2024 Book Recommendations

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Welcome to the WHOLE Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder and with me again is A .C. Floyd and we are giving our end -of -the -year holiday book recommendations.

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So we are just going to kind of point out a couple of books that we think are beneficial. I think

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I'm getting so old I don't like new books, so I just keep saying the same ones every year. But these aren't the same ones every year.

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However, I have mentioned a couple of these before. And the reason I want to mention them again this year is because Boehner had let them go out of print and now they're back in print.

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So they're really worth checking out in case you looked for them in the last year or two and found them hard to get in a good edition.

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So I'm going to start it off. My first book is a commentary and then I've got some biographies and then a devotional book.

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So for a commentary, Psalm 119 by Charles Bridges.

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It's one of the two books that I always recommend for Psalm 119, which I think is just quite an extraordinary psalm.

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Charles Spurgeon's Golden Alphabet is another option. But this is a new edition.

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So it had gone out of print for a while. We have had men's small groups, couples' small groups go through some of the verses in Psalm 119.

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And we've had to kind of get the print -on -demand version, which is not very durable and usually strange covers, you know, very

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Roman Catholic looking, you know, because it's religious. So they put a picture of a Jesus on it or something.

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So I'm really glad that Boehner has gotten the new reprint. It takes about two to three pages per verse.

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And when you read through Psalm 119, if you read quickly, you see that there is some repetition, particularly of key themes.

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And you might feel that in reading a commentary on that, what would the commentator have to say when this same theme is mentioned the third or fourth time down through the psalm?

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And I have thought that as I've been reading Bridges. And I have been always pleasantly shocked at how he draws from the whole of Scripture and Christian experience and really brings so much that's helpful.

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The startling thing to me about this book and its author is that I have always thought this was

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Bridges' work that he put together. He was, by the way, he was an Anglican minister around the time of Spurgeon.

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So I thought he put this book together at the end of his life, when he is an older saint who has labored for decades and all of this experience and wisdom and such a wonderful, wide and deep knowledge of Scripture.

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And, you know, so this is kind of the product of that. But it isn't. He actually wrote it, if I'm correct.

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I recently read that he wrote it when he was 33 years old. So this is one of his first books.

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He has a few others. He has a commentary on Ecclesiastes and one on Proverbs, which is the favorite of many on that book.

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And he also wrote a book to pastors called The Christian Ministry, which I think is one of the most well -rounded of books on the ministry.

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So Psalm 119 by Charles Bridges. Okay, so the first book that I want to recommend is

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All Things Made New by John Flavel. These are sermons by John Flavel that have been selected and edited by a pastor named

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Lewis Allen. Actually, our church, Christ Church New Albany, has been going through this book for our small group study this fall.

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So it's been really helpful, according to the people. Speaking honestly about Flavel, I'd never read

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Flavel before. So I kind of use this as my excuse to read Flavel for the first time. And I found in this book that Flavel was everything that I'd ever heard him to be by people who've read him at length before.

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That he was warm, Christocentric, doctrinal, precise.

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He's a Puritan. He couldn't get away from who he was and the men that trained him and how he preached. But he was a man who knew how to apply

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Christ to the souls of those who are under his care in written form. So this little book was my introduction to John Flavel.

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And honestly, I felt like within the first 10 pages of the book, this is what Christ Church needs to go through for our small group.

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And in that first 10 pages, I thought, how have I missed out on reading John Flavel for 35 years in my life?

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But to give some details about the book, it splits up into four parts.

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The salvation in Jesus Christ, which is four chapters. Trusting and belonging to Christ, four chapters.

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Living the Christian life, four chapters. And then he ends with two chapters on the church.

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So each chapter that we have in this book is between 15 and 30 pages. Now that might sound like a lot coming from a

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Puritan, but it's a Puritan paperback. So it's smaller books. Don't let 15 to 30 pages sound like an intimidating effort for you.

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Just remind yourself of what I had to remind myself when you would kind of get into all the details, maybe about the person of Christ.

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Or all the details of the work of Christ. Remember that this is a man who is a lover of Christ.

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He knew Christ firsthand. So he's coming to you with that warmth, that knowledge, that love.

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But also remember about Flavel that he's a man who knew the human heart. So when you read

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Flavel, it's not all about the head. It's not just information. It is a man taking

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Christ and applying it to the human heart in a way that exposes our hearts for what they are and for what is within them.

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Exposes our hearts and the great need that we have having Christ applied to it. And then just the beauty and glory and splendor of walking with this

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Christ. So in thinking about the last reason

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I'll give for why we should read this book, it's the reason that Lewis Allen gave. That strangers sometimes become the most valued friends.

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Before reading this book, John Flavel was a stranger to me. I'd only heard about him through hearsay.

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But now I can say, similar to what John Piper has said about the Puritans, I've had a friend come alongside me, point me to Christ, and my soul has eternally benefited from it.

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Yeah, as you mentioned, the whole church has been going through it. I think the first chapter has a couple of paragraphs that are a little difficult if you're not used to reading the

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Puritans. But what we did as a church is that we would read the chapter and one of the pastors in the church would take that chapter and in the church weekly email we would just send out any study helps we felt might be needed for people that aren't used to reading books that were written 350 years ago.

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And really, the first few chapters are the only ones that we found much that they needed help with.

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Some of it is old language. The editor, Lewis Allen, he graduated from Cambridge University and he pastors in Huddersfield.

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That's in Yorkshire, so northern England. He's a brainy guy, so I think some words might have been edited that he left unedited.

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No problem for him. Yeah, because he's English and he's brainy. So for us, maybe these are words that we're not as familiar with, but it's well worth the effort.

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And it's always good when you're reading a new author. Just tell yourself, it may not be until about the third chapter that I really kind of get into the rhythm of the way the author teaches.

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But I would definitely say, as you did, that Flavel is very warm in his application.

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But particularly, and people might not expect this, the book is very evangelistic.

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There are whole sections where he drives these great truths home to the lost and really argues with them.

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And you can see where Spurgeon gets his way of kind of drawing a net around your heart and pulling you in, making your conscience rise up and join him in the argument against you when you're cold and reluctant to respond, because Flavel and other

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Puritans did the same thing. Well, I'm cheating and I'm having two on. These are my biographies.

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And these are ones that I've mentioned before. And they, as I mentioned, have been reprinted now by Banner. One is the

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Memoir and Remains of Robert Murray McShane, and the other is Andrew Bonnard's Diary and Life.

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Now, Bonnard is the author of both. When McShane died at a young age,

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Andrew Bonnard, his close friend, put together letters and sermons and diary entries with the biographer's skill, and this has become one of the classic, great devotional biographies,

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I think, for the evangelical. Andrew Bonnard's Diary and Life, it's much more a diary and not a smooth -reading biography.

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So when you read the diary, each chapter really is just entries from the diary with a few, maybe a few explanations.

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And the editor might give a few things in footnotes, but basically it's his diary. And diaries are a lot harder to read than a biography.

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It doesn't flow smoothly like a story, but it has a unique value.

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Bonnard's diary shows what it was like to pastor in three seasons of extraordinary grace.

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We would call them revivals that Scotland enjoyed in the 19th century. And while he was never the bright, shining star, he was not really in the limelight like McShane or William Burns, who later went to China.

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He was a solid leader and a very godly, earnest, faithful, you know, indefatigable and laborious preacher.

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He just plugged away year after year faithfully, and God blessed his efforts.

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But you can read in his diaries where he really agonizes at times over the apparent ineffectiveness of his sermons and the coldness of his heart.

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So I think that it's good to read something like that alongside something like McShane.

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Because if you read the biography of McShane, and McShane died around age 30, then you get this idea that, you know, if I was really godly, then

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I would just glow. And I think McShane glowed. I think he floated above the earth and everywhere he went revival came.

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Well, that's not accurate. That's not what the book says, but you can get that impression.

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But when you read a man's own diary, if he's honest with himself, he gives you the other side of the

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Christian life, the struggles within. By the way, Bernard's diary contains his entries when his wife became sick and died.

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And we used that for some episodes long ago. And it is worth the price of the book to read what he says about passing through that dark season and how his heart was frequently broken.

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Frequently he was in a dark valley and God continually sustained him and how God helped him with, you know, explaining to the children who were still children.

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You know, how do we walk with God through this dark time? So, both of them very good.

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By the way, they live in a season of Scottish history that I think is helpful because of the balance.

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So you've had in the 18th century, about 20 years before these guys are born, you've got the ending of the great awakening waves or the evangelical revival.

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And Scotland certainly had many significant waves of revival in the 18th century. But early 19th century, between those two, the

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Church of Scotland continued to decline. It did not benefit as much as some of the other churches in Scotland because it was already kind of resisting the revival, kind of like the

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Anglican Church resisted much of, you know, Whitefield and Wesley's preaching. So it continues to decline, and by the time you reach, you know,

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Bernard and McShane, who are the same age, who are in college together studying for the ministry, and the account of their lives and this season in Scotland would be pretty bleak had not

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God saved the leader of the liberal and dominant party in the

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Church of Scotland, Thomas Charles. Thomas Charles, actually. Thomas Charles.

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We've tried...this is our, like, multiple take, so we'll just continue with it, Teddy. Thomas Charles was a

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Welshman. Thomas Chalmers, the Scot. And Chalmers had a massive brain. He was a very liberal thinker within the

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Church. When he is converted, he crosses over from the moderates to the evangelical men.

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And it just sends shockwaves through the Church of Scotland. And through his influence, men like Bernard and McShane and others were trained as ministers and were sent out.

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And it really is a wonderful account of how God, you know, providentially guides the conversion of one man and then the spread of the gospel so that today we're being impacted by their books.

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So, what's your next one? So, the next book that I'd like to recommend is a book called Growing in Christ by J .I.

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Packer. We're probably all familiar with J .I. Packer because of his book Knowing God, or Quest for Godliness, or Concise Theology.

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I mean, Packer's a pretty prolific writer. I bought this book probably about a year ago.

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And I bought it because it was chopped up, so to speak. It was made up of four parts.

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And with each of those parts, there were several chapters, three or four pages each.

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So, I thought, okay, this would be a good devotional book to read. It's not too much to read. It has scripture at the end, good discussion questions to go along with it.

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This will be great. I had high hopes for it. And after a year, I could say that J .I.

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Packer totally delivered in this book. The brevity with which he wrote was pretty astounding in my mind because of all of the densely packed doctrine and theology and application that he was able to squeeze in to three or four pages.

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So, the book, like I said, it's split up into four parts. He looks at the Apostles' Creed.

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He looks at Baptism and Conversion. He looks at the Lord's Prayer. And he looks at the

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Ten Commandments. And like I mentioned, each little chapter there is three to four pages, devotional, warm, concludes with scripture and discussion questions.

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And I was using it for my own personal devotions to warm my heart.

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I talked to another pastor friend about it. Have you ever read this? He said, yes, I'm actually using it for discipleship with people in my church now.

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And it's also would probably be helpful for small groups. So, it's a very good book with multiple uses.

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And I wanted to read just one paragraph from this book to kind of give you a flavor for J .I.

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Packer. He's really known, I think, for being a big brain, for being somebody who can talk about very high doctrine and theology.

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But I think when his warm heart toward Christ and his warm heart toward other believers and those who maybe doubt the

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Christian faith, it really comes out when he talks about forgiveness of sin in regard to Christ. So, let me read that paragraph.

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He says, God's forgiveness is the supreme instance of this, for it is

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God in love restoring fellowship at the cost of the cross. If our sins were unforgivable, where should we be?

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A bad conscience is the most universal experience and the most unbearable of all experiences. No outward change relieves it.

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You carry it with you all your waking hours. The more conscientious you are, the more your knowledge of having failed others and God, too, will haunt you.

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Without forgiveness, you will have no peace. A bad conscience delivering at full strength, tearing you to pieces in the name of God, is hell indeed, both here and hereafter.

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I mean, even in that paragraph, you see it. There's so much that he just said, but he's taking it and applying it to your heart, but also reminding you of the forgiveness that there is at the cost of the cross of Christ.

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So, I feel like that paragraph is emblematic of what is in the entire book.

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So, it's classic Packer. It's clear, it's direct, it's doctrinal, it's applicational, it's persuasive.

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But I would just like to give one disclaimer. J .I. Packer is a paedo -baptist, so he believes in infant baptism, and that really comes across in part two,

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Baptism and Conversion. But the thing that I will say in commending

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Packer is that he's very charitable to credo -baptists, to believers, baptism only.

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And the things that he does have to say about baptism, for lack of a better explanation, even his explanations there make you want to run to Christ and help you to see baptism more clearly and appreciate it more thoroughly.

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All right. So, is that a collection of talks that he gave, or is it a book that he wrote from beginning to end?

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That's a great question. I don't know. We'll find this out, and Teddy will put it in the show notes.

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All right. Well, my next book is a book that AC brought to my attention, and got me, and it's a book by Andrew Barnard called

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The Visitor's Book of Texts. And if you like it, AC will buy you one, all of you. No, not really. Sorry.

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His wife wouldn't let him. But here we go. It is a book that Banner has recently published which gives scriptural text with comments particularly suited to those who go and visit people who are in very difficult situations.

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So, you might not be as biblical as you think you are when you go and speak with people.

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And, you know, you visit them at the hospital, or you visit them at the home, maybe there's shut -ins. You visit someone when they're going through a peculiarly difficult time in life, and you think, well,

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I said good things. I think probably most of us feel that when we go and talk with people,

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I don't know what to say in that situation. I said the best I could. I wish I knew better, or, you know,

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I thought of things later that I perhaps would have been wise to say, but I didn't. So, this is a book that I think would help anyone who is particularly who has tasks in the church, every

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Christian in some measure, but those who spend a lot of time dealing with folks who are sick or who are going through times of sorrow.

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So, let me give you kind of the outline of the book, because it's not the kind of book, it's almost like a reference guide.

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It's not the kind you would just read straight through for your own soul, but you would read to see how does this godly man take the scriptures and apply it to the various circumstances.

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So, it's much more detailed than just saying to someone who's sick or someone who's lost someone.

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There's a lot of chapters in the book, and there's 24.

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So, there's 24 different situations that he deals with. So, big sections.

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First big section, the word brought near to the sick. And so, he talks about the sick believer who is troubled by temptation while he's sick or by circumstances connected with his illness or by the, you know, by the constant bodily pain.

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A believer who is sick and they are dying. A believer, the sick person's spiritual state is not known to them and they're sick.

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You know, so, where is your soul with the Lord? I'm not sure. Well, what do you say to a person like that? A sick person who is self -righteous.

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I'm fine, I know I'm a good person. A sick person who is anxious for themselves, for others.

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A sick person who is a backslider. A sick person who is hardened and they have become skeptical.

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A sick person that is indifferent to spiritual things. So, that's just section one.

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Section two, the word brought near to seven classes who may be found in the sick room.

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So, recovering from sickness as a believer, recovering from sickness as a nominal

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Christian or an unbeliever. As they're recovering, how do you speak to their souls?

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For those who are aged and who are sick. For young men or women who are sick.

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For children who are facing serious sickness. For those attending to the sick.

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So, you go into a room and there's someone that you know, you know, who's there frequently.

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And what can you say to them? For the friends of the sick, again. And then the final section, there's three major sections in the book, and the final section is called the word brought near to the sorrowful.

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And he has a number of different specific applications. The sorrowful, when their thoughts are directed to their own loss in the death of a friend.

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The sorrowful, when their thoughts are directed to the state of those who have just died. Those who have died in the

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Lord, what can you say to them? Those who have lost someone, whose spiritual state they are ignorant of,

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I don't know what they were. Or those who have lost someone that they fear the worst for them.

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Also, there's a section on the sorrowful widow and the sorrowful orphan.

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Sorrowful because of forebodings and cares, fears.

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Sorrowful because of worldly circumstances, sorrowful because of persecution or a lack of sympathy from other believers or people in your family, you feel isolated.

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And finally, the sorrow of the world. So, really a very unique book.

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And again, not the kind of book you're gonna read through easily and just from cover to cover, but a book that if you would determine, well, in the coming year,

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I want to be as equipped as a servant of God can be to come into various situations where people are struggling, to have verses in my mind for that circumstance and Benar's explanation.

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You know, why are these helpful? So, great little book by Banner of Truth, The Visitor's Book of Texts. Okay, so the last book that I want to recommend is a book by Simonetta Carr about Charles Haddon Spurgeon.

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And this book is a part of a series written about various figures in church history for young readers.

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And I've personally really enjoyed this series because of how much my children have enjoyed this series.

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Not just this book on Charles Haddon Spurgeon, but really every book in the series is of the highest quality.

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I think this is the best series that there is out there written for young readers on figures in church history.

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So, in these books, we have great visuals. There's original artwork, there are maps, pictures of the figures of Spurgeon.

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You get to see their birthplaces, churches, books. If they're recent enough, their spouses, their children.

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But it's not just the visuals, it's the content. These books, though brief, they're not too little.

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You don't feel like you're reading a children's book. At least, I didn't feel like I was reading a children's book.

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They're very informative, they're theological, they're applicational, they're spiritually stirring.

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By the time you finish one of these books, if I could quote Ravenhill for a minute, he said,

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I'm tired of reading about church history, I want to go out and make some. Well, I felt that way after reading these books to my sons and my daughter.

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So, my personal testimony to it is that this series is wonderful.

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If you have small children, if you have grandchildren, get these books for them.

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My oldest son, who's seven, has read the entire series and loves it.

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He can't read them fast enough. He's always asking me, when are they going to publish a new one? I want to read it.

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And I'll also say that my two younger sons, who were learning to read, they're learning to read, actually, from some of these books.

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So, my conclusion for this one about Spurgeon, and really for the whole series, is buy every book in this series.

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They're worth every penny, and I think they'll be of eternal value for your children and grandchildren.

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And we often buy some of those for families with little kids in the church, and then just give them a set, or, you know, give them a number of them.

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My final recommendation is one that is linked with the Christmas celebration of Christ's incarnation.

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And this is a book that my wife and our older daughter and myself, we read through this last

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December as we approached Christmas. And so, it's by Spurgeon.

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It's published, I thought this was Crossway, but it's Banner of Truth. It sounds like this is a Banner of Truth commercial, but we didn't plan it that way.

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Spurgeon, Good Tidings of Great Joy, Christ's Incarnation, the

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Foundation of Christianity. It really is a book that you could read, you know, at any point of the year, but the chapters are really short.

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So, they tend to be, you know, it's a small book, and the chapters tend to be maybe four pages like that.

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And so, what we would do is we would read one a night in our family worship, but oftentimes we found

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Spurgeon just so good. It just shocks me every time that Spurgeon can be so good across the board, whatever he's saying.

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And so, of course, with Christ, where Spurgeon always runs in every sermon in dealing with the incarnation of Christ, the things he says are so, the pictures, they just stay with you.

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And so, we would read sometimes two or three a night, you know, even though we'd only plan to read one a night, we would say, let's read the next one.

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No, let's read another one. So, Good Tidings of Great Joy. And I think it would be great if churches would buy a copy for every family in their church and, you know, or make them available at a good cost to every family in their church.

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And it was really an enjoyable read. And I'm going to suggest, right now, my family, we're reading through the second half of Pilgrim's Progress.

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So, Christiana, his wife, we're reading through that in our family worship times in the evening.

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But Bunyan is not nearly as easy to read as Spurgeon, you know. Sometimes his language is all, you know, it's the old style language.

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So, it sounds like Yoda talking. I'm like, wait, what did he say? You know, and where are we at?

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So, when we come up to the edge of December, I'm going to ask, can we read this one again?

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Because, you know, I will have forgotten most of what Spurgeon said. A .C., thanks for joining us again.

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And we hope that you have, if you aren't familiar with all of these books, maybe you could look into a few of them.

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If some of them you're already familiar with, and you see now they're reprinted in a really nice format again, you could get those for folks that you know would benefit.

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The information for all of these books will be found in one link. And the link will take you to the website where all the information will be there.

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So, we hope you have a good end of the year. And we've already filmed our podcasts that you'll be able to listen to in the coming days.

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Next week, I believe, we start with Jordan Thomas. And Jordan is always particularly helpful talking about treasuring