Tim Chester is a pastor at Grace Church, Boroughbridge in North Yorkshire. He is also a faculty member of Crosslands Training; and is the author of over 30 books, a number of which have been really significant in my own formation: Total Church, Everyday Church, You Can Change… When I heard about the vision behind Tim’s new book, Enjoying God, I was really keen to hear more…

– Tim, you’re probably one of the most prolific British Christian authors around. And yet I’ve heard you say this particular book might be your most important. Can you tell us a bit about Enjoying God – and why you feel that way about it?

Well, the word ‘might’ is significant because it’s not really for me to judge. But I hope the book says something fresh that can really make a different to our relationship with God. We talk a lot about enjoying God. If someone is struggling with temptation or bitterness or longing or emptiness then we call them to find joy in Christ. Rightly so. But what are we do to do with this exhortation? It makes a fine climax to a sermon, but what I am supposed to do next? Is joy an act of the will or even an act of make believe? What I’m trying do in the book is help Christians have a strong sense of living in relationship with God in the everyday stuff of life. The central ideas are not novel. To be honest, I’ve nicked them from the Puritan John Owen. But they’re not often talked about today and think they have the potential to make a powerful difference in people’s lives.

– Bible-believing Christians will often say that the gospel has brought us into a ‘right relationship with God’ – and yet you point out that we’re not very good at talking about what that relationship looks like in everyday life. Why do you think that is?

The central idea of the book is that a vital step in enjoying God is to think about how God the Father is relating to us and how we can respond, how the Son is relating to us and how we can respond, and how the Spirit is relating to us and how we can respond. This is what the book then tries to do. The reason this is important is because it’s hard to relate to God as a generic entity. Christian theology has always said we can’t know God’s essence. As it happens, I’m writing this in Hong Kong airport on my way home from a conference in Australia. On the plane I’ve been reading a book on the attributes of God in which lines up a series of theologians across the centuries who are all making precisely this point. We have nothing in our experience that enables us to have any sense of the ‘godness’ of God. But – here’s the good news – we can know the persons of God. The Father, Sons and Spirit exist in an personal relationship of joy and in Christ we are able to enjoy that relationship by relating to the persons of God. This is Owen’s big idea in his book Communion with God. It’s heavy duty theology, but it cashes out in a very simple principle: think about how the Father, Son and Spirit are each relating to you and how you can respond. That’s a long-winded way of answering your question. What it boils down to is people find it hard to relate to God when they’re relating to him as a generic entity – a being beyond comprehension.

– In Enjoying God, you underline the importance of relating to God as Father, Son, and Spirit – rather than just ‘God’. How do we know ‘who to relate to when’ – and what might you say to someone who is who feels this is ’splitting up’ the Triune God? 

Good question. Having just stressed the three-ness of God, let me now stress the one-ness of God. The three persons are one being so to relate to one is to relate to them all. In other words, as soon as you think about relating to the Father you inevitably start thinking about how we relate to the Father because we are ‘in’ the Son. That means our experience of God is the experience of the Son – that is, the love of a Father. Moreover, God sent the Spirit to enable us to cry ‘Abba, Father’. As a result, the objective reality of being a child of God becomes a subjective experience in our lives. All this means that by thinking about their distinctive roles, you find yourself actually connecting with the one triune God.

– At the end of each chapter, you include an ‘action point’, as well as ‘discussion questions’. It struck me that Christian books will often have discussion questions – but what made you include an ‘action point’?

It’s something I did in my book You Can Change and many people have told me how helpful they found it. I really, really want Enjoying God to help people see how God is at work in their lives day by day in all the nitty gritty of life. When many people think about experiencing God they think of an emotional experience in corporate worship or perhaps hearing God speak in some way a voice. Often people don’t really experience either these very much and so God feels rather distant to them. What I want to show people is that the triune God is intimately at work in our lives in many different ways all the time. Our experience of God is much bigger and richer and fuller than those kind of moments. I want to use the Scriptures to open the eyes of our faith to see God’s involvement in our daily lives.

– You say that one of the principles underlying your book is understanding the difference between our union with God and our communion with God. Can you unpack this further and show us why we need to understand both?

Again, this is something John Owen says. I don’t want to get hung up on the terminology, but the distinction is really important. Union with God in Christ is all God’s work from start to finish. That means our relationship with God is something we not achieve, nor something we can ruin. It’s all of grace. This is the foundation of our relationship with God. Communion with God describes the two-way relationship into which we’ve been saved. What we do really does make a difference to our experience of God. This gives us a great incentive to see God at work, listen for his voice in his word and pursue him in prayer. But all the time we have the great assurance that our relationship rests secure on his grace.

– I’ve heard a few people say recently that in our post-Christian culture the church needs to have a ‘thick’ spirituality that embodies our faith. How important is it that Christians in a post-Christian society are actively ‘enjoying God’?

Well I’m not sure how to quantify the importance. What units of measurement did you have in mind? But I do think it’s important. It’s important for us if we’re to survive in the face of increasing hostility and scepticism. And it’s important of the watching world. People often don’t want to engage at the level of what is true. But they are looking for something. Our culture is, as the philosopher Charles Taylor says, still haunted by transcendence. A deep sense of the triune God’s involvement in our lives, together with the joy this brings, has the potential to be a powerful apologetic for the gospel.

You can download the first chapter of Enjoying God for free here, or pick up a copy of the book from the publisher here.

Life Tastes Better is a short and punchy new give-away book from Terry Virgo, the founder of the Newfrontiers network of churches. It’s aimed at – and ideal for – those who are wanting to explore the Christian faith, demonstrating the life-changing surprise Jesus brings. Virgo’s friendly and conversational tone, as well as the fact the ‘book’ is only five short chapters (each between 6-14 pages) mean it’s a very light and inviting read.

A Christianity That Works

As the title suggests, the book is written from the angle of showing that what Jesus adds to life makes him well worth considering. This is a legitimate and helpful evangelistic approach: rather than being concerned with Christianity’s objective truthfulness, many people want to know if Christianity actually ‘works’. What does it bring to my life? Appealing to this instinct doesn’t mean Virgo dilutes the gospel call to turn and trust in Christ, nor does it mean he promises material prosperity or the absence of suffering. And yet it did mean that the book takes a slightly different line of engagement to many of the evangelistic books I’ve read.

The booklet focuses in on Jesus’ appearance at the wedding in Cana (John 2:1-11) and the hook is that Jesus can help us when we’re running out – whether it’s running out of answers, options or hope. There’s not many of us who would say our lives are all sorted – so Virgo’s appeal here raises interest. He grounds this helpfully in the apostle John’s bigger purpose of showing that Jesus’ ‘signs’ should lead to believing that he is the Messiah, in turn receiving ‘life in his name’ (John 20:31). In other words, the ‘sign’ of water being turned into wine in John 2 demonstrates that Jesus has an authority that means he is worth trusting with our lives.

A Jesus Full of Surprises

In the next three chapters Virgo seeks to show how this incident at Cana demolishes a number of common stereotypes about Christianity.

Firstly, in chapter 2, we see that Jesus was willing to be at this party. In other words, he is interested in the things of real life. Is this the kind of Jesus we often think of? Is this what we imagine about religion? More than that, this party is a wedding party – which leads to Virgo skilfully introducing Jesus as the Bridegroom of the Bible’s greater wedding storyline. Setting this against the backdrop of a modern resistance to the commitment of marriage, we see Jesus as giving himself to us, “for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health”.

Chapter 3 was my favourite chapter. Virgo addresses Jesus’ seemingly rude comment to his mother in John 2:4 (“Woman, what does this have to do with me?”) and shows how it reveals the bigger truth that Jesus has not come to complete our agendas and plans. I thought this was a really powerful way of highlighting how we can all bring our own expectations to Jesus, but in effect we’re trying to redefine him, expecting him to pay more attention to our hopes and goals than his. And yet Jesus wants to turn that perspective on its head:

“Acknowledging Jesus’ authority to be in charge in his world unlocks the door for us to enter into a new world where he will do amazing amazing things for us.”

Or to put it simply, “Jesus helps by taking over.” We have been taken from our surface-level problems – or even our under-the-surface-level problems to consider that Jesus has come to put his finger in an even bigger problem.

A Life That Is Not Our Own

In the final chapter Virgo leaves us seeing the need to respond to Jesus. Reflecting on his own Christian journey, he shares that he’d been living as a Christian for a while before someone showed him that God wanted his whole life:

“I wanted Jesus to do his thing for me, but not to be in charge of me… [But] Jesus wanted to take charge – not coexist with a load of competitors. I never really understood that before, but I could feel God saying to me, Are you mine or not? I was suddenly really aware of the awesomeness of God. I want your life. Do I have your life? 

This is the rub of the book: that Christianity involves a change of ownership (or at least acknowledging a change of ownership!) – but that this is for the better. As the one who can deal with our greatest need and give us peace with himself it is a much better thing for us to hand over our lives to God.

A Resource to Share

This is an evangelistic book with a lot of strengths. It is brief – surely increasingly important in our cultural moment. It is warm in tone. It is engaging – even the title and presentation seeks to connect with the reader. And yet you couldn’t miss its central message, which doesn’t pull any punches and leaves you fully aware a response needs to be made.

Perhaps this is a generalisation, but many evangelistic books seem to be either written in response to a particular objection or they assume substantial pre-existing Christian interest. (The exception to this would be testimony-led books, e.g. Marcus Nodder’s excellent City Lives). But I wonder if this means such books can tend to come across as either just solving a logical problem, or they just struggle to engage. Either way, it makes the opportunities to give them away more niche. Life Tastes Better models something different, and it means I’m already thinking about people I’d love to hand it to.

Life Tastes Better is currently available from the publisher for £1.69 per copy here, with further discounts for bulk purchases.

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Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, but I hope this is still a fair review.

Did Rest Get Trendy Or Did We Just Get Crazy-Busy?

There’s obviously something amiss in our Christian culture when books on burn-out or rest seem to be about as common as, I dunno, church-plants using those pull-up banner-stand things. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not a complaint in either case. For one, don’t knock the stands – they do the job – and in terms of rest, the sad reality is that by all accounts we’re in great need of some fine-tuned resources to help us out in this area.

When you think about it, it’s unsurprising that writing on rest often comes from a personal angle. We learn – and write – from experience. And sadly, what’s going to convince you of the importance of rest more than crashing and burning? That comes out in Christopher Ash and David Murray’s recent books, and it’s also the case with The Art of Rest, a new, punchy paperback from Massachusetts-based pastor, Adam Mabry. Hopefully these ‘pre-emptive’ resources can do the rest of us the world of good, before we find out the hard way.

Doing Do Is Easier Than Doing Rest

Mabry’s opening chapter is titled, “I Don’t Do Rest”; he shares that his wife’s reaction to him announcing he was writing a book on rest was to laugh in his face. The problem he highlights is that many of us aren’t so good at doing rest, but we’re pretty hot at doing ‘do’. In fact we’re suckers for do. We see busyness and think it means we’re achieving something, getting somewhere. It makes us feel important. We idolise being productive and being ‘high-capacity leaders’, but we forget that, ultimately, “God has wired us to require rest.”

The ‘art of rest’ refers to Mabry’s conviction that rest is less about rule and more about rhythm. We might be diligent at taking a day-off or marking the Sabbath, but we still need to consider whether we’re truly resting – and the reason. As he says, the why of rest is just as important as the how. To skip the ‘why’ is to attempt to grow a tree on top of some pavement; you need to bust-up the concrete and get under the surface before you can grow anything of significance. It’s a powerful image, and throughout the book Mabry seeks to get under the surface of why we’re so prone not to rest, and therefore why we need it so much.

Reasons To Rest

So why rest? In four easy-to-read chapters, Mabry serves up a range of different motivations:

• Rest is for remembering. It’s for remembering God, ourselves, and true story of the world: “regularly stopping to rest in God allows us to remember that the meaning of our lives isn’t to wander around inside ourselves and choose what aspects of our desires we’ll wear as an identity badge.”
• Rest is resistance; building on the work of Walter Brueggemann, Mabry suggests rest is resistance against a world that defines itself by work and career: “[rest] is open rebellion against the systems of this world that demand we do in order to be.” Here Mabry is brilliant at exposing the default mode of our culture – and even our church culture: “in order for you to be the most you-ey you you can be, you just need to look within.” Yes, that’s a lot of ‘you’s but that’s exactly the point. Part of the problem here is that we become complicit in the tendency towards self-justification, self-actualisation, because, after all, “the most powerful god of the West [is] the one in the mirror.” In contrast:

“[T]he truth is that you only come into contact with your truest self when you come closer to Christ. You won’t find you by clambering about in your own subconscious, but by bringing your whole self to him.”

• Rest restores relationships. Our restlessness often leaves a trail of damage: “dead marriages, distant children, and fair-weather friendships all lie in the wake of the Western wanderer and their quest to quiet the inner voice and find the end-point of the pursuit of happiness.” Instead, rest brings with it “relational room,” the oxygen to allow relationships to live and grow.
• Rest brings reward. Mabry shows that rest is a God-given means for our Father in heaven to bless us – through reflection, through memory, through security, through endurance, and through anticipation.

Keeping Sabbath Special

Obviously you can’t write a book on rest without engaging with the fourth commandment to keep the Sabbath. Mabry acknowledges that how we apply this command as Christians is a topic that can easily divide churches and lead to endless discussion and debate, e.g. how does Jesus fulfil the Old Testament law? Is every command still binding, as it reads? These are important questions, but Mabry’s own take is that this command doesn’t apply directly to us today, having been fulfilled in Christ (Hebrews 3-4; Colossians 2:16-17). Yet he makes the valid point – which is backed-up in some of the endorsements – that even if you disagree with him on this, you’d still be in agreement with 96% of the rest of the book. The wisdom and importance and significance of resting remains, even if that doesn’t involve a prescribed Sabbath day. In fact Mabry also challenges those who argue that keeping a Sabbath is legalistic: “simply ask how not observing Sabbath rest is going for you. It’s not rest that threatens to oppress you, but your refusal to rest.”

Rest in Practice

The final chapter gives some practical suggestions for rest: namely, sleeping, reading, praying, reflecting, avocating (new one for me!), recreating, eating and singing, as well as considering the categories of daily, weekly and yearly rest. I felt Ash’s Zeal Without Burnout and Murray’s ReSet probably were more expansive in this area.

My critique of The Art of Rest would be that occasionally the book’s structure and flow seemed a bit muddled. The first chapter is set-up as a bit of a Bible overview of rest, but we quickly got into ‘lies that Satan uses to convince us not to rest’. These were helpful in themselves, and maybe it’s just me, but it felt like we were racing to application before I’d really got going.

Despite that the four central chapters were excellent and really thought-provoking and compelling. In particular, the strength of Mabry’s contribution to the ‘rest canon’ is his ability to expose some of the ways in which we buy into a culture of ‘do’. He writes in such a way that you really want to grab a handle on your life and live restfully, in line with how God made us. If you’re ever tempted to think of yourself as ‘busy’, ‘too busy’, or you actually find yourself enjoying being busy, then The Art of Rest would be well worth picking up.

You can pick up a copy of The Art of Rest from the publisher here.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, but I hope this is still a fair review.