“Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.”
―Edmund Burke

Here are a few November book recommendations (or maybe some Christmas gift ideas) to feed your brain. None are new, but all are important and nourishing.

Delighting in the Trinity by Michael Reeves

If you’ve thought that the doctrine of the Trinity, however crucial to Christian orthodoxy, is a strange, abstract doctrine for theologians and apologists to bat around, but has little practical value for your day-to-day life, you are in for a sweet surprise! Michael Reeves’s short book (only 130 pages) helpfully addresses issues most people stumble over and he dialogues with other religions’ objections, most notably Islam’s. But I found the most worship-fueling thing to be Reeves’s wonderful explanation of how the uniquely Christian concept of God’s Trinitarian nature must be true for God to be truly loving at his core. If God is not a Trinity, the Bible could not say and we could not believe that “God is love” (1 John 4:7). So God’s Trinitarian nature is the foundation of our deepest joy and really does affect us at every level every day. And you will find that Reeves’s own delight in the Trinity is contagious in his writing. It’s contagious in his speaking too. Listen to him giving two wonderful addresses on the Trinity (scroll down to the speakers).

Wrestling with an Angel by Greg Lucas

God indeed gives his children more than they can handle — certainly more than they think they can handle. Wrestling with an Angel is Greg Lucas’s memoir of raising his multiply-disabled son, Jake, and through it wrestling with God over the nature of God’s sovereignty, love, and grace in the face of suffering that defies tidy categories. Lucas comes away limping with a humbled, broken, grace-shaped, faith-filled joy in Jesus, which helps fuel ours. This book would make a precious gift to anyone you know who has a loved one disabled by genetics, accident, or disease. It’s rich fare for a two-hour read. Thank you, Greg Lucas.

The Last Lion: Winston Spenser Churchill, 1873–1965 (3 volumes) by William Manchester

Why read secular history and biography? First, all history is God’s and all humans are God’s. Not all history is told by Christian historians. But if the historian is credible, we will likely gain valuable insights. Second, all of us humans tend to have a default mindset that we’re different from our forebears, that we’re wiser and won’t repeat their mistakes. That’s a foolish mindset and reading history helps correct it. I embarked the time commitment for this long biography based on Tim Challies’s sound recommendation. I am very glad I did.

William Manchester brilliantly combines biography and history to provide us both a complex, multi-dimensional, respectful but not hagiographic portrait of Winston Churchill, and a deeper understanding of the moral, cultural, political, and economic climates of late nineteenth to mid-twentieth Century Europe and America. Perhaps the greatest value of reading this work is gaining a more profound understanding of our own times. Observing the devastating effects of sin-diseased morality in a culture (like Victorian aristocratic debauchery) as well as the devastating effects of weak, undiscerning political leadership is crucial for us.

These were sown winds that reaped the whirlwinds of two unspeakably horrible world wars. Winston Churchill was among the few strong, discerning leaders of his time who saw the harvest coming and prophesied. And though no God-fearer himself, and significantly flawed, God used Churchill to both restrain and overcome incomprehensible evil. We do well to listen and observe him. For winds are being sown in our day. What whirlwinds shall we reap?

Audiobook Feature: The Religious Affections by Jonathan Edwards

I don’t know that anyone since the Apostles has reflected as extensively and insightfully on the natures of true and counterfeit Christian affections (passions, emotions, feelings springing from true and false faith) than Jonathan Edwards. His book, The Religious Affections, is certainly foundational to us here at Desiring God. But many, who once avoided the book assuming it must be difficult, end up surprised by how readable it is. In fact, I recently discovered that the audiobook version is a wonderful way to experience this book. The link above will direct you to that edition read by Simon Vance (who is excellent). So if you don’t have time to read the print version or would like a refresher having read it years ago, consider maximizing your commute or chore time for soul nourishment by listening to it.