Book Review: Bible Revival by Kenneth Berding

Do you remember the story of Stacey Irvine, the girl in Great Britain who ate nothing but chicken nuggets and just about died? Well Kenneth Berding asserts that North American Christians are killing ourselves spiritually in the same way by dining on a steady diet of “Christian fast food” and ignoring the necessary sustenance of the word of God. Berding lays out a call to Bible Revival and challenges Christians to learn, value, understand, apply, obey and speak the word.

Berding’s passion to see Christians passionate about the Bible is clear and contagious. He has a legitimate concern that while we have the greatest access to the Bible in all of Christian history, we are not only not reading it, we are often despising it. Our biblical illiteracy is not only a shame, it is a sin, and Berding calls it such. I sped through this 80 page book in a single day, because I also share the author’s concerns and I was eager to read his take on this self-induced spiritual famine.

Kenneth Berding identifies many of the issues related to the problem clearly. He calls laziness and unbelief and a failure to trust in the sufficiency of scripture exactly what they are, and he illustrates those things to help us face our own blind spots. He writes like a concerned parent, and readily admits his own failures in many of these things. I felt like I would really like to invite the author for dinner and have a long conversation with him on the subject.

I did have two disappointments with the book. First, in addressing the need for a revival in our passion for the word of God, Berding fails to express why, exactly, we should care about the Bible and our knowledge of it. Romans 10 tells us this:

¹³ For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

¹⁴ How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?^[c] And how are they to hear without someone preaching? ¹⁵ And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” ¹⁶ But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” ¹⁷ So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.  (ESV- emphasis mine.)

So we know that the word of God, both read personally, and preached in corporate worship (vs. 14), is one of the primary ways by which the Holy Spirit works faith and grace in our lives. Berding never expresses the reason for the urgency of his call to return to the word of God. Not only are we starving ourselves to death, we are removing ourselves from the work of the Holy Spirit when we remove the word of God from our lives. That is the first, and most important, reason for us to learn, value, understand, apply, obey and speak the word, as Berding challenges.

Secondly, this quote in the first chapter was very disheartening: “In short, the sense that we know a lot about the Bible because we grew up going to church is misguided.” While it may be true, it should not be accepted as true. Berding’s point is that we must be actively involved in reading the word daily rather than weekly, and I heartily agree; however, as Romans 10 (above) and Ezekiel 37  teach, the weekly preaching of the word MUST be the cornerstone upon which all other personal and group bible study is built. I am sure that Berding would agree with the necessity of the church and corporate worship. His emphasis on personal study of, and literacy in, the Bible, without the inclusion of the importance of the preached word, created an unfortunately unbalanced perspective.

Bible Revival is a necessary book on a necessary subject, and Berding’s challenges to some of the besetting sins of our North American Christian culture are as well written as they are well deserved. His appendix on memorizing is a wonderful resource and is almost exactly the way we are memorizing scripture in our family.

I received no compensation for this post. I was provided an electronic edition for the purpose of review. I was not required to provide a positive one. I keep a disclosure statement here.

A Metamorphosis of Sorts

When I was 13 or 14, I sat in my upstairs bedroom on a rainy night and started to read A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. I met the protagonist, Meg Murray, and realized that apart from her braces and whizzing math brain, she was me! I devoured the book, and the others in the series and I can say confidently that Meg Murray is a big part of why I am the nerdy girl that I am.

Today I stepped out after dinner to clip some pussy willows for my kitchen window. I was wearing some gaudy leggings under a black knit skirt, and had thrown my favorite browny green blanket sweater over a grey shirt to keep me warm. As I put my feet into my bright floral rubber boots I had a sudden realization.

I am no longer Meg.

I have become Mrs. Whatsit.

It’s the Little Things.

On Friday, May 2, Jonathan had his last class of seminary. Ever.

For four years we have celebrated “last class day” each semester with friends and neighbors. It was one of my favorite traditions. But Friday was different. As Jonathan emerged from his computer streaming for the last time, I was overwhelmed with a tremendous sadness that this grandest last class of all those last classes would go uncelebrated. I had tears in my eyes as I washed the lunch dishes and remembered our friend Chad playing the Hallelujah chorus across the shared lawn in our seminary neighborhood. It seemed so wrong to miss that today, of all the days.

Jonathan had suggested we get ice cream to celebrate and I had posted that to Facebook on Thursday. When we arrived at the Dairy Bar this was what greeted us:

So I am still missing our seminary friends today, but I am overwhelmed at how blessed we are that after only four months here, these people would come to celebrate a moment that they didn’t share. They weren’t there out of a shared experience, they were there to celebrate with us (and enjoy that ice cream, because OHMYWORD!) because they love us. We are blessed, and the Lord is good.

Book Review: “Great Kings of the Bible” by Deepak Reju

When looking for children’s bible books, Jonathan and I have two criteria that all too often aren’t met. First, we want to avoid any pictures of Jesus, and secondly we want all stories to acknowledge that God is the hero of the stories, not the human participants. We were delighted to see Great Kings of the Bible: How Jesus is greater than Saul, David and Solomon passed both of those hurdles.

As the subtitle states, the author sets out to use the lives of the three kings of unified Israel to point to King Jesus as the greatest King. Reju sets the story out in simple chapters that are beautifully illustrated by Fred Apps. Sticking to the facts as  laid out in scripture, each king is portrayed in both strength and weakness, and then compared to Jesus, the only perfect king. My children found the stories engaging, the illustrations capturing and enjoyed the repetition of the theme that Jesus was the greatest King of all.

I was disappointed that in comparing the great kings of Israel to Christ the natural comparison of covenant representatives was not included. The book lead us to those conversations with our children, but we were surprised not to find it in the text of the work itself. Additionally, I found the section on Bathsheeba to be a little more detailed than I would have preferred to read to children as young as mine. The overall idea of Great Kings of the Bible is an excellent one, and we are pleased to have it in our library. It sparked some good discussion with the children and happily coincided with their memorizing Christ’s three offices in the catechism giving us another avenue of comparison between temporary earthly kings and King Jesus, our eternal King.

I received no compensation for this post. I was provided an hard-cover edition for the purpose of review. I was not required to provide a positive one. I keep a disclosure statement here.