Language and Christian Life

One of the interesting things about language acquisition is that the student will soak in the vocabulary, accents and inflections of the teacher.  When I have a conversation with one of the students that is helping me with Thai, I understand and speak at an optimal level.  Put me out on the streets with some stranger and all of a sudden I can understand barely half of what they are saying.  On another point, my fellow co-workers in Sankampaeng and Hangdong teach children at elementary schools for their main ministries.  Dealing with mostly adolescent children, their range of vocabulary and grammar is perfect for commands (like sit down, pay attention, clean up) and words pertaining to school related things (scissors, glue, ruler).  On the other hand as I work in a university level Christian setting, helping with praise and worship and sitting through sermons and prayer times, I am exposed to and soak up all the Thai Christian-ese (words like worship, praise, prayer and phrases like "i feel thankful for..." or "praise God for...").  So when I'm placed in a children ministry setting, I'll do alright, but I'm not in my comfort zone with the particular phrases and vocabulary suited for such things.

On Sundays before worship, we go around the community of believers (church) and share things that we're thankful to God for.  The couple times I did raise my hand to share something, the Thai students pushed me to share in Thai.  When I did, I was amazed at the ease certain phrases came out or vocabulary that I thought I didn't know.  The first couple times I was like, "Whoa, it's God! He just put the words in my mouth!" Not saying that's not true to a certain extent, but now that I think back, I see that much of what came out of my mouth was due to what I was absorbing in my surroundings.

Those long hours of cryptic Thai sermons and Bible studies that I had to pinch myself to get through? It actually did something.  Missionary Daniel talks about how important it is just to sit and listen and soak in all the tones and inflections and words even if you don't understand any of it.  I now see why he put me through needless needful torture.  One day things start clicking and you try to do things on your own and it just comes out.

The point is that our Christian life and walk is no different.  We humans as societal creatures naturally soak up the things in our surrounding culture - attitudes, behavior, values, and worldview. Where else do we get all of our cool sayings, hip clothing styles, and time-passing fads? (before I left it was break-dancing, would someone like to inform me what's cool to do in the Korean American community now?)  Anyway, it should be pretty obvious why our walk with God stays superficial and shallow and the fruit we bear is meager and nominal when all we take in are the values and beliefs of our secular surroundings.  The world screams at us that every moment needs to be lived in the here and now, in pleasure, and in fun and entertainment.  A lot of people think that the Christian religion is all about denying yourself and they make fun of a belief system that denies "natural" desires in favor of a dry and stuffy moralistic lifestyle.  And we as Christians buy what the world tells us what Christianity is.  Thus we can't seem to bear Christ-like fruit in our lives because all we're trying to do is to negate the desires of our flesh.  We're not actually focused on abiding in Christ and remaining in the vine so that we can take in from Him all the values and beliefs and worldviews and attitudes that will really satisfy us and bear fruit that will glorify God.

In all of our fighting and running away from the flesh, we also need to be running toward something, that is, a personal living God in Christ Jesus. In Romans 12, Paul calls us to be transformed by the renewing of our mind.  He says in Philippians 4:8-9, "whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you."  Our daily walk has to be about surrounding, immersing and soaking our minds and hearts in Christ and the things of Christ. Only then we can really start putting into practice all that we have learned and received and heard.

A fruitful walk with God also calls for us to have good teachers and a good surrounding community of people.  There's a reason I don't teach Korean here. It's what Jesus called the blind leading the blind.  I also don't learn my Thai from my American friends.  In the same way a student of language needs a teacher comfortable and fluent in the usage and theory of language, a disciple of Christ needs a shepherd, role-model, or leader who is consistent in his or her walk and grounded in his or her beliefs.  Sometimes (okay a lot of times) I make mistakes as I try to speak Thai. People around me laugh but in the end I know they are genuinely invested in my improvement.  I think a lot of times we're afraid to have someone further along in his or her life as a Christian discipling us because we think we may be judged, but in the end they're looking out for our interests in our own spiritual maturity.  A good discipler produces a good disciple.  We can't learn these things on our own.  I don't think anyone can get Thai tones on their own.  There's a reason why Paul continually exhorts his churches to be imitators of him as he imitates Christ.

The community add its own dimension to both language learning and spiritual maturity.  I have one main Thai teacher, but everyone expresses language in their own unique way.  The Thai I learn from one person may not be useful with another.  My teacher takes the time to speak slowly and use simple words but not everyone's going to talk to me like a 3rd grade Thai student.  Only going around and speaking with all types of people will I be able to better grasp the full expression and nuances of the Thai language.  As Christians we learn from everyone in the body as God has gifted each one of us to mutually encourage one another towards maturity in faith.  As an underclassman I learned about the rich beauty of praise and the true meaning of worship from Sam Kang, but I also soaked in the intellectually awe-inspiring value of theology and foundations of faith from Jonas Lee (now Pastor Jonas, haha...wait is Sam a pastor too? Worship Pastor Sam? I don't know).  As an upperclassman I was humbled by my own weaknesses as I tried to lead others.  In the end, we absorb the rich diversity of gifts and functions within the community of Christ to further understand Christian life and worship of God.

So take heed with what you surround yourself with, what you feed your mind and heart with.  Let your soul feed upon the unsearchable riches of God's grace and feast at the banqueting table of God.  Let your heart assent with all its emotion that it has tasted that the Lord is good.  Find leaders you admire and wish to be like and learn from them.  Imitate the strengths God has gifted them with.  Interact within a community of like-minded believers and run the race together.  Bear each others burdens and encourage one another.

And one day, you will speak Thai be a faithful disciple and a light to the world.

A Morning Devotion

Lamentations 3:22-23 - "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness."

I don't know about other people, but whenever I think about God's mercy during a morning QT, this verse always rings in my head.  God's mercies are new every morning.  Wow.  Forget about all your failings and mistakes of the previous day because God has made his mercies anew.  Come to His fountain of living water and drink, all who are thirsty and parched.

This verse has always brought me great solace and comfort after the sorrow that tarries through the night, but I realized today, why does God's mercy need only be taken in a passive sense?  Why must we only come to this promise of fresh mercies after periods of struggle, failure, and darkness?  If we've been doing particularly well with our walk or have been more loving in our lives today, does this mean the mercies of God are not needed tomorrow?

Then it seems to me that whether we are bogged in the miry clay or soaring on wings like eagles, the mercies of God that are new every morning are meant to be taken, received and enjoyed every morning.  Like the manna from heaven, God's grace and mercy is meant to be taken one day at a time.  Some theologian that I read somewhere pointed out that the reason why Jesus says do not worry about tomorrow is that the grace God has given us is meant to be used this day.

This is a lesson I'm learning painfully in Thailand.  I know everyone understands how God's mercy works when we have fallen and God picks us up again, but are we to live the entirety of the Christian life by cheapening the grace of God?  God wants me to come to His throne every, every, every morning to be filled by His grace, strengthened by His mercy for the day ahead of me.  He wants me to grow in holiness and in sanctification.  So if yesterday I've been a particularly "good" Christian, who cares? If I use yesterday as my motivation for today, I'm actually being fueled by my success yesterday rather God's mercy and grace available today.

Thus we must forget what lies behind, yesterday's failures and successes, and strain forward to what lies ahead, that is the mercies of God ready and available to us every morning.  In light of this, let us press onward toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus (Philippians 3:13-14).

Great Is Thy Faithfulness

Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my father!
There is no shadow of turning with Thee;
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not:
As thou hast been Thou forever wilt be.
 
Great is Thy faithfulness, Great is Thy faithfulness,
Morning by morning new mercies I see:
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord unto me!
 
Summer and winter, and springtime and harvest,
Sun, moon and stars in their courses above,
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To Thy great faithfulness, mercy and love.
 
Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth.
Thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide,
Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow
Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside!

Language and God

So the other day I helped P'Phung translate "With All I Am" by Reuben Morgan into Thai.  Probably because I'm such a nerd, I find language fascinating.  Or maybe just words - how they're used, developed, original meanings, etc. (I just looked it up on wikipedia - it's called morphology)  In any case, I wish I had studied some of this at UCLA.  So here are some interesting things to think about.

1. Again, noting that I have no prior experience studying linguistics, I think it's safe to say that language itself is a cultural expression and its usage in different communities or societies reflect different values or beliefs of that community or society.  Anyway, assuming that most of the readership are Korean-Americans, it's interesting to see how the hierarchical or honorific forms that exist in Korean reflect the societal values of hierarchy and honor, while English really has no such thing built into the language itself which reflects its very egalitarian values.

(People thinking about very high liturgical churches might think about the "thee" "thy" "thou" language as an expression of some type of holiness or honor, but it was used during the old old days to express intimacy and familiarity. "You" was actually used in formal situations.  So all those hymns and songs that we sing that we think is using archaic and non-"God is my friend" language really does imply that personal and intimate relationship with God, seen in its proper context of course.)

Thai also has honorific language built into the language itself but unlike the Korean language which for the most part uses honorific conjugations (I could be wrong, I only studied up to Korean 5), the Thai language uses different words for higher beings - kings and gods/God.  So all the nice conversational words I learned and memorized are pretty useless when I read the Bible because Jesus does all his verbs in the honorific form.

Anyway, my simplistic conclusion to that one is that Americans and our "Jesus is my homeboy" Christianity do not have the built-in language values to describe the holiness and transcendence of God.  Or is it the language which is the expression of our cultural values that creates our Jesus Homeboy Christianity. I don't know, did the chicken or the egg come first?  And Thai's would feel uncomfortable talking about God in too much of a colloquial language because God is supposed to be high and beyond us. 

Yet God is amazingly both!  Here's one of my favorite verses about this from Isaiah 57:15, "For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place,
and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite."  God is fearsome, bigger than the universe, transcendent, holy, set apart, all-powerful, yet He calls us friend, we are adopted into His sonship, and we can cry to Him "Abba, Father."  Too bad human language can't seem to capture this.

2. One of my favorite Thai words is glap jai which means "to repent."   Glap is used in phrases like glap baan which means "return home" or glap rot which means "u-turn" and jai means "heart or mind." Its literal meaning is returning your heart or turning your heart around. Now that's a great definition of repent, like the original Greek word metanoeo which means to change one's mind.  Yet the primary definition of the English word "repent" is to feel sorry. (I guess if you study that word in Latin it means something like "do penitence again" but what does that even mean for us 21st century folk?)  And that seems to carry over into American Christianity where if we sin, repenting just means we feel sorry about it and God forgives us and everything is good and dandy.  The Thai and Greek word carries the full meaning of repentance which is not merely feeling sorry, but changing or turning your heart around, that is towards God.  It's more of an action than it is an emotion.  We turn away from our sins, not just feel sorry about them.

3. Coming in at a close second is the Thai word santi suk which means "peace".  This word is really cool because it's a word created by Christians because the original Thai word for peace is santi which comes from the Buddhist conception of peace, namely a peace that comes from the absence of everything.  In the Buddhist worldview is the point of life is to remove oneself from all desire then peace is empty.  I think the world that is under pervading influence of Buddhism has this conception of peace.  Have you seen those "coexist" or "peace" bumper stickers with all the symbols of world religions?  Is peace really an ideal that's so simplistic that all these different religions with different worldviews are going to somehow retract some of their conflicting beliefs for this false sense of peace?  You believe what you want and I'll believe what I want, let's just not step on each other's toes and we'll call it peace.

But no sir, that is not the Christian peace, santi suk. The Thai word suk means joy and you put that with santi and bam! you got santi suk which would mean something like a joy filled peace.  Now that's on track with the biblical definition of peace which comes from the Hebrew word shalom which the ESV Study Bible describes as "where a person's life with God and with everything else is in ordered harmony, both physically and spiritually, and “all is well.”"  Real peace is not the merely the absence of conflict or a withdrawal from the enemy but it is full-force unrelenting march toward the enemy with love.  Real peace is not passive, but is active in bringing about joy and love and harmony in all things.

4. The last word I like is the Thai phrase for saying sorry, khoe thoot. It literally means "I ask for your punishment." I wonder what kind of cultural value that denotes hahaha jk.  It's just funny.

Hope that was interesting, and if not, too bad I'm a nerd. =)

The Joys of New Christians

There's a section on seminary applications that asks you when you became Christian or accepted Christ as Lord and Savior.  I keep dreading that question because I really have no idea when I became Christian.  I don't even have a specific experience of personalization (a fancy term I learned at UCLA as a Religion major meaning the act of taking and making the faith of one's parents into one's own personal faith).  I just always went to church (as if church is just a building right?) and God became more evident in His existence and sovereignty in my life.

As a result, I don't really even have a "first love" experience or memory.  Whenever I read Revelations and think about my first love, I usually just go back to previous "moments" -  the kind where you are so in awe and consumed by God's love and grace. It's probably the same thing right?  (This is probably why my personal theology on salvation centers not around a decisive moment but rather a life of continual sanctification and obedience to God...but this is not to de-emphasize that singular, important moment of justification...but I digress).

Regardless, whether your story is like mine or you have a more decisive salvation story, the fact is we as humans are quite forgetful, especially of the love and grace of God.  Sometimes we just get into the grind of life, work, school, and ministry and forget the reason why we decided to do everything in the first place.  We may be faithful in terms of what we do, but our heart and motive behind it has become hazy and unclear.

On the mission field, I have found no better first love reminder than seeing and witness to the first love of new Christians.  God is like that shiny new toy that we loved and played with and got bored of, but when someone new comes and is having fun with the toy again, you suddenly want it back.  But with God, there's enough to go around for everyone!

I bring this up because in the past two weeks we've had two new believers put their faith in Jesus Christ.  The kind of joy in the air and the excitement in their eyes can't be replicated by other circumstances.  If I remember correctly, John Piper's father once told him, "There's no greater joy than winning souls."  I truly do believe this because as new believers learn about God, share their experiences and testimonies, I see God reviving joy in the hearts of all the other members.  Both of the staff members here cry every time they hear someone's testimony.  I see friends of new believers with tears of joy that their friend has entered into and are now enjoying the great community of God.

Back when I was in college (that is...seven months ago...), I got to experience the kind of joy and love of teaching and sharing Christ with younger believers.  This brought me great joy as other students moved from the socialization of Christianity (growing up in a faith or tradition) to personalization of faith, but I regret that I never saw one complete non-believer come to Christ.  And this is my fault because I never bothered to go outside the bounds of church.

I mean if you really think about a complete non-believer putting their faith into Christ, it's really an amazing thing.  And I'm not just talking about the amazing theology behind it - God by his grace regenerating children of wrath, and calling rebellious beings into the adoption of sonship through the obedience and suffering of Jesus Christ.  I think about all the practical things behind conversion like the fact that someone is giving up a worldview that they've grown up with, with its attached cultural and behavioral values and customs.  Christian kids know the Christian law, values, and behavior before they accept the Christian gospel, but when they put faith in Christ, the worldview of Christianity is more or less there.  But growing up Buddhist for twenty years, believing in the power of merit from all sorts of rituals, then leaving all those things behind to follow a daresay foreign God?  I mean Buddhism technically doesn't even have a God in its belief system.

But these new believers have found something worth throwing away twenty years of what previously gave them worth and value in their life.  They're willing to face being shunned or shamed by family members and friends.  And on top of that, they're just filled with this infectious joy that's overflowing from their first love.

I would love for brothers and sisters back home to be able to experience this kind of joy, and they CAN.  We just need to step outside our four walls and turn to a neighbor or a classmate.  But more on my thoughts of how that can happen later.

For now, please pray for Kazuko and Jubjib, the new sisters in Christ, that their joy would only continue to grow as they come to know and be known by the living God.

God is moving!

Spiritual Wilderness

It's been a long time blog. Too long?

Quite frankly, I'm writing my first post in over a month with hesitation and fear.  I love putting into words the different thoughts that have been jumbling around in my head.  I love sharing the different experiences, emotions and feelings that God has given me with people back at home.  But blogging, that is sharing things God has been teaching me, comes with a deep deep price.

I don't know about other people, but I am a very prideful person. My nature is adverse to humility and arrogance courses through my veins.  And what horrifies me the most is that I have the uncanny ability to take something beautiful that God has given me or has taught me, and turn it into something that glorifies not God, but myself.  I am blessed by God.  I am blessed when I share my blessings with others.  But rather than continually looking toward God for more blessings, I become satisfied with not what God has done or is doing, but what God has done or is doing through me.

And the thing about blogging is that I don't like writing about lessons God is teaching me in the middle of it.  I like going through the entire experience, then reflecting back upon all that has happened and creating a nice beginning, middle, and end.  Unfortunately, when I'm mid-trial or tribulation, I don't feel much like writing.  So here's a secret: if you haven't seen me blog for a while, I probably don't feel like I'm at a point where I should be blogging.  And this vicious cycle continues where I blog, become proud of what I've learned, become independent from God, fall hard, don't blog, recover, and blog again.  So I have a lot to share from the past month which I'll try updating topically, but please please, pray that blogging would not become a source of pride and self-satisfaction.  I would love to share all the blessings I've received, but I can't if my blessings turn into my own curse.

I am reminded of Jeremiah 2:13 because I commit two evils: forsaking God, the fountain of living waters and hewing out cisterns that hold no water for myself.  The picture I see in my head is something like drinking crystal clear, mountain spring water and then being proud that I sweat it out.  Then I proceed to satisfy and sustain myself on my own sweat.  Maybe a better example would be drinking one's urine. Or the biblical example would be the dog returning to its vomit right?  Whatever the case, God's grace flowing out from us is not meant to feed us.  Yes we are blessed when God uses sinful creatures like us for His will, but it's supposed to make us look continually to God, not ourselves.

Anyway, Song Kim (Missionary Daniel's wife) said something quite profound to me last night and I want to leave with this: "There's a kind of faith that grows in the context of church and being surrounded by Christians, and there's a kind of faith that grows on the mission field.  The kind of faith that grows on the mission field has to be a deep faith."

I'd say January had to be the toughest month for me in Thailand.  Maybe it's the six month wall or that I have a huge slump every winter time starting from my freshman year in college.  Actually, this past month was the toughest month of my life.  All the other times I had my friends and my pastors and my church to fall back upon, places and people to nurture and take of me.  And I grew during those times.  But this past month was so, so hard.  Perhaps it was the sovereign plan of the Lord for me to go through this during a time when everyone back home gets to be uber-blessed from two weeks of teuksae and prayer and sermons.  And this was my first month living in my apartment so I was never home to talk to people at home.  And people were probably tired from teuksae so they weren't online to talk anyway.  And Satan used the new year with all my self-effort, self-induced goals and ambitions to bring all my failures crashing down on me.

Whatever the case, I had nobody but God in the spiritual wilderness.  And I understand now just a taste of what the missionary's faith requires: a deep deep foundation and rooted-ness in the vine that is Christ.  There's no water in the desert, that's why cacti have freaking deep roots.  So hopefully God made me more like a cactus.

Santa = Satan?

Whoa whoa whoa Eric, are you talking about Jolly Ole St. Nick? Kris Kringle? Santa, Santa Claus?! How dare you equate a cherished and beloved symbol of the Christmas season with the Father of Lies, the Prince of Darkness? Come it's not like we're worshiping Santa Claus. We know he's not real, it's just something fun we do like the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny (Don't you know that Jesus and his disciples painted eggs together at the Last Supper?).  You don't need to go all extreme and make things black and white. All in good fun, all in good fun.

Haha, I agree but here are my reservations:
1. We can kind of safely have these pseudo-symbols or characters on religious holidays like Christmas and Easter because America is a Christian-ish country.  And by that I mean, we're now labeled post-Christian, but there's cultural, symbolic, and moralistic residue left over from when America used to be very Christian.  So for the Christians at least, it might be something Christians kind of play along with but everyone knows God is the only true and living God and that Jesus is the reason for the season.  And for non-Christians, Santa can be something to give some kind of meaning to their holiday break from work (as far as I know, no Asian countries give Christmas day off).
2. It might be more okay in America to just play along with these kinds of things because Western materialistic worldview discredits the supernatural as a given. At a certain age, no one's really going to believe that tooth fairies, Santa Claus and the Easter bunny exists.  However, in a more pantheistic, spiritual/animistic Eastern/Asian worldview everything is and can be a god and is able to be worshiped.  For example, P'Mee shared with me once that if you take a funny shaped rock, say it brings good luck and give it to an animistic Thai, they'll put it up on their shelf of religious objects and believe that it's going to give you good luck.  If you come and say a statue changed your life, they'll take the statue and worship that.  If you give them the Bible and say that it changed your life, they.... no they don't take that one.

So let's look at the nature and powers of Santa:
1. Possibly immortal as he's been handing out presents for hundreds of years.
2. Has the power of flight
3. Possibly omnipresent, especially if he's going to every child's house in one night. Or the power of super-speed.
4. Possibly has the power of teleportation, especially when your apartment doesn't have a chimney. (Maybe he's just good at picking locks)
5. Omniscient - He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows if you've been bad or good... So be good for goodness' sake.
6. Apparently works according to the universal moral law. If you're good, you get a good gift. If you're bad, you get coal. What if you're really bad, like evil? It's been discussed, you get coal. (Five points to anyone who knows where that line is from.)
    a. However, he doesn't seem to keep a real list, or is quite gracious because everyone seems to get gifts on Christmas morning. (Except that one time when I went on vacation to Las Vegas with my family and my mom said Santa wouldn't come follow us on vacation.)

Sounds like a god to me.  I'm not writing this post to point fingers at America and Christians who celebrate Santa with their kids and tell them they're worshiping Satan. I'm not that crazy.  But it's interesting to take a look at Santa from the Thai perspective and understand exactly why the Christian church would dare not bring Santa into any type of Christian tradition.  They have their own cultural residue that they need to get rid of and to bring in an imported tradition that could possibly be received through a spiritual/animistic worldview doesn't sound too safe.  Thai Buddhists look at Christianity through their worldview anyway - either something to be rejected or just another way to nirvana.  I'm sure there's enough confusion trying to explain the idea of a personal creator God and the reason why we need the gospel, so to add Santa is quite unwise.

Is Santa Satan? Is it coincidence that they use the SAME LETTERS?! I'm not going to shove my opinion down anyone's throats but as you make your opinion for yourself, let us consider who we worship and what this Christmas season is for.  Not a jolly old fat man with super powers, but a man who "had no form or majesty that we should look at him and no beauty that  we should desire him," a "man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief."  A man "wounded for our transgressions...crushed for our iniquities," and by whose stripes we are healed. (Isaiah 53)

This season is about Christ Jesus:
  ⁶Who, being in very nature God,
      did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
 ⁷but made himself nothing,
      taking the very nature of a servant,
      being made in human likeness.
 ⁸And being found in appearance as a man,
      he humbled himself
      and became obedient to death—
         even death on a cross!
 ⁹Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
      and gave him the name that is above every name,
 ¹⁰that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
      in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
 ¹¹and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
      to the glory of God the Father.
(Philippians 2:6-11)

Glory to God in the highest!

Eric's Book Corner - 12/14/09

Because of all the new books people sent and plenty of ample time for reading (although I'm still not reading as much as I'd like), I want to just give some summaries or ratings of different books that I've read while I'm here.

John Piper - Let the Nations Be Glad

My Rating: 4.5/5

Probably the first book I finished in Thailand as I tried to cultivate a heart for missions. Let the Nations Be Glad is an amazing book that points to the glory of God in all things, and how missions plays into that. I mean who hasn't heard the line "Missions exist because worship does not"?  Piper as always writes seeking to take his readers beyond just contentment and satisfaction in relative standards to seeing God through the standard of the ultimate and the infinite. You just want to see the bigger picture in the entire plan of God and his purpose for missions.  There were so many chapters where after I finished I had to just stop and pray. And to me that's the mark of a great great book.  I would give the book a five out of five just because I'm biased towards Piper, but the entire middle section becomes quite heady and academic because Piper takes the effort to biblically support the doctrines of eternal damnation and the definition of "nations" as ethnic people groups through exegesis of original Greek.  I know no Greek and as nerdy as I am, that part just got really boring.  But the first and last third of the book is quite great. I suggest you go pick up a copy now!

A.W. Tozer - The Knowledge of the Holy

My Rating: 3.5/5

I absolute loved Tozer's The Pursuit of God and I remember PJ recommending this book if you wanted to know more about the attributes of God.  It's not a bad book by any means, but Tozer does write from half a century ago and even though that doesn't seem like a lot, a book just has to be amazing to outlast the influences of an ever-changing language (To me, C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity is an example).  Tozer goes through around twenty different attributes and takes the time to make sure that knowledge about the attributes of God will not be head knowledge but heart knowledge.  He wants the reader to learn about a unique attribute of God and overflow in exultant worship. Maybe because I've read books on attributes of God before and I didn't try hard enough to make this into heart-knowledge, but nothing really spoke out to me.  However, if you would like to study the attributes of God for the first time it might be worth your time.

John Piper - The Pleasures of God

My Rating: 5/5

The second in Piper's trilogy (Desiring God, The Pleasures of God, Future Grace), Piper takes a whole book to talk about just why God is most glorified when He is most satisfied in himself - a corollary from Piper's famous line "God is most glorified when we are most satisfied in Him" from Desiring God.  I let a friend borrow the book so I can't be more detailed about it, but Piper's chapter on how prayer glorifies God was another one of those things you read and you can't help but pray for an hour after.  The book also gives Piper's answers on things like election (and how God is glorified in it) as well as the two wills of God (like can the love in John 3:16 be applicable to all or only God's chosen elect?).  Again, I'm giving this book a biased rating because I want everyone to go pick up a copy. But really, go out and pick up one of his three most famous books (among many others).

Jack Deere - Surprised by the Power of the Holy Spirit

My Rating: 5/5

I rate this book high because it's just something I really really needed to read at this point in my walk and if you're like me, this book is a must read.  The deepening of my walk with God began on a very intellectual basis, starting with like intro books to Reformed Theology by R.C. Sproul in my sophomore year. I'm kind of a rational, logical kind of guy when it comes to how I see things anyway so I ate up these kinds of theology or apologetics books.  But somewhere in that development, I developed a rational framework to deny the power of the Holy Spirit.  And it's something along the lines of "I know that logically God can do anything like heal or perform miracles today, but I just don't believe God will use me to do it." Jack Deere points out how statements or beliefs like these aren't really beliefs in the power of God that God still does work through the giftings of the Holy Spirit today powerfully and supernaturally.  This entire realm of the Holy Spirit is still quite a mystery to me, but I agree with Deere when he argues that the gospel is powerfully supported through signs and wonders, although he makes it clear that ultimately God must open hearts to the message itself.  So for all who feel trapped in a logical rational Christianity (which isn't necessarily bad) and want a biblically supported argument for exploring the power of the Holy Spirit, I recommend this book.