Best of 2008

Here's the short list of the best of 2008 (take "best" in a mostly trivial sense)


Best Movie: Slumdog Millionare
close seconds: Dark Knight, There Will be Blood

Best Book Fiction: The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
Honorable Mentions: the Samurai by Shusako Endo; The Bridges at Toko-Riby James Michener; A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle;
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Best Book Biography:
The Road to Lost Innocence by Somaly Mam

Best Book - Theological: The Gospel According to Jesusby John Macarthur
honorable mentions: Crazy Loveby Francis Chan; The Cross and Christian Ministryby D.A. Carson

Best Album:
Keith Green: The Live Experience

Best Trip: Driving to Canada and back with my honey

Best Youth Group Memory:
Missions trip to NYC
honorable mentions: Having Joe live with us, Seeing Joe and Anai lead youth group, Youth led worship band

Best Adventure: Lobster Fishing on San Clemente Island with Dad

Best Kisser:

Sarah Freiberg


Happy New Year!

The Gospel and Personal Evangelism

I recently finished reading The Gospel and Personal Evangelism by Mark Dever. Although it was pretty basic, I would definitely recommend it. Here are a few memorable quotes:

"Isn't it amazing that we have trouble sharing such wonderful news? Who would mind telling a friend that they held a winning lottery ticket? What doctor wouldn't want to tell their patient that the tests came back negative?" (16)

"Your conclusion that you are not gifted for a particular task does not absolve you of responsibility to obey" (25)

"The Bible presents God not simply as our creator but as our jealous lover. He wants us --- every part of us. For us to think that we can disregard him sometimes, to set aside his ways when it suits us, is to show that we haven't understood the nature of the relationship at all. So, you see, we can't claim to be believers and yet knowingly, repeatedly, happily break God's law." (34)

"One of the main reasons that the local church is to be a community of love is so that others will know the God of love" (51)

"The temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in A.D. 70, and there is nothing about a great Christian temple in the New Testament - a place of granduet and majesty to which we can point our non-Christian friends and say, "Look! Aren't you impressed? Doesn't this show how wonderful and mysterious and beautiful and true and good God is?" What happened to the temple in the New Testament era? There is nothing like it, because the temple has become us. We Christians have together beccome the temple of the Holy Spirit. When you read the New Testament, you find that it's not our church buildings but us, Christians. We Christians have together become the temple of the Holy Spirit. So the community we live in will be given hope by those of us who live distinctive Christian lives, not by your church or mine, not by how similar we are to those around us (a common mistake Christians can make), but by how attractively different we are. That's why we are to live the distinctive lives that we do - because we are God's picture, God's billboard, in our city." (67)

That Hideous Strength

I'm almost finished with the last book in C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy. I have enjoyed these books immensely for how Lewis intricately weaves theology, philosophy, and science fiction together. That sounds like a dangerous combination, and assuredly could be, but read with discernment, these books have created in me a deeper longing for my Savior and Creator.
Below is the account of Jane's, one of the main characters in That Hideous Strength, conversion. I really connected with it as it is similar to my own conversion. I had grown up knowing the facts of the Gospel, but never experienced the reality of them, or the reality of Jesus Christ. I know that sounds kinda esoteric or mystical, but Scripture is clear that mere mental assent to the Gospel is not sufficient to save (James 2:19) but one must have a real, transforming, self-denying, regenerating, new-birth conceiving meeting with the real, living Jesus Christ. This may not be a dramatic, Damascus Road experience but is real none the less.
In the book, Jane has just been told by a prophet (Called the "Director") that she will become a Christian. This seems like nonsense to her, as she grew up in the church but rejected it as an adult because it seemed stale and made of fairy tales. Besides doesn't she have a say in the matter? She goes out to the garden to contemplate things...

"...for one moment she had a ridiculous and scorching vision of a world in which God Himself would never understand, never take her with full seriousness. Then, at one particular corner of the gooseberry patch, the change came.
What awaited her there was serious to the degree of sorrow and beyond. There was no form nor sound. The mould under the bushes, the moss on the path, and the little brick border, were not visibly changed. But they were changed. A boundary had been crossed. She had come into a world, or into a Person, or into the presence of a Person. Something expectant, patient, inexorable, met her with no veil or protection between. In the closeness of that contact she perceived at once that the Director's words had been entirely misleading. This demand which now pressed upon her was not, even by analogy, like any other demand. It was the origin of all right demands and contained them. In its light you could understand them; But from them you could know nothing of it. There was nothing, and never had been anything, like this. And now there was nothing except this. Yet also, every had been like this; only by being like this had anything existed. In this height and depth and breadth the little idea of herself which she had hitherto called "me" dropped down and vanished, unfluttering, into bottomless distance, like a bird in a space without air. The name "me" was the name of a being whose existence she had never suspected, a being that did not yet fully exist but which was demanded. It was a person (not the person she had thought), yet also a thing, a made thing, made to please Another and in Him to please all others, a thing being made at this very moment, without its choice, in a shape it had never dreamed of. And the making went on amidst a kind of splendor or sorrow or both, wherof she could not tell whether it was in the moulding hands or in the kneading lump...And as it closed, without an instant's pause, the voices of those who have not joy rose howling and chattering from every corner of her being.
"Take care. Draw back. Keep your head. Don't commit yourself," they said. And then mreo subtly, from another quarter, "You have had a religious experience. This is very interesting. Not everyone does. How much better you will now understand the Seventeenth Century poets!" Or from a third direction, more sweetly, "Go on. Try to get it again. It will please the Director."
But her defences had been captured and these counter-attacks were unsuccessful.

Dear sin, you are hideous

I was struck while reading Perelandra (Book 2 in C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy) at the ugliness of sin and convicted by my lack of deep hatred for it. In the book the main character, Dr. Ransom, has been taken to a planet that is just being created. This new planet has an equivalent Adam and Eve and sin has not yet infected this new creation. Everything is new, pure, beautiful, peaceful, perfect, and full of life. Ransom spends a few days on this planet, basking in the beauty of God's unspoiled work, until evil is introduced. When Ransom stumbles across the first effects of this evil he is stunned by something that we would not think twice about here on sin-stained earth. But this decay in a world of pure life brought out the reality of the stark contrast between death and life. Here is how Lewis communicates it.

At first he (Dr. Ransom) thought it was a creature of more fantastic shape than he had yet seen on Perelandra. Its shape and was not only fantastic but hideous. Then he dropped on one knee to examine it. Finally he touched it, with reluctance. A moment later he drew back his hands like a man who had touched a snake.
It was a damaged animal. It was, or had been, one of the brightly coloured frogs. But some accident had happened to it. The whole back had been ripped open in a sort of V-shaped gash, the point of the V being a little behind the head. Something had torn a widening wound backward -- as we do in opening an envelope -- along the trunk and pulled it out so far behind the animal that the hoppers or hind legs had been almost torn off with it. They were so damaged that the frog could not leap. On earth it would have been merely a nasty sight, but up to this moment Ransom had as yet seen nothing dead or spoiled in Perelandra, and it was like a blow in the face. It was like the first spasm of well-remembered pain warning a man who had thought he was cured that his family have deceived him and he is dying after all. It was like the first lie from the mouth of a friend on whose truth one was willing to stake a thousand pounds. It was irrevocable. The milk-warm wind blowing over the golden sea, the blues and silvers and greens of the floating garden, the sky itself -- all these had become, in one instant, merely the illuminated margin of a book whose text was the struggling little horror at his feet, and he himself, in that same instant, had passed into a state of emotion which he could neither control nor understand. He told himself that a creature of that kind probably had very little sensation. But it did not much mend matters. It was not merely pity for pain that had suddenly changed the rhythm of his heart-beats. The thing was an intolerable obscenity which afficted him with shame. It would have been better, or so he thought at that moment, for the whole universe never to have existed than for this one thing to have happened. (108-109)


I want to have this kind of repulsion to sin and its effects. I want to see the ugliness of Satan as exposed in the piercing and truthful rays of God's glory. I want to curse the father of lies and be sickened at the horribleness of sin every time I drive by roadkill or am selfish or watch a dear friend die of cancer or see a people group systematically oppressed. I want to praise God that even His sin perverted-creation can still have a shadow of beauty that goes beyond any synthetic imitation we could make. I want to see and feel sin and its effects from God's perspective, not my own desensitized, complacent position. And I can because Christ, through His being twisted, tortured, torn and terminated has faced sin and it's rotten Father and defeated them for and throughout eternity.

12 Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned— 13 for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law. 14 Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.
15 But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! 16 Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. 17 For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
18 Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men. 19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous. (Ro 5:12-19)

But now he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself.
(Heb 9:26)

by His grace
for His glory
jrf

Best of 2007

For your amusement and (hopefully) edification, here are some my Best of Lists of 2007:


Movies:
3:10 To Yuma - A return to the classic man-movie. Well done and well acted. I especially appreciated the themes of redemption and a counter-cultural emphasis on shame and the importance of honor, even at the cost of your own life. Warning: rated R for violence.

Enchanted - Clean, fun, imaginative Disney soon to be classic.

Amazing Grace - Finally a movie that has the Gospel in it...and is done well! My favorite parts are where Albert Finney (John Newton) steals the show.

Honorable Mentions:
Reign Over Me - Drama about a man dealing with loosing his family in 911. Caution, has bad language.

Pirates 3 - the more I think about Pirates 2-3 as one big movie the more I appreciate it

Stardust - a blend of Willow and Princess Bride. Caution: subtly (subtle enough not to ruin the movie but also to unconsciously assent) presents things such as premarital sex and homosexuality as acceptable (which they are in our society but use discernment when watching, especially with kids).

Elizabeth 2 - Excellent performance as usual from Cate Blanchett. Deals with England's war with Spain.


wanted to see (but didn't and therefore cannot recommend one way or the other):
Trade
Lake of Fire
The Darjeeling Limited
No Country for Old Men
War/Dance
I'm Not There
The Kite Runner

Books:
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Hemmingway at his chillingly best. Interesting history of the Spanish Civil war. Explores themes of futility of life, the depravity of man and the murkiness of war

The New Covenant Ministry of the Holy Spirit by Larry Pettegrew - A thoroughly Biblical book which gives attention to a member of the Trinity that doesn't get a lot of press time in my circles.

The Pursuit of Man by A.W. Tozer - Still reading it but it's knocking my socks off! Painful like surgery.

Evangelical Hermeneutics by Robert L. Thomas - a great critique of Hermeneutical trends. Lots of food for thought

Prince Caspian - Read this again in preparation for the movie this summer. Unlike the Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, which was a metaphor for salvation, Prince Caspian is a metaphor for sanctification.

Measuring a Meridian by Jules Verne - Africa and Jules Verne. Can't go wrong there.

The Seven Sayings of the Saviour on the Cross by A.W. Pink: Short, concise and powerful.

The Radical Cross by A.W. Tozer: I don't only read Tozer books but when I do I am glad I did.

Check out Desiring God's Best of List here!

For His glory
by His grace
jrf

Top Ten Piper

Those of you who know me know that John Piper is one of my favorite preachers and authors. I cannot think of any contemporary writer and/or preacher who has been used by God to convict, encourage, and exhort me and my generation to joyfully serve Christ more than Piper. In addition my aunt came to know Christ as Lord through his ministry and she now attends the church that he pastors, Bethlehem Baptist Church, in Minneapolis.

So in light of the fact that John Piper's ministry, Desiring God, is putting all their books on sale for only $5 on June 27-28 (!), I thought I would post my top ten favorite John Piper books. Although I have read a lot of his books, I have not read all of them as the man is a prolific writer and he writes faster than I can read, so do not consider this an exhaustive or authoritative list.

1. Desiring God
2. Let the Nations be Glad!
3. Don't Waste Your Life
4. Brothers We are not Professionals
5. God is the Gospel
6. Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (ed. with Wayne Grudem)
7. When I Don't Desire God
8. The Roots of Endurance
9. A Hunger for God
10. The Misery of Job and the Mercy of God

for more suggestions on how to make the most of this sale check this out