Books Recommended by Pastor Jeff

I'm downgrading.  I initially said that I would be adding a book or two a week here.  Let's just say, I will be adding new books periodically.  These are all books that have been helpful to me in my spiritual journey and I want to pass them on to you so that you can gain from them as well. Click on the book for a link to purchase it from www.christianbook.com.

 I'm sitting in airport in Hamilton, waiting for my flight back home from the Fellowship Convention in Niagara Falls and passing the time by reading An Unstoppable Force by Erwin Raphael McManus.  I'm not finished yet, but I can tell that it is a book that will challenge the heart of every serious follower of Jesus.  It addresses some core issues about the nature of the church and how each church can discover it's unique vision for the culture in which it lives.  McManus doesn't stop there, though.  He leads us to dig deep and helps us to find the courage to make the necessary changes that will enable us to break free of those things that hold us back from being the unstoppable force that God intended the church to be.  What does our culture in our city need to hear the life changing gospel of Jesus Christ?

Where Love is, there is God also is a trilogy of little known gospel short stories by the great Russian novelist and thinker Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) Tolstoy is largely remembered for his novels, Anna Karenina and War and Peace. As compiler Lawrence Jordan notes, "For the Christian, Tolstoy's gospel stories represent Christ-centered fiction at its best-imaginative narratives that put the gospel message into compelling action."

This translation retains the Russian feel and captures Tolstoy's struggle with the reality of the Gospel. The book also has an introduction into the life of Tolstoy and opens a window into his soul.  This is a superb read for anyone who is curious about how the Gospel and real life should intersect.

The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard.This is probably one of my all time favourite books and, next to the Bible, the book that has been the most revolutionary in my walk with God.  Willard explains how God is doing a transforming work in the heart of the Christian as they cooperate with His Spirit.  Too often we reduce our relationship with Chirst to religious acts.  Our lives become about sin management.  We juggle the good and the bad --  try to do the good, try not to do the bad.  We end up living defeated lives because we can only do what we are on the inside.  It will come out in our actions.  Willard is genius in his explanation of Jesus' program for transformation.  The book is quite heavy at times and you may want to read it more than once to get the gist of it, but it is well worth the effort.

The Life You've Always Wanted by John Ortberg is about transformation.  Inside each of us is a niggling feeling that there is something not quite right.  We don't love the way we know we should.  We tend to hurt the people we are supposed to love.  God has a plan for us.  He wants to morph us into the kinds of people that He created us to be.  He wants to do an inside job, an extreme make over of our hearts and minds so that we can be the persons that God has created us to be.  This is a must read for anyone who is serious about their spiritual journey.

The Prodigal God will change your life.  It will surprise you at every turn.  It may cause you to question how you have lived your life with God.  What is the Christian life really about?  Most Christians are familiar with what we typically call The Parable of the Prodigal Son, and we normally focus primarily on the younger son who runs away with an early inheritance, blows it all on riotous living and then in humility crawls back to his father who receives him with open arms and restores him to enjoy a loving relationship.  When we do that we miss, perhaps, the main point of the parable because the older son in the parable is equally lost.  Even though he has always done the right thing and never left his father he is more dangerously lost than his younger brother.  Read this book and I guarantee you will not see your faith in the same light again.