Banner Board Books Set

Rebecca VanDoodewaard and Blair Bailie

Banner of Truth, 2017, $9 each

One of my goals every year is to read a few biographies. That is because biographies captivate us. Many of us as adults have been introduced to figures like Luther, Whitefield, and Spurgeon through carefully researched and presented accounts of their fascinating lives. But what about our children? Is there an accommodating way to introduce them in their earliest years to some of the church’s historical heroes?

Thankfully, Rebecca VanDoodewaard (author) and Blair Bailie (illustrator) have provided us with short, fun, and wonderfully illustrated board books to do just that. These simple stories are directed to very young children, ages 0–3. In them you can read to your kids about the lives of Katharina Luther, George Whitefield, Susannah Spurgeon, and Martyn Lloyd-Jones. To make the experience a little more adventurous, on the back cover there are directions of what to look for in the illustrations.

Prayers of the Bible

Gordon Keddie

Crown and Covenant Publications, 2017, $18

Available at CrownandCovenant.com

When Jesus taught His disciples to pray, He understood that the Christian life is a life of prayer. Prayer is as essential to our faith as breathing is to the body. Nevertheless, it is not easy to pray. The Puritan Richard Baxter once said that the difficulty of prayer comes because by nature we do not love the very things God commends and commands. Ultimately, we need the Holy Spirit to grant to us new affections to make us love those things we previously did not. We need His ministry to work in us a spirit of true prayer.

Thankfully, God has also given us other encouragements to a prayerful life. Such is Gordon Keddie’s new book Prayers of the Bible: 366 Devotionals to Encourage Your Prayer Life. This volume is a compilation of devotions that Keddie prepared for his church’s weekly prayer meeting. Each one—averaging a page and a half in length—exposits and applies a different prayer from the Bible. Keddie pastorally brings us through prayers of praise and lament, blessing and cursing, petition and thankfulness. The result is a book filled with warm and convicting encouragement. I hope that this book will get a wide reading and that we would see in our churches the tremendous blessing that comes as we pray privately and publicly to the God of all grace.

Not Tragically Colored

Ismael Hernandez

Acton Institute, 2016, $20

Are there race-based problems in America? If politics, society, and media are an accurate indication, it seems there are. In response we’ve been bombarded by narratives, commentary, and explanations that try to help us understand this systemic problem. However, many of the conversations are confusing and often unhelpful to those who are genuinely seeking clarity. That’s why Ismael Hernandez’s book Not Tragically Colored is a fresh and welcome perspective.

In university when I was studying philosophy, I remember becoming aware (at least superficially) of how much we are shaped by the culture around us. We are all far more a product of our time than we like to admit. Ironically, most of us remain ignorant of the ideologies and philosophies that inform the way we understand the world around us. This is true of the “racialism” in our society. With penetrating insight and carefully developed conclusions, Hernandez interacts with the motivating ideas behind the racial divide, poverty, government welfare, and black culture in America.

Hernandez, a former Communist who was born and raised in Puerto Rico and is now a Catholic social worker, seeks to explore (and expose) the radical ideologies and redefinitions that have consciously or unconsciously informed the narrative of our cultural conversation. Unlike many voices in this discussion, Hernandez does not accept the presuppositions and starting points of many; he challenges the reader to cautiously evaluate the influences that impact us.

As an example, in an intriguing chapter on personhood, Hernandez critiques how race in America has become essential to personhood—that is to say, racial identity defines who we are. Refusing to accept this, Hernandez maintains that race is actually a thin veneer that actually distorts the intrinsic value of a person. The solution to the “race problem” is not in identifying ourselves with a particular racial or tribal identity, but to reclaim the greatness of the human person as person.

According to Hernandez—a committed Roman Catholic—this cannot be achieved without understanding that personhood is rooted in the image of God. The image of God expresses itself in the harmonious but diverse communion of sexual identity (male and female) but, in his argument, not in racial identity. He writes: “It is in our sexual reality as individuals, not in our race, that we find the first quest for identity and togetherness.” Racialism, he goes on to say, is a path that leads to sinful self-assertion and wrongheaded autonomy. He concludes: “By essentializing race, we have created another boundary of shame: the classification of race.”

All of this matters because, according to Hernandez, we continue to see programs, discussions, and analyses that assume certain things and then try to offer a remedy to the “race problem.” At the end of the day (in his estimation), because we do not challenge the assumptions, we have only superficial answers.

I do not agree with every philosophic or theological conclusion Hernandez makes. Nevertheless, Not Tragically Colored is a book that rationally and compellingly aims at the heart of societal problems. While I appreciate the level of cogent argumentation, this could, at the end of the day, be one of its weaknesses. Maybe it is my pessimism, but in a society dominated by rhetoric, angst, and irrationality, one has to wonder if the weapons of logic and reason are not always useful. That being said, this book deserves a wide reading and, in my mind, is a breath of fresh air in an otherwise confused and confusing societal discussion.

Heart of the Matter: Daily Reflections for Changing Hearts and Lives

Nancy B. Winter (ed.)

New Growth Press, 2012, $22

Reviewed by Sharon Sampson

Available at CrownandCovenant.com

Few of us would disagree that we should spend time daily in the Word. Those who are intimidated by the “read the whole Bible in a year” approach often turn to daily devotionals in order to make their quiet times more manageable. Such resources, however, can come up short in terms of Bible reading or beneficial content. While I would probably prefer Voices of the Past: Puritan Devotional Readings (edited by Richard Rushing) or Gordon Keddie’s new Prayers of the Bible devotional, Heart of the Matter does a fine job of bridging the gap between too much reading and too little value.

One of the first things you notice about the book is that each day’s reading is more than just one verse, usually 10 to 20 verses, or a short chapter. This allows much more opportunity to see the context of the passage and hear more from God’s Word, rather than just the thoughts of a person referring to one verse. The commentaries themselves come from more than 30 counseling books and booklets, most of them published by the Christian Counseling Education Foundation (CCEF).

One drawback is that the reader has to go to the back of the book to find the source of each day’s devotional, and there is no master list of all the resources. (Voices of the Past has the resource at the bottom of each page, along with a bibliography and topical index at the back.)

It is truly a strength, however, that in Heart of the Matter there is so much Scripture, including Psalm readings on 93 days. Another strength is that, because the readings have been taken from counseling resources, they are pointing to Scripture passages and providing commentaries that focus on hope and the encouragement of Scripture (Rom. 15:4). Often those who are facing trials struggle to read the Bible. They are down, discouraged, and feeling distant from the Lord. This book is a great resource to get yourself or someone you know back into the habit of drinking daily from the fountain of God’s Word. You will be reminded of the promises of God that are yours in Christ, of the character of our God who does not change, and to put off the old man and put on the new (Eph. 4:22–24), while calling upon the God of all comfort who hears your prayers.