Jesus Monday through Saturday and then ignore meeting with His people on Sunday, without affecting our relationship. When attending Church matters to us less, eventually, our faith will matter less to us as well.  Our fire tends to dim and our light begins to flicker when we cut ourselves off from the people that Christ is crafting for himself.

Apostles, Prophets, Teachers

One final thought: In Ephesians 4:11-16, the Apostle Paul writes:

‘And He (Jesus) gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.”

It is very likely that God has gifted millennials in this generation to be prophets, apostles, teachers, shepherds and evangelists for building up the body of Christ into the fullness of Christ.  We should be those things for the church. We should start new things and new movements. We should be truth-tellers in church and lead people back to repentance.  Yet all of those things involve being party of the body. 

Friends, I pray that we could learn to love the church as much as Christ does.  That even when it is difficult, we could pray for our brothers and sisters, being honest truth-tellers and gentle in correction and rebuke, but never forgetting that when we critique the church, we do so as members of His body and His people, that Christ is sanctifying, justifying, redeeming and washing clean, day by day.

One of my greatest joys over the summer months is spending more time than usual in very old books. Spurgeon, Owen, and Edwards have been my company this summer alongside more modern contemporaries. Reading has been a constant habit of mine since I was a small child, and it has provided a fountain of wisdom beyond which I could have ever hoped to have tapped into on my own strength.

The find of the summer for me has been a small book, Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret, on the extraordinary missionary Hudson Taylor. Taylor was the founder of the China Inland Mission and in God’s strength and provision, was responsible in the mid 19th century for leading hundreds of missionaries into China’s inland for the first time. It was written by his son, Howard Taylor, that ‘the life that was to be exceptionally fruitful had to be rooted and grounded in God in no ordinary way‘.

Taylor was a man who drunk deeply at the fountain of Christ. It was written of him that ‘he overcame difficulties such as few men have ever had to encounter and left a work which long after his death is still growing in usefulness’. In the foreword to Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secrets, it was said that:

‘Hudson Taylor had many secrets, for he was always going on with God, yet they were but one – the simple, profound secret of drawing for every need, temporal or spiritual, upon “the fathomless wealth of Christ”

‘Here was a man almost sixty years of age, bearing tremendous burdens, yet absolutely calm and untroubled. Oh, the pile of letters! any one of which might contain news of death, of lack of funds, of riots or serious trouble. Yet all were opened, read and answered with the same tranquility — Christ his reason for peace, his power for calm. Dwelling in Christ, he drew upon His very being and resources. . . . And this he did by an attitude of faith as simple as it was continuous. Yet he was delightfully free and natural. I can find no words to describe it save the Scriptural expression “in God.” He was in God all the time and God in him. It was that true “abiding” of John fifteen’.

The simple secret that Hudson Taylor’s learned was that without Jesus, we can do nothing. For all our scurrying and scheming and planning and harrying, without Him, we are spiritually paralyzed. It is abundantly clear that if He were to leave us to ourselves, we would become completely impotent. We would produce nothing of worth, because, ‘without Me, you can do nothing’ (John 15:5).

Jesus has declared that our productivity and our faithfulness is directly linked to our abiding in Him. As Christians, we will bear fruit only if we abide in Christ. The closer we stay to Christ, the more fruit we shall bear.

Sailboats and Powerboats

There have been many times where I would prefer to be under my own power, dependent on no-one else for success. We set up our lives in such a way that even if God doesn’t move in powerful and mighty ways that we might yet move forward. We seek to be powerboats, cutting through the waters in high velocity, throttle on full with our eyes only on how fast we can move towards a destination of our own choosing.

Jesus reminds us that we created to be sailboats. The simple sailboat does not bring glory to itself, but to the power of an unseen force propelling it along. It is dependent upon the wind for its power. The work of a sailing crew is to align the sails with the wind that will blow it. It is dead in the water unless the wind wills it to move. Jesus talks often about the Spirit blowing around like the wind. Our role is to discern where the wind is at work, not how fast we can get there.

When you look at the language the Pharisees use in Acts 6 to describe Peter and John, you can see the Spirit at work:

‘Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognised that they had been with Jesus‘ 

The power of Peter and John did not come from refined skills of leadership won through sheer determination and hard work. They were uneducated, common men who had spent an inordinate amount of time abiding in Jesus and being filled with the Spirit. They were sailboats into whom, and through whom, the wind of the presence of Jesus moved in irrefutable fashion.

They had become ‘rooted and grounded in Christ in no ordinary way’.

Rooted and Grounded in Christ

Everyone has a rhythm to their lives. A particular bent in the way we live our lives. Some of us hit the gym regularly, whilst others have a rhythm of coffee and friends. Most of the time, we don’t even think about the rhythms that we have; it sort of just happens to us. For many, though, the rhythms involves noise, busyness, stress and isolation rather than life-giving, soul-stirring habits of grace.

Jesus advocates an entirely new rhythm of life:

‘Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing’ (John 15:4–5)

Abiding literally means to ‘remain, live or continue’; to abide in Christ means to live in Him and remain in Him.  It is both something we possess and something we participate in.  When we come to Christ, we are united to him by faith (John 14:2), we are in Christ (2nd Corinthians 5:17)  and sealed in Him by the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:13). This is a work that God has done in us.

However, abiding and remaining in Christ also means reorienting our lives and rhythms around Christ:

If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. By this, my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.  As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments you will abide in my love,  just as I have kept my Fathers commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full. 

Having the words of Jesus abide in us, or as Paul echoes in Colossians 3:16, ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly’, is a key facet of abiding in Jesus. Meditation on His word to the extent that it fills our minds, directs our wills and transforms our affections for Him is crucial.  Our relationship with Christ is intimately tied to how we dwell on the ‘fathomless wealth of Christ’ and allow that to govern our lives.

Abiding in Jesus means dwelling often on the grace that saved us and the extravagant love of Christ. We must never allow ourselves to drift from the daily contemplation of what Christ has done for us on the cross, the great scandal of the King of Kings redeeming and rescuing ‘sons and daughters of disobedience’ (Ephesians 2:2). We rest our lives on the love of Christ.  This leads us to a place where the words, love, and joy of Christ fill us with great abandon and transform our hearts.

We abide through relationship and obedience. We pursue Christ as we have been pursued. We prune our lives until the noise and the business of life is drowned out by the word made flesh. We meditate on the words of Christ until it stirs our affections.  We build into our lives habits of grace, rhythms that bring us closer to the great I AM.

It was Charles Spurgeon who wrote that:

‘Sometimes we think we are too busy to pray. This is a great mistake, for praying is a saving of time. If we have no time we must make time, for if God has given us time for secondary duties, He must have given us time for primary ones, and to draw near to Him is a primary duty. We must let nothing set it on one side’

There is the good news for those who are finding this a tall order: We love Jesus because he first loved us (1 John 4:19). We didn’t choose him; he chose us and he chose us to walk out our faith in obedience to him (John 15:16). Apart from Christ, we cannot do anything (John 15:5). This is good news to the weary person who thinks he must muster up the strength to pursue and know Christ. He provides the grace and the strength. He provides the wind to power our sails.

Abide in him, and he will abide in you. He who began a good work in you will complete it (Philippians 1:6). He who called you is faithful; he will surely do it (1 Thessalonians 5:24).

Emile Cailliet grew up in a small village in France.  In his college days, Emile was an agnostic who had never picked up a bible for himself. Then, he served in the army in WWI. ‘ The inadequacy of my views on the human situation overwhelmed me’, he wrote,  ‘what use the philosophic banter of the seminar .. when your own buddy – at the time speaking to you of his mother – dies standing in front of you a bullet to his chest’

One night, a bullet got Emile as well. An American field ambulance crew saved his life and later the use of a badly shattered arm was restored.  Emile returned to his books, but they were no longer the same books. Reading in literature and philosophy, he found himself probing their depths for new meaning.  ‘During long night watches in the foxholes, I had in a strange way been longing – I must say it, however queer it may sound – for a book that would understand me’.

Since he knew of no such book, he decided to prepare own for his own private use. Emile read widely, and as he went reading, would file away passages that ‘speak to my condition’, then carefully copied them into a leather bound pocketbook that he would carry with him wherever  he went.  He hoped that they would ‘mead’ him ‘from fear and anguish, through a variety of intervening stages, to supreme utterances of release and jubilation.

The day came when Emile put the finishing touches to ‘the book that would understand me’, the words and the sentences that would speak to his condition, and help him through life’s happening. A beautiful, sunny day, Emile went out, sat under a tree and opened his book. As he went on reading, however, a growing disappointment came over him.   Instead of speaking to his condition, the various passages reminded him of their context and the circumstances. In his own words, ‘then I knew that the whole undertaking would not work, simply because it was of my own making. It carried no strength of persuasion.

At that moment, Emile’s wife, who knew nothing of the project on which he had been working, appeared at the gate of the garden, pushing the baby carriage.  She had with her a Bible in French from a pastor she had met on her morning walk. As she stood in front of him, Emile literally grabbed the book and rushed to his study with it. He opened the Bible and “chanced” upon the Beatitudes. He read, and read, and read – first in quiet and then aloud with an ‘indescribable warmth surging inside’.  These are his words:

“I could not find words to express my awe and wonder. And suddenly the realisation dawned upon me: this was the book that would understand me!  I continued to read deeply into the night, mostly from the Gospels. And lo and behold, as I looked through them, the One of whom they spoke, the One who spoke and acted in them became alive to me.

The providential circumstances amid which the book had found me now made it clear that while it seemed absurd to speak of a book understanding a man, this could be said of the Bible because its pages were animated by the presence of the living God and the power of his mighty acts. To this God, I prayed that night, and the God who answered was the same God of whom it was spoken in the book”. 

I love reading stories, and I love reading books time and time again. There are some cherished stories, that I go back to because they seem to express some deep parts of me,  but the only book that ever revealed me in my entirety was the Bible.  

Books don’t transform people, paragraphs do.

John Piper said that. I think it is deeply profound.  The vast content of the books that have spoken most deeply to me over the years have mostly been forgotten, but captivating paragraphs and quotes still stick in the recesses of my mind.  When all else has been forgotten, it is these sentences that keep stirring my affections for Christ.

Around this time of year people start compiling their ‘best of selection’ of what they have read, and what others should read from the year behind us. Instead, I am going to compile a list of the paragraphs that have most stirred my affections for Jesus from 2016.

John Piper

Prayer is not only the measure of our hearts, revealing what we really desire, it is also the indispensable remedy for our hearts when we do not desire God the way we ought’ | Read in Habits of Grace, by David Mathis

If you don’t see the greatness of God then all the things that money can buy become very exciting. If you can’t see the sun you will be impressed with a street light. If you’ve never felt thunder and lightning you’ll be impressed with fireworks. And if you turn your back on the greatness and majesty of God you’ll fall in love with a world of shadows and short-lived pleasures | The Curse of Careless Worship

Elizabeth Elliot

If your goal is purity of heart, be prepared to be thought very odd | Passion and Purity

Herman Bavinck

As [we] dream of progress and civilisation, at the same time see opening up before us the instability and futility of the existing world. Culture has great, even incalculable, advantages but also brings with its own peculiar drawbacks and dangers. The more abundantly the benefits of civilisation come streaming our way, the emptier our life becomes.”

If the ills of humanity were caused by culture, they could certainly be cured in no way other than by culture. But the ills we have in mind are native to the human heart, which always remains the same, and culture only brings them out. With all its wealth and power, it only shows that the human heart, in which God has put eternity, is so huge that all the world is too small to satisfy it’ | Reformed Dogmatics

Jonathan Edwards

No idea or attitude or theory or doctrine is of any value that does not inflame the heart and stir the affections in love and joy and fear of God.. if the great things of religion are rightly understood, they will affect the heart | Religious Affections

James K. Smith

What if, instead of starting from the assumption that human beings are thinking things, we started from the conviction that human beings are first and foremost lovers? What if you are defined not by what you know but by what you desire? What if the center and seat of the human person is found not in the heady regions of the intellect but in the gut-level regions of the heart? | You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

To be human is to have a heart. You can’t not love. So the question isn’t whether you will love something as ultimate; the question is what you will love as ultimate | You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

The longings of our hearts both point us in the direction of the kingdom and propel us towards it.  You are what you love because you live towards what you most desire’ |  You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

Charles Spurgeon

Oh, there is, in contemplating Christ, a balm for every wound; in musing on the Father, there is a quietus for every grief; and in the influence of the Holy Ghost, there is a balsam for every sore. Would you lose your sorrow? Would you drown your cares? Then go, plunge yourself in the Godhead’s deepest sea; be lost in his immensity; and you shall come forth as from a couch of rest, refreshed and invigorated. I know nothing which can so comfort the soul; so calm the swelling billows of sorrow and grief; so speak peace to the winds of trial, as a devout musing upon the subject of the Godhead | The Immutability of God

Avoid a sugared gospel as you would shun sugar of lead. Seek the gospel which rips up and tears and cuts and wounds and hacks and even kills, for that is the gospel that makes alive again. And when you have found it, give good heed to it. Let it enter into your inmost being. As the rain soaks into the ground, so pray the Lord to let his gospel soak into your soul.

Matt Chandler

‘The day will come when you will die and see all of history being rewritten from the halls of heaven. The annals of history will not be filled with wars and kings; there will be one story, the heroes will be missionaries and the victor will be seen clearly as Christ’ | To Live is Christ, To Die is Gain

Dietrich Bonheoffer

It is not good for us to take too seriously the many untoward experiences we have with ourselves in meditation (on the scriptures). It is here that our old vanity and our illicit claims upon God may creep in by a pious detour, as if it were our right to have nothing but elevating and fruitful experiences, and as if the discovery of our own inner poverty were quite below our dignity. For may it not be that God Himself sends us these hours of reproof and dryness that we may be brought again to expect everything from His word? “Seek God, not happiness” – this is the fundamental rule of all meditation. If you seek God alone, you will gain happiness: that is it’s promise | Life Together

It is more important for us to know what God did to Israel, to His Son Jesus Christ, then to seek what God intends for us today. The fact that Jesus died is more important than the fact that I shall die, and the fact that Jesus Christ rose from the dead is the sole ground of my hope that I, too, shall be raised on the Last Day. I find no salvation in my life history, but only in the history of Jesus Christ. Only he who allows himself to be found in Jesus Christ, in his incarnation, his cross, and his resurrection, is with God and God with him |
Life Together

Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble; it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him. Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: “ye were bought at a price,” and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us | The Cost of Discipleship

David Mathis

As much as we want to master the habit of Bible intake, to trace the lines of cause and effect from some action we take to some resulting satisfaction of our soul, the Helper resists our efforts to objectify grace. He lingers in silence. He labours mysteriously, outside our control. He imperceptibly shapes us this morning to make us into who we need to be this afternoon, and next week. His hands act untraceably as he moulds our minds, hews out our hearts, whittles at our wills, and carves at our calluses.

When we get alone with the Bible, we are not alone. God has not left us to ourselves to understand His words and feed our own souls. No matter how thin your training, no matter how spotty your routine, the Helper stands ready. Take up the text in confidence that God is primed to bless your being with his very breath | Habits of Grace

What Paragraphs Have Stirred Your Affections?

This is by no means an exhaustive collection of sentences and paragraphs that have shaped me in 2016, but simply the ones that come most readily to mind, and therefore, the ones most likely to continue to shape me in years to come.  What paragraphs and sentences have stirred your affections for Jesus?

It was Alan Bennet who said that’a book is a device to ignite the imagination’.  I would add that books are one of the best tools that we have to stir our affections and point us in helpful directions towards Jesus.  Christians throughout history have been avid readers and writers, and we should avail ourselves often of the best that God has on offer for us.

Do you love to read? Do you enjoy reading books that cross the whole spectrum of topics and genres? Then I’ve got something that may be right up your alley: Tim Challies 2017 Christian Reading Challenge. Whether you are a light reader or completely obsessed, this 2017 Christian Reading Challenge is designed to help you read more and to broaden the scope of your reading.

How It Works

The 2017 Christian Reading Challenge is composed of 4 lists of books, which you are meant to move through progressively. You will need to determine a reading goal early in the year and set your pace accordingly.

• The Light Reader. This plan has 13 books which sets a pace of 1 book every 4 weeks.
• The Avid Reader. The Avid plan adds another 13 books which increases the pace to 1 book every 2 weeks.
• The Committed Reader. This plan adds a further 26 books, bringing the total to 52, or 1 book every week.
• The Obsessed Reader. The Obsessed plan doubles the total to 104 books which sets a demanding pace of 2 books every week.

Begin with the Light plan, which includes suggestions for 13 books. Choose those books and read them in any order, checking them off as you complete them. When you have finished those 13, advance to the Avid plan. Use the criteria there to choose another 13 books and read them in any order. Then it’s time to move to the Committed plan with a further 26 books. When you have completed the Committed plan (that’s 52 books so far!), you are ready to brave the Obsessed plan with its 104 books. Be sure to set your goal at the beginning of the year and pace yourself accordingly.

All you need to do is download the list, choose your first few books, and get going. Use the hashtag #vtReadingChallenge to keep up to date with everyone else reading. Happy reading in 2017!

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