Stand to Reason Blog

Free Audiobook: Think

The free audiobook at ChristianAudio.com this month is John Piper's Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God. Piper's defense of, and call to, rigorous thinking in the Christian life explores the relationship between thinking and loving God, between thinking and salvation, and between thinking and living humbly in love for God and man.

Here are a few highlights to give you a taste:

I hope it is clear now that the emphasis of this book on thinking is not at the expense of feeling or delighting or loving. Both are essential to being human, and both are essential to glorifying God. And, while it is true that mind and heart are mutually enlivening, it is also clear that the mind is mainly the servant of the heart. That is, the mind serves to know the truth that fuels the fires of the heart. The apex of glorifying God is enjoying him with the heart. But this is an empty emotionalism where that joy is not awakened and sustained by true views of God for who he really is. That is mainly what the mind is for….

Here is the place of thinking and reason. Paul uses his mind to proclaim and explain and defend and confirm the facts of the gospel. And we use our mind to hear it and construe its meaning and weigh its claims. Paul argues that Jesus is the Christ and that he rose from the dead and that he died for our sins. Paul reasons with facts and arguments and sets Christ forth. Therefore, we know that the sight of the self-authenticating glory of Christ is not separate from the rational presentation and demonstration and reception of the truth of the gospel. That rational presentation and reception—the work of the mind—is indispensable….

No amount of reasoning or historical argument alone can produce spiritual sight in the blind. This is the limit of thinking. Nevertheless, the rational proclamation and comprehension of the gospel facts are indispensable….

[A] logical presentation of the gospel of Christ is like wire along which the electricity of spiritual power runs. Wires do not make lights go on; electricity does. But in the providence of God, electricity runs through wires. And in the design of God, the use of our minds in knowing, ordering, and presenting the truth of Christ is the normal way that the eyes of the blind are opened and belief in Jesus is awakened….

The remedy for barren intellectualism is not anti-intellectualism, but humble, faithful, prayerful, Spirit-dependent, rigorous thinking.

Download the free audiobook here.

10 Classics for a Balanced Reading Diet

If you'd like to take on an adventure and be more deliberate in your reading this year, John Mark Reynolds has a post on "10 Essential Classics of Western Literature" that can get you started:

Here are 10 books that began the rebirth in my own soul of something better. Eccentric though such a list must be it at least has the benefit of actually having helped one person and I have some hope that where it helped one it may help another.

I have limited myself to one sentence to say why I read them….

1. Odyssey, Homer. The long journey from the darkness of paganism to philosophy begins here.

2. Republic, Plato. Justice should be sought for its own sake, but we need a man to die and come to life again in order to fully see it.

3. Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius. Emo-whining gets a dose of tough love from Lady Philosophy, and the result is a poetic vision of reality.

4. Divine Comedy, Dante. The world isn’t quite what Dante imagined, but if wrong in details this great poem is truer as a whole than what you will read in today’s paper.

5. Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser. Protestants can be romantic and poetic.

6. Much Ado about Nothing, William Shakespeare. If not the Bard’s greatest play maybe the best play for us, because this comedy contrasts our cynicism and eroticism with Christian romance while making us laugh out loud (not LOL).

7. Paradise Lost, John Milton. We oft like Milton’s Satan more than Milton’s God, revealing more about us than about Milton.

8. Second Treatise, John Locke. If you are an American, this apologist helped create the government you should cherish.

9. On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin. Darwin tries to remove design from biology and still makes the case better than anyone else.

10. Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky wrestles with seeming meaninglessness and pain and finds Christ, if not Christianity, victor.

One thing I appreciate about John Mark Reynolds is his love of beauty and poetry, and you'll notice this list is chock-full of it. I also suspect that as analytical people who love apologetics, you might not be getting enough of these things in your diet. So give them a try! They will speak to you in a different way from a theology or philosophy book and reach different parts of you, but tell you true things, nonetheless.

Read his post to hear more about why and how to read great literature (or if you want more explanation on his inclusion of Darwin). And take a look at his Great Books Reader where you'll find excerpts from 30 classics followed by essays that will help you think through and appreciate these books as a Christian.

How Our Suffering Glorifies God

I've been reading Richard Wurmbrand's Tortured for Christ, a book about the sufferings of Christians under the Communists, particularly Wurmbrand's own suffering in Romania. This book puts some flesh and bones on what we read about suffering in 1 Peter, enabling us to see with our own "eyes" the reality of the unique role suffering plays in our purpose as Christians.

In 1 Peter 2:9-10 we read:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light; for you once were not a people, but now you are the people of God; you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

God calls and saves a people for Himself for the purpose of "proclaiming His excellencies"—the pinnacle of those excellencies being His mercy and grace that changed us, His enemies, into His people. And in 1 Peter, we find two ways that suffering accomplishes this purpose. The first is in 1:6-7:

[Y]ou have been distressed by various trials, so that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold which is perishable, even though tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

The truth about Christ's death on the cross for our sins, about our adoption as God's children, and our future enjoyment of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit forever is something far more precious than gold. And every time a Christian endures suffering and holds on to this truth instead of giving up in unbelief, cynicism, or bitterness, he is revealing God's glory to the world by saying the height of God's value is even greater than the depth of pain in suffering. In the case of Wurmbrand and his fellow prisoners, this is saying something indeed.

But there's yet another way suffering accomplishes God's purpose for us. Peter twice couples our suffering with a description Christ's suffering. First in 2:21-24:

For what credit is there if, when you sin and are harshly treated, you endure it with patience? But if when you do what is right and suffer for it you patiently endure it, this finds favor with God.

For you have been called for this purpose, since Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example for you to follow in His steps, who committed no sin, nor was any deceit found in His mouth; and while being reviled, He did not revile in return; while suffering, He uttered no threats, but kept entrusting Himself to Him who judges righteously; and He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by His wounds you were healed.

And again in 3:17-18:

For it is better, if God should will it so, that you suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong. For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit.

When we suffer unjustly and respond as Christ did, we serve as a picture of Christ to our persecutors and to the world, proclaiming His glory and revealing Him to those who don’t yet know Him.

Wurmbrand and his fellow Christian prisoners would suffer through their beatings, refusing to deny Christ, and then turn and pray in love for those tormentors whose sin was responsible for the cruel destruction of their bodies. By this living illustration of the beauty of Christ's character, work, and value, some of the guards saw Jesus for the first time and became His followers.

The suffering of Christians, inevitable and expected, uniquely accomplishes both of these goods in the service of our ultimate purpose of glorifying God and His grace.

(Right now on Amazon, the Kindle version of Tortured for Christ is only $1. And you don't need a Kindle! Just download a free app to read the book on your PC or Mac.)

Prayer Begins with Hope in God

Today is the National Day of Prayer, and while prayer is a central part of life for some of you, I have no doubt that many of you are sheepishly reflecting on the fact that you're not very big on prayer. Perhaps some of you are even defiantly resisting prayer, or are merely depressed and unable to motivate yourselves to plead with God when you've faced so many disappointments and feel so far away from Him.

Or maybe you're like me, and you've been in each of these places at one time or another. When I was in the lowest point of my prayer life, I came across A Praying Life by Paul Miller and found it to be very helpful. I discovered yesterday that Amazon is offering the Kindle version of this book for free, so take a look today because I don't know how long this will last. (You can download a free program onto your computer (PC or Mac) from Amazon to read the book, even if you don't have a Kindle.) And here's a review of the book by Tim Challies that explains its strengths and weaknesses.

Beyond recommending the book, I wanted to say a word of encouragement to those who are having trouble praying. First, the greatest killer of prayer is a loss of hope. A turning point for me when I was feeling most hopeless happened when I was reading Romans 4. In this chapter, Paul is explaining that we're the descendants of Abraham, and the heir of the promises made to him, if we share in the faith of Abraham. Then Paul hits us with a description of God that changes everything: "Him whom [Abraham] believed, even God, who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist."

Meditate on that for a moment. God "gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist." God has the power to give your spirit the life and hope that is now lacking in you--He calls it into being out of nothing. Do you feel dead? God is the God who gives life where it does not now exist. This is who God is. This is what He does. But He doesn't always do this immediately. Do you have the faith to trust in Him while waiting as Abraham waited? 

Without becoming weak in faith [Abraham] contemplated his own body, now as good as dead since he was about a hundred years old, and the deadness of Sarah's womb; yet, with respect to the promise of God, he did not waver in unbelief but grew strong in faith, giving glory to God, and being fully assured that what God had promised, He was able also to perform (Romans 4:18-21).

It's likely that an end to your hopelessness, leading to an ability to pray again, seems impossible to you--just as impossible as the birth of Isaac seemed to Abraham. So, like Abraham, don't try to focus all your faith on this happening. Instead, focus your faith on God, trustworthy and powerful, who gives life to the dead. Meditate on who He is. Don't worry if you don't believe you'll ever have hope again. Just start by believing the truth about God. Like Abraham, "in hope against hope" put your faith in Him who is able to call into being that which does not exist.

Second, your soul is real. There are spiritual realities in life just as there are physical realities. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that my soul can starve just as surely as my body can starve. You need to pray and read the Bible as much as you need to eat because there is the same reality of necessity in both cases. Do you place as much urgency on the one as on the other? Do you ever decide not to eat for a few days because you're too busy? Is your soul suffering now the way your body would be if you stopped eating? The answer to your apathy or despair might be as simple as beginning to eat again.

Let A Praying Life be a starting point for you.

Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites

This is a much-needed book. 

Thomas Nagel Likes Meyer's Book

Nice.  Prominent philosopher Thomas Nagel names Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design as one of his books of the year:

Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperCollins) is a detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter – something that had to happen before the process of biological evolution could begin. The controversy over Intelligent Design has so far focused mainly on whether the evolution of life since its beginnings can be explained entirely by natural selection and other non-purposive causes. Meyer takes up the prior question of how the immensely complex and exquisitely functional chemical structure of DNA, which cannot be explained by natural selection because it makes natural selection possible, could have originated without an intentional cause. He examines the history and present state of research on non-purposive chemical explanations of the origin of life, and argues that the available evidence offers no prospect of a credible naturalistic alternative to the hypothesis of an intentional cause. Meyer is a Christian, but atheists, and theists who believe God never intervenes in the natural world, will be instructed by his careful presentation of this fiendishly difficult problem.

Meyer's book is an Amazon best seller.  Go buy it.  Now.

New Video Promoting Apologetics Study Bible for Students

Sean McDowell has a new video demonstrating the need for the upcoming Apologetics Study Bible for Students. Greg, Brett, and I all have articles in it. It will be available for purchase in February, 2010.

Summer Book Sale

If you haven’t already taken advantage of the great deals being offered right now in our online bookstore, I suggest you do so soon.  Inventory is moving quickly, and these discounts are only good while supplies last:

Welcome to College

 We know that many Christians walk away from Christ during college.  And many parents and students are desperate for guidance and wisdom on how to navigate this perilous part of life's journey.  That’s why Jonathan Morrow’s new book, Welcome to College, is a must-have resource. 

If a parent or student asked me for a single book to read before or during college, I’d give them Morrow’s book.  He has written a comprehensive guide broken into 42 manageable, “bite-sized” chapters, yet it is remarkably in-depth.  It’s definitely not your typical dumbed-down Christianity-lite. 

And Morrow deals with both head and heart.  Chapter 2 really frames the book, as he unpacks what it means to “Think Christianly.”  Next, he lays a vital foundation, clarifying issues Christians are profoundly confused about, like theology, faith and knowledge.  Then he offers clear-thinking yet gracious apologetics for the contemporary challenges a college student will be sure to face from peers and professors. 

But he doesn’t just offer pat answers.  Morrow has the philosophical training (he’s a graduate of Talbot’s premiere masters in philosophy of religion and ethics program) to equip students how to think, introducing them to important categories of thought like metaphysics and epistemology. 

Morrow doesn’t stop with the intellectual work though.  As a pastor, he knows head and heart cannot be divorced.  So he tackles very practical issues like managing money, God’s will, sex and dating, navigating media, and alcohol.  And all of this is placed in the context of a life lived in apprenticeship to Jesus of Nazareth. 

Check out FamilyLife Today's interview with Jonathan today and tomorrow.  Also, Jonathan blogs regularly.  And be sure to get a copy of his book for every graduating high school senior you know this spring.  

Three STR Amigos Contribute to One Book

Three STR speakers each wrote a chapter in a new book from Harvest House Publishers focusing on relational apologetics. Brett Kunkle's chapter is on truth, former STR speaker Steve Wagner wrote a chapter on abortion, and my (Alan Shlemon) chapter is on homosexuality. Only Greg is missing, but he's not complaining because he has his own book out.

Apologetics for a New Generation: A Biblical and Culturally Relevant Approach to Talking About God is available for purchase now.