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As I indicated in an earlier post and as many of you well know there is that list of what we are planning to read for the year and then that list gets interrupted by books that you had not necessarily planned on . We are not even out of January and that has already happened to me. There are two books that are coming out next week, January 24 and 25, that I will most likely acquire as soon as they hit the shelves.

The first of these two titles is Why Jesus?: Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality, by Ravi Zacharias. I will readily admit that Ravi is among my favorite teachers/preachers/apologists/authors which means that if he writes it I will read it. However, I am especially looking forward to reading this one. He has been talking about this book for some time on his weekly radio program “Let My People Think.” (http://www.rzim.org/resources/listen/letmypeoplethink.aspx) In a bit of pointed humor he pointed out that his chosen title had been From Oprah to Chopra. It is my understanding that while the publisher changed the title (I liked the first one better) for the book, one of the chapters has retained that description. As is directly implied the author takes Deepak Chopra to task for his cleverness in presentation of Hinduism masked in terms that is more palatable to a western audience, but his disingenuousness for not calling it what it is. Throughout the book he will treat popular culture (the very first line of the book introduces the movie Inception) philosophy, and world religions, all the while pointing out that even though “spirituality” is quite in vogue, there is no other model that coherently answers the “big questions” as well as Christianity does.

The second title I am anticipating has a far more focused audience. Being released next Tuesday is a 40th Anniversary edition of the classic by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones Preaching & Preachers. As I said, this will have a far more specific target (or at least specialized) than the former book I mentioned. I shamefully admit that I never read the original–it falls into the category of the “should have read.” But I will remedy that very soon. This new edition includes not only the original text but also a series of essays from some of the more well-known preachers of today. Men such as Bryan Chapell, Mark Dever, Kevin DeYoung, Ligon Duncan, Timothy Keller, and John Piper.

So much preaching today has become vapid almost to the point of meaningless, or little more than a self-help seminar. I would like to think that my own preaching does not descend to those levels, but I certainly am not the best judge of that. We all know that we may not always see ourselves as others see us, but it may also be true that we do not hear ourselves as others hear us. Nonetheless, such a reprint as this one could not be better timed. I especially like the telling endorsement given by John Piper–“Preachers need to hear this kind of preaching as a partial antidote to the relentless trivializing of preaching in our day.”

I hope to be reading both of these titles by the middle of next week and I am sure you will be hearing about them as I progress. I am sure you are waiting with bated breath. :)

By the way, I wanted to give a big thank you to those who read in this space. Sometime in the early morning hours I just passed 30,000 hits on the blog. I really appreciate you being part of this “rambling” conversation.

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