Tag: humility

Top 10 Books

I don’t know who asked me to jump on this top 10 books list, but I’ve finally gotten round to it.  Here goes:

  • Emma, by Jane Austin.  It’s a long story, but this is how I decided I was looking for love in all the wrong places.  I had a long discussion with the girl who became my wife, shortly after reading this book
  • The Way the World Works, by June Wannasiki.  I don’t know that this is the best economics book.  Wannasiki is kind of like Algernon – he doesn’t necessarily write accurately, but he writes with wonderful expression.   Anyway, this book opened my eyes to the sort of political shenanigans that are being done in the name of bad economics.
  • Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, by Mark DeverI had been looking for what exactly was going wrong in the sort of churches I was going to.  Even in the prosperous, well-populated churches, there was something rotten about their state.  9Marks pointed me in the right direction. Incidentally, I gave my copy to somebody, so if you’d like to help me replenish my library…
  • Humility: True Greatness, by CJ Mahaney.  It was a toss-up between this and The Cross-Centered Life.  Either way, what I really appreciate about Mahaney’s little books is their practicality: “XYZ is true.  Here are some habits you can build into your life so it will have an practical effect.”  Want to be humble?  Start by thanking God that you get tired at night.
  • The Bruised Reed, by Richard Sibbes.  Just… Wow.  I used to want to be Dennis Jernigan when I grew up.  Now I want to be Richard Sibbes.  So incredibly helpful to see how exactly the Spirit of God works in actual broken hearts.  As a happy side effect: the sweetest, most reassuring teaching of God’s selection in salvation you have ever heard.
  • Surprised by Joy, by CS Lewis.  This is a cheat.  It stands in for “The Complete Works of,” which I understand is against the rules.  I might have been CS Lewis, if my middle class lawyer dad had just sent me to a private tutor for my entire high school, where I studied classics in Latin and Greek for 12 hours a day.  Surprised by Joy is less biography and more a spiritual memoir in the style of Augustin’s Confession.  The picture he give of his conversion still sticks with me:  a lobster in a corset on a bus, I think.  Strangely, he falls on the side of free will in salvation, while describing a perfectly Calvinist conversion.
  • Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.  I wrote a paper on Gustave Flaubert my junior year in college. It kind of revolutionized my view on the world.  I got an A-.  My hard drive crashed, and now I have only the vaguest recollection of what my conclusions were.  Flaubert was set to be a fantasy author.  He had this blockbuster story he wrote about Saint Anthony in the tombs.  It was a colossal flop.  His friends urged him to quit writing about “Chimeras,” that is fantastical ideas, and to focus on realism.  So he wrote a story about a girl who wanted to have a truly great romance and ruined her life chasing it while ignoring the perfectly good romance right in her lap.  I was totally unable to relate to this concept.
  • Institutes of Christianity, by John Calvin.  This is kind of a cheat, since I never actually finished the book.  But he really knew how to pack ‘em in there. The one that comes up the most is his explanation of faith – not just confidence, but confidence in a person’s word in the face of very good reasons to doubt. We’ll skip past how much Calvin talks about the Spirit, and how I totally avoided him the first time I heard of him, because I knew he had nothing to say to me due to his ignorance of the Holy Spirit.
  • Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer.  More specifically, The Franklin’s Tale, which taught me about the complex overlay of loyalties that we would now call “Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.”  As a bonus, reading journal articles on The Franklin’s Tale taught me that Feminism is bunk, specifically because it can’t see those loyalties as anything other than systematic oppression
  • On the Cessation of the Charismata, by John Ruthven.  Specifically, the footnotes to the first chapter, which gave me references to a whirlwind tour of early church thought on spiritual gifts, and the supernatural.  I used it as the bibliographical launching point for a church history paper, and it inspired me for the thesis for my PhD, which I will probably never get to write.
(Yes, Tolkien is lovely, but he didn’t change my life.  I’m very fond of Luther, but I haven’t actually read any books by him. Paradise lost did nothing for me, other than give me some perspective when reading Middlemarch. Inferno was extremely interesting, but Purgatorio was distressingly Catholic.  Robinson Crusoe was a waste of time.)
There’s a strange lack of fiction titles in this list.  I went through a major theological shift about 15 years ago, so my top 10 list changed accordingly.  The books above are the ones that got me going in my current direction.  It just so happened that when I was grasping, very few of the branches that held were fiction.

Repentance Jiu-jitsu

“The trick is, when somebody accuses you of something, is to believe they really mean it. They really think you are… whatever awful thing they said about you. Look, here’s a golden opportunity to be humble. Take what they have to say, submit to God and resist the Devil. They really see something in you that forms a basis for their accusation. Now is your chance to repent! This could be your only chance to see something you’ve been totally blind about your whole life. ‘Faithful are the wounds of a friend.’ If there is any truth in what they are saying, then they can be your ally against their own will, by helping you repent.”

“Wow. Is that really what you do?”

“Me? No, not since I stopped sinning.”

The Spirit of Mercy Should Move Us (Pt 2)

Preachers need to take heed therefore, how they deal with young believers.  Let them be careful not to pitch matters too high,

Simplicity and Humility

Preachers should take heed likewise that they don’t hide their meaning in dark speeches, speaking in the clouds.  Truth fears nothing so much as concealment, and desires nothing so much as clearly to be laid open to the view of all.  When it is most unadorned, it is most lovely and powerful.  Our blessed Savior, as he took our nature upon him, so he took upon him our familiar manner of speech, which was part of his voluntary abasement.  Paul was a profound man, yet he became as a nurse to the weaker sort (1 Thess. 2:7)

That spirit of mercy that was in Christ should move his servants to be content to abase themselves for the good of the meanest.  What made the kingdom of heaven “suffer violence” (Matt. 11:12) after John the Baptist’s time, but that comfortable truths were laid open with such plainness and evidence as to offer a holy violence to obtain them?

Christ chose those to preach mercy felt most mercy, as Peter and Paul, that they might be examples of what they taught.  Paul became all things to all men (1 Cor. 9:22), stooping unto them for their good.  Christ came down from heaven and emptied himself of majesty in tender love to souls.  Shall we not come down from our high conceits to do any poor soul good?  Shall man be proud after God has been humble?

We see the ministers of Satan turn themselves into all shapes to “make one proselyte” (Matt 23:15).  We see ambitious men study accommodation of themselves to the humors of those by whom they hope to be raised, and shall not we study application of ourselves to Christ, by whom we hope to be advanced, nay are already sitting with him in heavenly places?  After we are gained to Christ ourselves, we should labor to gain others to Christ.  Holy ambition and covetousness will move us to put upon ourselves the disposition of Christ.  But we must put off ourselves first.

Godly irony

Jollyblogger has a new post up. I really love to watch this man think, and I think it’s a great pity that he’s able write so rarely.

It also strikes me as odd how a man can be so important while chastising himself for thinking he might be important. Particularly when the thing that makes him important is how profoundly he realizes his pride in thinking he might be important. Similarly with courage: It is sad, but bright to see someone die so well.

Exhortation

This fallen world affects all creatures,
Saint and sinner, with the bread
Of hard affliction—mournful soul-ache,
Unjust judgment, creeping dread.

But the God of all creation
Has engineered a hidden path
Wherein the sweetest, purest pleasures
In affliction may be had.

The wise are found in those dark mine shafts
Sifting ore from worthless slag,
While the torrents of life’s hardships
Fall like oil upon their heads.

And the key into this pathway
Where God’s favorites know to hide
Is the simple abjuration
Of any form of human pride. Continue reading “Exhortation”

Humility

One of the blessings we’ve had of late has been to be a part of a home group whose leader truly cares pastorally for his little flock. He’s also a reader, which has been to my advantage, because there are a lot of books in the tradition of my church that I’ve never read before and right now I don’t have the cash to buy them, or the room to store them if I did. And so my deacon has become my librarian.

Recently he had lent me his copy of CJ Mahaney’s book Humility: True Greatness (which I highly recommend to everybody) and was asking me if I could share any thoughts on what I had read with our group. I sent him a few notes on what I might say to the group, but there was one thing that I didn’t find convenient to mention there, so I thought I might share it here:

In reading CJ’s book, it occurred to me that much of what I practice in the name of humility isn’t really humility at all, but self-effacement, which is not the same thing. I still think of myself more highly than I ought – in fact, more highly of myself than of you. But I hide my pride, and glory in the fact that I may have impressed you simultaneously with how humble I appear to be.