Blogger Review Books

Summary: Mostly Gire does not find God at the hunger games.

I loved the Hunger Games.  I have read it twice, watched the movie twice.  I spent long hours talking with my wife about the books (we don’t often read the same books and when we do we often talk a lot about them.)

So when christianaudio.com was offering Finding God in the Hunger games to review I jumped.  And since the book is short I listened to it all in an afternoon the same day I requested the review copy.

My main problem is that this is a slipshod book.  I do not have a problem with the relatively short length (about 85 pages).  But the is not really a book about the Hunger Games.  It is three essays.  One about entertainment and Rome. One about the hunger for God within each of us.  And a final chapter about the end times.

Not only is Finding God in the Hunger Games not about the real content of the Hunger Games, but the author admits that the few interactions with the Hunger games are mostly from the movie and not the book.  That was disappointing, no where in the description does it say that this book is primarily about the movie.

He even says he had not finished reading the book before he started watching the movie. This leads to lots of impressions and not much content. There are the occasional quotes, discussing a couple scenes.  However, what I was looking for was a discussion of the story, the over arching themes of the book.

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Summary: “…The world is divided into two groups after all….the line is drawn between those that are aware of their disabilities and those that are blind to them.”

Disability and the Gospel, fortunately, is not another attempt at defining the gospel as an adjective like so many books lately. It is a real, and somewhat dense, look at how Christianity understands both the people that are commonly labeled as disabled and how we as humans are labeled disabled by the gospel. (The gospel here is used as a general summary of Grace, Salvation and the Power of God. And not my preferred definition which is simply ‘Jesus is Lord, Savior and Messiah. See my review of the King Jesus Gospel for a longer discussion of this.)

The clearest summary of this book is about 3/4 of the way through the book where the author says, “…The world is divided into two groups after all. Not however, the normal and the abnormal, or the able and the disabled. Rather the line is drawn between those that are aware of their disabilities and those that are blind to them.”

So throughout the book, the author is using these two lenses to think about disability. On the one hand the traditionally understood disabled (blind, paraplegic, Down’s Syndrome, etc.) On the other hand, all of us as humans are disabled by sin and need to realize that we need God and that God works in us best though our weakness. Relatively early in the book the authors says that the body’s purpose is to show weakness and point toward a future in Heaven. Overall, I like the split focus, but I found the discussion on traditionally disabled far more challenging and helpful.

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Summary: Holiness is affection for God and a way of life, not a set of rules that we have to live by.

Holiness is a difficult topic to discuss.  About halfway through the book I thought of my comments in a review of a book on Christian giving.  “Just because there has been so much bad teaching on the theology of giving does not mean that we should not talk about giving.”  And in this context, just because there has been so much bad teaching on holiness does not mean that holiness is somehow unimportant.  In fact we mostly likely need to spend more time discussing holiness.  Unfortunately authors and pastors have to deal with the bad teaching in order for the good teaching to make sense.

Tyler Braun is very directly attempting to communicate the importance of holiness to the Millennial Generation (although this is a beneficial book if you are not in that generation) because holiness has been so badly taught in the past.

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Takeaway: The Gospel needs to be understood and Explicit.

I want to affirm Chandler’s desire that people really understand the Gospel. (Although we have a different definition of what is actually the meaning of the word gospel.)  He was struck one day by the number of people that his church was baptizing that said the equivalent of “I grew up in a Christian home and going to church but I never heard the gospel until…”  I heard and have thought the same thing.  Was it that the gospel was not preached or was it that you did not understand?

But like many, his path toward defining and pushing the importance of the gospel takes a pretty standard line.  God is great, God owes you nothing, we are saved by God’s grace alone, our desire for this world is really a mis-placed desire intended for God. So we must emphasize our sin, the reality of hell, and our lost-ness without Christ.

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Takeaway: In spite of the fact that some Christians misuse scripture about giving, those portions of scripture are still there and we need to focus on the right meaning, not avoid them.

As I have said before, my wife and I lead a small group of newly married couples.  Our next topic is finances.  So when I was offered this book to review I read it with that in mind.

This book was written by my pastor.  So I am not completely unbiased and I have heard much of this content before in sermons or other teaching.

But the thing that most struck me here is that in spite of the fact that Health and Wealth gospel preachers misuse scripture on giving, God still is interested in how we think about and use our money.

Andy Stanley starts with the fact that we often think about giving wrong.  It is not ‘God gets this amount and everything else is ours’.  It is God have given all of it to you and you are merely a steward of it all.  So God wants us to invest it.  That investment should be in God’s kingdom.  This does not mean that we can’t use money on things we need, but that if we have the right attitude toward the money, those things that we really need are far less.

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Takeaway: We are created to need solitude, community and to do service.

I don’t remember when I first became acquainted with Henri Nouwen.  Probably some time in college.  I had read a handful of his books.

This is the one I have read most and I think is most helpful.  His book Out of Solitude covers some similar material from a different perspective, so it is a good supplement to this one.  Because they are both so short, someone should get rights to both and print them together.

This book is a simple explanation about the movement from solitude with God, to community with others to service for God and back to solitude again is apart of God’s created order.

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