book review | Craig T. Owens

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The Christian In Complete Armour (book review)

January 17, 2017 — Craig T. Owens

When I saw both John Newton and Charles Spurgeon put William Gurnall on their “must read” lists (I’ll share their quotes in a moment), I thought, “I have to get this book!” Although The Christian In Complete Armour was written by Gurnall over 360 years ago, the words ring just as true for Christians today.

In summary, The Christian In Complete Armour is an intensive look at the spiritual warfare preparations that the Apostle Paul lists in Ephesians 6:10-18. Gurnall opens his book with these sobering challenges to Christians:

“All may have a desire to be successful soldiers, but few have the courage and determination to grapple with the difficulties that accost them on the way to victory.”

“The fearful are those who march for Hell (Revelation 21:8); the valiant are those who take Heaven by force (Matthew 11:12). Cowards never won Heaven. Do not claim that you are begotten of God and have His royal blood running in your veins unless you can prove your lineage by this heroic spirit: to dare to be holy in spite of man and devils.” (emphasis mine in both quotes)

So piece by piece, step by step, William Gurnall explains the value of each of the Christian’s armaments. He tells us what we can expect when we employ them as God intended, and what we should fear if we fail to make use of each and every piece of equipment God has made available for His soldiers.

John Newton said, “If I might read only one book besides the Bible, I would choose The Christian In Complete Armour.”

And Charles Spurgeon noted, “Gurnall’s work is peerless and priceless; every line is full of wisdom; every sentence is suggestive…the best thought-breeder in all our library.”

Although a very old text, James S. Bell, Jr. has done a marvelous work in preserving Gurnall’s message, but presenting it to us in modern-day English. This is an excellent work for every Christian soldier to have on their shelf.

I am a Moody Press book reviewer.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: book review, Charles Spurgeon, Christian, Ephesians, Heaven, Hell, John Newton, quotes, spiritual warfare, William Gurnall. 23 Comments »

9 Quotes From “Leadership Promises For Every Day”

January 11, 2017 — Craig T. Owens

Leadership Promises For Every Day is a devotional book for leaders and aspiring leaders. A passage from the Bible is combined with a passage from one of John Maxwell’s outstanding books. It’s an excellent way to start your day! If you haven’t already, check out my review of this book here, and then enjoy a few quotes—

“How many leaders have ruined their lives and damaged the lives of others through immorality? Character has become a crucial issue today precisely because of the myriad of leaders in the political, business, and religious worlds who have fallen morally. No doubt they fall partly because the enemy has targeted leaders for attack. Leaders need to remember that they influence many others beyond themselves; they never fall in a vacuum. They also need to realize that replacing fallen leaders is a slow and difficult process.”

“Our goal among brothers should not be to punish or excommunicate, but to restore. Confrontation is a redemptive act of leadership.”

“Leaders need to respond to individuals based on their needs rather than their faults. … Good leaders do this well. They don’t lead out of a predetermined package of behaviors, but size up every situation and discern what must happen to reach the desired goal.”

“People rise or fall to meet our level of expectations for them. If you express skepticism and doubt in others, they’ll return your lack of confidence with mediocrity. But if you believe in them and expect them to do well, they’ll wear themselves out trying to do their best.”

“Leaders must constantly ask if their plans fit God’s revealed will for them and their organization. Then they must ask if their plans remain relevant to the needs of their mission, their values, their vision, and their long-range objectives. Finally, they need to ask if their plans fit the needs of their culture and time.”

“We need to remember that when people follow behind us, they can only go as far as we go. If our growth stops today, our ability to lead will stop along with it. Neither personality nor methodology can substitute for personal growth. We cannot model what we do not possess. Begin learning and growing today, and watch those around you begin to grow.”

“Servanthood is not about position or skill. It’s about attitude.”

“People who blame others for their failures never overcome them. They simply move from problem to problem. To reach your potential, you must continually improve yourself, and you can’t do that if you don’t take responsibility for your actions and learn from your mistakes.”

“Laughter breeds resilience. Laughing is the quickest way to get up and get going again when you’ve been knocked down.”

I am always sharing great quotes from John Maxwell and others on Twitter and Tumblr. If you’re not following me there, please do so!

Leadership Promises For Every Day (book review)

January 10, 2017 — Craig T. Owens

John Maxwell wisely noted, “The secret to your success can be found in your daily agenda.” He also says, “All’s well that begins well.” With those two thoughts in mind, his Leadership Promises For Every Day can be a key component to a leader’s success.

For 20+ years John Maxwell has written extensively and persuasively on leadership development. In fact, my library has an entire shelf devoted to his wisdom! I have benefited from all of his books, as they have helped me go deeper into various leadership topics.

But Leadership Promises is a different way of presenting Maxwell’s wisdom. Instead of a deep dive into specific topics, this devotional presents a broad foundation across the entire leadership spectrum. Each day’s leadership thought is introduced with a passage from the Bible, and then a relevant passage from one of Maxwell’s outstanding books.

As I have included Leadership Promises in my beginning-of-the-day routine, I have found timely insights I have needed for each day. I have also found that discussing each day’s thought with a friend who is also reading this book has added a deeper dimension to both of our leadership development.

Whether reading this on your own or as means of starting a discussion with other leaders-in-training, Leadership Promises will help you soar in your personal leadership growth. It takes just a few minutes to read each day’s lesson, but I’m sure you will find, as I have, that you will be contemplating the wisdom all day long.

I am a Thomas Nelson book reviewer.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: agenda, book review, devotions, John Maxwell, leadership, personal growth, wisdom. 2 Comments »

9 Quotes From “The Bad Habits Of Jesus”

January 4, 2017 — Craig T. Owens

Leonard Sweet explores how revolutionary Jesus Christ’s public ministry was in his outstanding book The Bad Habits Of Jesus. Check out my book review by clicking here, and then enjoy some of these quotes I especially liked.

“As the church we can be Jesus to the world, but only if we are not afraid of the spit in the dirt. To lose our earthiness is to lose our humility, which, in the end, is to lose our humanity.”

“It’s easier to donate money than to put our hand in the hand of a man or a woman who looks dirty, down, and drowned with mud. Yet the church of Jesus is not meant to be a hideaway but a hostel for all of God’s dirtiest who need restoration and healing.”

“Jesus didn’t procrastinate due to slackness or indecision or perfectionism or fear of moving forward. Jesus delayed doing what He wanted or needed to do because the timing wasn’t right, because He was telling time by His Father’s clock and making the most of the time His Father had given Him.”

“Sometimes delay is the best strategy for dealing with a problem, especially problems that have not been prayed over enough in the heart or played about enough in the mind.”

“We especially need to learn to wait on Jesus, which has both a Martha and a Mary meaning. There is the ‘waiter’ meaning of ‘waiting on Jesus,’ which means serving Him by serving others. To put the interests of others before our own is not to be weak but to be strong enough to transcend selfishness. That’s why love is only for the strong, not for the weak. Only the strong can love. … Then there is the ‘await’ meaning of ‘waiting on Jesus,’ which means patiently waiting without hating or wearing out the carpets with our pacing and fretting, sitting at His feet upon His arrival, leaning into His presence, and learning to put on the mind of Christ.”

“We all need the pendulum swing of snatching spaces of solitude and setting tables of sociability. In fact, the more plugged in and connected we are, the more we need to unplug and disconnect. A world of presence needs a time of absence.”

“Sometimes the Prince of Peace was a disturber of the peace so that He could be God’s purveyor of true peace.”

“When political correctness takes over in the church, it’s no longer about Jesus. … The Gospel becomes not God’s Good News but our own good intentions. … Jesus’ bad habit of not being afraid to offend so offends our PC sense of rectitude that He would be liable to be arrested for indecency.”

“When people today work for the church instead of working for God, love a denomination more than they love God, cherish their traditions more than they cherish their relationship with God, then they steal what is due only God.”

I will be sharing more quotes from this book soon. If you would like to be notified as soon as these quotes are posted, simply enter your email address in the box in the right column and click “Sign me up!” You can also follow me on Twitter and Tumblr where I share inspiring and thoughtful quotes ever day.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: book review, Christianity, church, counter-cultural, healing, humility, Jesus Christ, Leonard Sweet, love others, Martha, Mary, peace, political correctness, prayer, problem solving, procrastination, quotes, serve, solitude, tradition, waiting. 2 Comments »

The Bad Habits Of Jesus (book review)

January 3, 2017 — Craig T. Owens

My wife asked me what book I was reading, and I told her, “The Bad Habits Of Jesus by Leonard Sweet.” Her quick reply was, “Oh, He didn’t have any!” Her gut reaction to this book’s title is probably the gut reaction of most Christians. But to think of Jesus that way is to completely misconstrue how much of a revolutionary Jesus was!

Sweet gives us 15 bad habits Jesus demonstrated while He lived and ministered in first-century Israel. They were “bad habits” because they went against the grain of all that polite, religious society had ingrained in the culture.

To give you an idea, let me list just one of Jesus Christ’s bad habits: He enjoyed the company of women. I know today many people would say, “Yeah, so what’s the big deal.”

The big deal is that women were called “misbegotten” by Aristotle. They were persona non grata if they weren’t in the company of their fathers or husbands. They could be mistreated or divorced solely because their husbands wanted to. And women could never—ever!—be a student of a rabbi.

And yet Jesus not only taught women, but He treated them with a dignity and respect that was unheard of in His culture. He allowed them to have key roles in supporting His ministry, and He elevated their value in society. Leonard Sweet points out, “Jesus is the first Person in recorded history, in fact, to critique the ‘male gaze,’ saying that ‘Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’ Jesus took the proverb ‘As he thinks in his heart, so is he’ seriously but went beyond ‘Don’t do it’ to ‘Don’t even think about it!’” Jesus protected women like they had never been protected before.

This is truly an innovative, paradigm-busting, eye-opening book, and in the process, my understanding of what Jesus taught and demonstrated in the Gospels was expanded as well. The Bad Habits Of Jesus is written in such an engaging style that you will have a hard time putting it down.

I am a Tyndale book reviewer.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: Aristotle, biblical history, book review, church history, culture, habits, Jesus Christ, Leonard Sweet, world history. 9 Comments »

5 More Quotes + 2 Graphics From “The Beauty Of Intolerance”

January 2, 2017 — Craig T. Owens

This is the fourth set of quotes I’ve shared from Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell’s book The Beauty Of Intolerance. You can check out the other quotes here, here, and here; and if you missed my review of this book, please click here to read that.

“Respecting the boundaries of sexual morality and prohibitions for extramarital and premarital sex does bring protection and provision. Here are just a few ways it does this:

“Although sin has separated us from God, His original intent for us and the reality that we were created in His image have not changed. What we do or don’t do may distort that image, but our worth to God as human beings never changes.”

“So how has Christ loved you? He values all people for their inherent worth and offers grace freely to all people without exception. Cultural tolerance, on the other hand, claims to accept everyone’s differing beliefs, values, and lifestyles, yet it qualifies that acceptance. … What distinguishes God’s unconditional acceptance from that of our culture is authentic love. His love is intended to make the security, happiness, and welfare of another as important as His own. It is other-focused, not performance-focused. … Real valuing of another’s personhood expressed in the context of authentic love separates doing from being and sees the acts of sin distinct from the sinner (which, by the way, is all of us).”

“The beauty of intolerance is its opposition to wrong and evil in the world—in alignment with God’s righteous and perfect standard of justice, equality, human rights, and caring for others. Intolerance of evil is not mean-spirited and condemnatory; it is actually the only way to be loving and caring. Far from being judgmental, it advances God’s righteous kingdom.”

“Most people in America subscribe to a view of morality called ‘cultural ethics.’ In other words, they believe that whatever is acceptable in that culture is moral; if the majority of people say a thing is right, then it is right. … But there’s a problem with that. If that is true, then how can we say the ‘aborting’ of six million Jews in the Holocaust was wrong? In fact, the Nazis offered that very argument as a defense at the Nuremberg Trials. They argued, ‘How can you come from another culture and condemn what we did when we acted according to what our culture said was acceptable?’ In condemning them, the tribunal said that there is something beyond culture, above culture, that determines right and wrong.”

“We are all entitled to our own beliefs, but this doesn’t mean each of us has our own truths. Our beliefs describe the way we think the world is. Truth describes the objective state of the world regardless of how we take it to be. Beliefs can be relative, but truth cannot. … Moral truth was never meant to be spoken or understood outside of a loving relationship. Being like Christ and speaking the truth in love are synonymous.”

Favorite 2016 Posts

December 31, 2016 — Craig T. Owens

These are the Top 10 posts that were published on my blog in 2016…

1. Break Free From Porn

2. 7 Must-Have Bible Study Tools

3. 9 Quotes From “The Porn Circuit”

4. 7 Quotes From “The Beauty Of Intolerance”

5. 10 Quotes From “#struggles”

6. Theism Or Christianity?

7. Notes From The Global Leadership Summit

8. 4 Practical Prayer Tips From Jesus

9. The Porn Circuit (book review)

10. 9 Quotes From “Chase The Lion”

And these are the posts with “staying power.” These posts received the most views in 2016, even though they were published in an earlier year…

1. 21 Quotes From “Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn” [originally posted October 22, 2013]

2. 17 Quotes From “Smith Wigglesworth On Prayer, Power & Miracles” [January 15, 2014]

3. 14 Quotes From “Smith Wigglesworth On Healing” [May 7, 2013]

4. 11 Quotes From Vujicic in “Stand Strong” [July 23, 2014]

5. 22 Quotes From “The Ragamuffin Gospel” [July 17, 2013]

6. 15 Quotes From “Mansfield’s Book Of Manly Men” [January 11, 2014]

7. 10 Quotes From “You Don’t Need A Title To Be A Leader” [March 19, 2013]

8. 13 Quotes From “God’s Pursuit Of Man” [September 13, 2014]

9. 23 Quotes From “The 5 Levels Of Leadership” [March 28, 2013]

10. 10 Quotes From “The Necessity Of An Enemy” [July 13, 2012]

Book Reviews From 2016

December 27, 2016 — Craig T. Owens

Here are the books I read and reviewed in 2016. Click a title to read the review…

Archeological Study Bible

Chase The Lion

Churchill’s Trial

Culture

Hope … The Best Of All Things

How To Read A Book

I Stand At The Door And Knock

Jesus Always

Letters To A Birmingham Jail

Light & Truth—Acts & The Larger Epistles

Light & Truth—Revelation

Light & Truth—The Lesser Epistles

More Than A Carpenter

Of Antichrist And His Ruin

On This Day

One Of The Few

Our Iceberg Is Melting

Shaken

So, Anyway…

Streams In The Desert

The American Patriot’s Almanac

The Bad Habits Of Jesus

The Beauty Of Intolerance

The Blessing Of Humility

The Dawn Of Indestructible Joy

The Duty Of Pastors

The Gospels Side-By-Side

The Mathematical Proof For Christianity

The Philosophy Of Sin

The Place Of Help

The Porn Circuit

The Psychology Of Redemption

The Seven Laws Of Love

The Shadow Of An Agony

The Tabernacle Of Israel

Think On These Things

Today’s Moment Of Truth

Useful Maxims

Your Sorrow Will Turn To Joy

Here are my book reviews for 2011.

Here are my book reviews for 2012.

Here are my book reviews for 2013.

Here are my book reviews for 2014.

Here are my book reviews for 2015.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: A.W. Tozer, American history, angels, antichrist, apologetic, archeology, atonement, autobiography, Bible study, biblical history, book review, books, Brian Ridolfi, business strategy, change, Christianity, Christmas, church, comedy, commentary, Corrie ten Boom, Craig Groeschel, crucifixion, culture, Dan Delzell, Dave Willis, difficulties, Easter, encouragement, fable, family, First Advent, football, forgiveness, God's wisdom, government, health, hope, Horatius Bonar, humility, Incarnation, intolerance, Islam, J. Warner Wallace, J.I. Packer, James Strong, Jesus Christ, John Bunyan, John Cleese, John Maxwell, John Owen, John Piper, Joni Eareckson Tada, Josh McDowell, L.B. Cowman, Larry Arnn, Leonard Sweet, Mark Batterson, Martin Luther King, mathematics, Max Lucado, maxims, memoir, Mortimer Adler, Nabeel Qureshi, Nazi, New Testament, Old Testament, Oswald Chambers, parenting, Passion Week, pastoring, pornography, proverbs, purity, redemption, Resurrection Sunday, Revelation, Sarah Young, Sean McDowell, sexual sin, sin, spiritual warfare, Tabernacle, thought life, Tim Tebow, trials, US armed forces, William Bennett, Winston Churchill, wisdom, world history, World War II, worship. 8 Comments »

An Angel’s Story (book review)

December 22, 2016 — Craig T. Owens

Reader’s of my blog will know that I seldom read fiction books, but Max Lucado tricked me into reading this one! I read the introduction to An Angel’s Story and thought, “Wow, this is going to be an interesting take on the Christmas story,” and I began reading. But before I realized I was reading a fictional account, I was hooked and had to keep on reading.

I’m so glad I did!

We often think of the night of Christ’s birth being—as the Christmas carols tell us—a silent night of wonder, a holy night of rejoicing, a festive night of an angel choir singing in the skies above Bethlehem. Indeed this is the picture we get in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

However, the book of Revelation tells a different story.

In Revelation, we see the lengths to which the devil and his hoard went to prevent the Advent of Jesus. And we also read about the angels who remain loyal to God battling against the dark forces in the heavens. Max Lucado imagines what this might of have looked like in the unseen spiritual world around Mary, Joseph, and Jesus.

If you’ve ever read anything from Max Lucado, you know that he is a first-class storyteller, and An Angel’s Story is no exception. Believe me: this book will grab your attention, keep you riveted until the very end, and give you a perspective of the night of Christ’s birth like you’ve probably never seen before.

I highly recommend this book to you!

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: angels, book review, Christmas, First Advent, Gospel of Luke, Gospel of Matthew, Jesus Christ, Joseph, Mary, Max Lucado, Revelation, spiritual warfare, storytelling. 1 Comment »

The Dawning Of Indestructible Joy (book review)

December 20, 2016 — Craig T. Owens

Sometimes I am concerned that even those who know the story of the Incarnation of Jesus miss out on the stunningly powerful miracle that took place in Bethlehem. Instead of being awed by the majesty of Christ’s First Advent, we merely give lip service to His birth. John Piper’s book The Dawning Of Indestructible Joy will give you a fresh perspective of the miracle of Christ’s birth and all that it means.

The Dawning Of Indestructible Joy is written in 25 chapters, building an exciting countdown from December 1 until Christmas morning. Each day John Piper will awaken your heart and mind again to the unimaginable gifts that Jesus Christ made available to us through His incarnation. Gifts such as freedom from sin, intimacy with God, eternal life, and soul-lifting joy.

Each chapter is short enough to serve as an ideal family reading time, perhaps each evening around the dinner table in December. The Scripture passage for each day is short enough, too, for everyone to memorize so that they are prepared to share with anyone else the joy that comes with the miracle of the Advent.

Make this book a part of your family Christmas tradition.