Category: Book Summaries

When I consider this month’s focus on the Discipline of Submission, I visualize a posture of “gentle and lowly.”  Incidentally, that’s the title of Dane Ortlund’s 2020 book.  I first learned about Ortlund’s book as part of our Weekend Bible Study class in the Spring of 2021.

Ortlund explains that the strategy of his book was to take either a Bible passage or a bit of teaching from the Puritans or others and consider what is being said about the heart of God and of Christ.

His book considers the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, the apostles John and Paul, the Puritans Goodwin and Sibbes and Bunyan and Owen, and others such as Edwards and Spurgeon and Warfield and deciphers what they tell us about the heart of God and the heart of Christ.

It is one thing to ask what Christ has done. And there are many sound books on this. Consider Stott’s The Cross of Christ; or Jeffery, Ovey, and Sach’s Pierced for Our Transgressions; or Macleod’s Christ Crucified; or Packer’s seminal 1974 article; or a dozen other solid historical or contemporary treatments.  Ortlund chooses not to focus on what Christ has done. Instead, the controlling question of his book is: Who is Jesus Christ?

Click here for a summary of Ortlund’s book, which focuses on the heart of Christ for sinners and sufferers

When I consider this month’s focus on Submission, I’m reminded of my One Word for 2023, Surrender.

When I determined my One Word for this year, I picked up a copy of Elisabeth Elliot’s 1982 book entitled, Joyful Surrender: 7 Disciplines for the Believer’s Life.  Elliot recalls how her father was an amateur ornithologist who, as a young man, had taken an interest in birds long before bird-watching became a popular pastime. He gave lectures, illustrated with colored slides, in which he talked about the habits of the birds and beautifully imitated their songs.

He nearly always closed his lecture with these lines: Said the Robin to the Sparrow, “I should really like to know Why these anxious human beings Rush about and worry so.”

Said the Sparrow to the Robin, “Friend, I think that it must be That they have no heavenly Father Such as cares for you and me.”

Have we no such loving Father? We have, of course.

If you don’t recall Elisabeth Elliot’s story, her first husband, Jim Elliot, was killed in 1956 while attempting to make missionary contact with the Auca people of eastern Ecuador. She later spent two years as a missionary to the tribe members who killed her husband.

Consider what “Joyful Surrender” means to her.

Click here to consider the 7 Disciplines for the Believer’s Life that lead to Joyful Surrender