Some Books

Ok, so I've been asked by a number of different people in the past few weeks about books... I'm a read a pretty fair amount and often people I know will ask me to recommend a book or something for them to read. So, I'm posting these lists here... that way I don't have to think about it and write it all out multiple times (cuz, I mean, sheesh... who wants to think!?)

Ok, so there are three lists here... each from different "season" in my life, the first list being earliest and the last list being more recent. The books are in no particular order.

1. The Oath - Peretti
2. This Present Darkness (&) Piercing the Darkness - Peretti
3. When Heaven Weeps - Dekker
4. The Circle Trilogy (Black, Red, White) - Dekker
5. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain

I know... I had the "hyper-spiritual" thing going and then Mark Twain shows up... oh well. I figure it'd rather be honest. Tom Sawyer was actually the first whole book I ever read... I think I was like 8 or 9. I found a copy that was my dad's... and it was actually his grandmother's or something crazy like that. Anyway, it was just so old that it fascinated me and and I ended up reading the whole thing. It reveals a lot of the adventurer heart in me.

Something, also, that I just realized was that I encountered a "war" of sorts in my reading. I read anything that fascintated me...if I read the first ten pages and didn't find it interesting I found something else. Frank Peretti was fascinating. And so was Stephen King. I read a whole lot of his books. ...I'm kinda fascinated now by this... Anyone who has any discernment knows that King's books are straight out of the "dark side." I remember getting like 3 books through his Dark Tower series and suddenly losing interest. (P.S. I do not in any way, shape, or form recommend reading any of that... its demonic trash.) I'm certain it was nothing less than the Lord's grace that I lost interest in those.

Then I hit my mid-late high school years:

1. Screwtape Letters - C.S. Lewis
2. Barbarian Way - Erwin McManus
3. Four Pillars of a Man's Heart - Stu Weber
4. Wild at Heart - John Eldredge
5. Epic - John Eldgedge

Barbarian Way and Epic basially gave me permission to be utterly and recklessly abandoned to the Lord. Four Pillars began to teach me what it meant to truly be a man of the Lord, and Wild at Heart forced me to deal with many of my own wounds and desires so that I could walk rightly in my wild heart. Screwtape Letters gave me a look into the nature of temptation that simply fascinated me... I wrote my senior paper on that book.

And then I hit college...whoa:

1. Heavenly Man - Brother Yun
2. Rees Howells, Intercessor - Norman Grubb
3. Pursuit of the Holy - Corey Russell
4. Apostolic Foundations - Arthur Katz
5. The Radical Cross - A. W. Tozer

I will warn you with this: Those five books above are like powder kegs. They will screw your life up in the most glorious possible way. But read them with caution... not the "these books are bad" caution, but the "holy crap I'm playing with an untamed lion" sort of caution. I'm relatively certain that at some point or another I threw each of those books across the room in frustration.

How glorious...

My list of "to read" books contains some of the following:

The Cross of Christ - John Stott
Twilight Labyrinth - George Otis
The Weight of Glory - C.S. Lewis
...absolutey anything by Tozer...
Lead Like Jesus - Blanchard
...plus a whole gaggle of Peretti and Dekker books I haven't gotten to yet.

One thing I will say is that I don't read as many books now as I did early on in life... I read pretty selectively. I don't usually read something unless I feel a real tug in my spirit to read it... the vast majority of my reading time is spent in the Word. I'm not gonna lie... I've become a whole lot more fascinated by Scripture itself than anything else. Don't get me wrong; there are times when I'm utterly bored out of my mind and I'm going, "Lord what's the point of this?!" But it's the intrigue of it all that keeps me coming back for more.

The Word of the Lord truly is life... it is Living Water. Don't ever substitute anything else for it. All the Dekker and Peretti books in the world (as much as I love them) cannot give life to your spirit like the Word of God can.

I think my favorite books of the Bible are, but not limited to (I tend to start calling any book of the Bible I get really into my "favorite"): Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Hosea, John, Revelation.

Speaking of which, I think I'm gonna go do that now... you should too :)


rj.