Entries from March 2008 ↓

Online sermons from Mike Kendall at St Neots Evangelical Church

SNEC is the church I grew up in. Mike’s preaching is humble, engaging and thoroughly biblical. Well worth a listen.

SNEC Sermon library

I have set myself the goal of reading 30 books during 2008 (see my previous post). This is where I am keeping a list of books I have read or want to read during the year. Hopefully this will be an eclectic list of titles.

Books I have read:

1. The inncocent man - John Grisham
2. Experiencing the spirit - Graham Beynon

Books I want to read:

• A call to spiritual reformation - D. A. Carson
• The cross of Christ - John Stott
• The pursuit of holiness - Jerry Bridges
• Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
• According to plan - Graeme Goldsworthy
• Experiencing the Spirit - Graham Beynon
• Integrity - Jonathon Lamb
• How to read the Bible for all it’s worth - Gordon D. Fee
• Cross Examined - Mark Meynell

One thing that I struggle with on a regular basis is reading the Bible daily and I guess I’m not alone in that struggle. Reading the Bible and praying shouldn’t be something we squeeze in to our days, it should be a priority. Anything that helps people to engage with the Bible regularily has to be a good idea.

There is a new free service developed by Scripture Union called WordLive that is designed to help people to engage with the Bible in a variety of ways. The website offers a daily Bible passage and options to explore it through Bible studies, music, video and podcasts. As well as the website and the podcasts there are RSS feeds, daily emails and a specially formatted version of the site for mobile phones.

The variety of ways to access WordLive makes it flexible appealing to those of us who spend plenty of time on a computer.The service is in it’s infancy (it launched on 1st January 2008) and there is room for improvement in things like the flexibility of the email options, but I am sure that these things will develop as the service matures.

I read a lot. I read magazines, I read news and blogs on my phone, I read all sorts of things on the internet, I enjoy taking in information. All this is reading, but almost always in short bursts. I’ll read a page on a website then follow a link to something else and move on. I’ll flick through a photography magazine and read articles that grab my attention and skip over others.

Books require a different kind of reading, reading with greater stamina, reading with more commitment. I almost always enjoy reading books, but I’m not as well or widely read as I would like to be.

In an attempt to read more and partly inspired by this blog post and talking to my step father in law about his book group, I am going to set myself a target of reading 30 books this year. It’s not a huge number, but it is a number I think I can realistically hit.

I want to read Christian books to help me understand the Bible better and help me get to know Jesus better and be more like him. I want to read fiction books, both new and classic. I want to read stuff that I wouldn’t naturally pick up and I want to read the Bible more, a lot more.

So my target is 30 books in the ten months left this year. I will try to keep a record of the books I read and want to read as well as posting reviews of some of them.