Imagine if our lives were marked by contentment rather than coveting. Imagine if we gravitated towards generosity rather than grasping for more. Imagine if we felt peace about our finances, rather than anxiety.

That’s how Graham Beynon begins his new book, Money Counts. Instinctively it’s an appealing vision, but, as Graham acknowledges, that perspective on money often seems so far from the reality.

Of course, it doesn’t help that we’ve somehow made money a taboo subject in our churches. Early on in the book, Graham tells of an experienced pastor who shared that though he’d had people come and ask for help with almost every pastoral situation imaginable, he’d never had someone come and ask for help with how they handled their money.

Similarly, in my experience you struggle to find decent, simple Christian books looking at the matter of money. We don’t like talking about money, and so there’s not much writing or reading about it. And yet evidently our experiences would suggest we could do with some light on the subject.

That’s why Money Counts is such an important addition to The Good Book Company’s Live Different series. And rather than just filling a gap, it’s a brilliant read. It’s straight-forward and utterly readable, yet a thoroughly rich guide to getting our heads round money from a Christian perspective.

In fact the book’s strapline is a fair summary of the strengths of the book: ‘How to handle money in your heart and with your hands’:-

Firstly Graham recognises that ultimately money is a heart issue. He seeks to open up the Bible and illuminate the gospel, rather than simply give a few budgeting tips, money-saving tricks, or a prescriptive set of financial rules. And as he does so it becomes clear that the danger with money is that it can act as a wannabe god in our lives, holding out to us false promises of security and satisfaction.

Of course the problem isn’t that money is inherently bad, but that we let it sit comfortably on the throne of our lives, calling the shots on our desires and worries and ambitions. Yet Graham writes in a way that gently exposes the tug of war in our hearts and takes us back to the gospel and the goodness of letting God be our joy and comfort and King. He shows how the Bible engages with the allure of greed, as well as growing generosity in our hearts.

And yet, secondly, the book is practical too. Graham wants us to envisage how this issue ‘cashes out’ (boom boom), and so he gives personal examples, and at the end of each chapter asks practical, yet heart-engaging, questions. Likewise he doesn’t make assumptions about the financial situation of the reader, and the book ends with some useful appendices on debts, loans, mortgages and insurance, as well as a helpful list of ‘go to’ resources.

Along the way Graham unpicks much of the wrong thinking about money that can be associated with Christianity, whether it’s the untruth that Jesus promises financial prosperity, or the untruth that God is against money and simply favours poverty.

What I found particularly helpful is that the book prods those of us who have never really questioned our own approach to money. If that’s you, this is the perfect book. Likewise, if you’re finding yourself subtly consumed by wanting more, or constantly anxious about not having enough, this is a simple, solid and searching read.

Money Counts would also make for a great accompanying resource to a teaching series on money, or a book club, or even for a newly-married couple to read together. Likewise, why not chew it over as you begin a new year?

You can pre-order the book from its publisher here, ahead of its release in early Jan 2016.

Full disclosure: The publisher sent me a copy of the book for free, but I hope this is still a fair and honest review!

The evenings are drawing in, X-Factor’s on the telly, and you already feel ready for a holiday. Yup, September is well and truly here.

Of course with a new term comes new opportunities, but there’s also all the life-admin, calendar-coordinating, and general sense of busyness that comes with these. New rotas, new to-do lists, new courses.

And so as Christians called to be part of local churches, whether we’re in a ‘formal’ position of responsibility or not, we can soon start to feel the ‘burden’ of service:

“Man, why do I put myself through this…?”

“Ok, here we go again then…”

“You know, I really think it’s time I took a step back from all this…”

Just over a year ago I was feeling something of the ‘burden’ of all this when someone put into my hands a book that made me do a 180. In essence, it asked me a question that I was not expecting. Rather than asking me, ‘what are you doing to serve?, instead it wanted to know, ‘are you being served?’.

The book was John Hindley’s brilliant Serving without sinking: How to serve Christ and keep your joy, and it’s essentially a reflection on the stunning truth encapsulated in Jesus’ mission statement in Mark 10:45: [Jesus] “came not to be served, but to serve.” It is essential for our spiritual health that we are resting in the reality that we are served by Jesus. As Hindley puts it:

Jesus doesn’t call you to come and serve Him. He calls you to see that He came to serve you. It’s only if we see that, first and foremost, we are not servants, we are served, that we can know the joyful freedom of the Christian life. And as we do that, we’ll find that we serve like we never served before.

As such Serving without sinking is a brilliant book to get your hands on this September. Hindley understands the everyday tensions and struggles of the Christian life, particularly concerning the different motivations we have for serving others, and he pastorally applies truths about Jesus into them. Each chapter is also fairly brief, and you’ll be able to devour two or three in a short sitting, whether that be on a wet Thursday evening or whilst the kids are napping after lunch.

Here’s the icing on the cake. Not only is it a great book, but its publisher, The Good Book Company, are currently giving the eBook version away for free throughout this month. Just ‘like‘ their Facebook page here and you’ll see a discount code to enter at their online store. There’s no sane reason not to try it.

To whet your appetite, here’s another snippet:

Jesus is saying: “Follow me and I will serve you.”

Or, in His actual words:

“For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.”

He did not come so that you would serve Him. He came to serve you. Christianity is about Jesus, the God who serves His people.

Jesus comes into our lives to serve us. There is no catch, no small-print, no strings attached—there is just loving, humble, kind service by the Creator of the cosmos for His creatures, for us. Jesus’ greatness is not that He can command the service of millions; it is that He serves millions.

If you follow Jesus, then your relationship with Him, your status before God the Father, and your having His Spirit with you, will never depend on how you serve Him. It is all about His service of you.”

Go and download it for free while you can!

Hey, it’s nothing particularly novel, but I feel it’s something I’m realising afresh: let’s not let social media time kill our own personal reflection time.

I’m convinced reflection is important. Really important. By reflection I basically mean thinking. Processing. For me that means thinking things through with an attitude of repentance and faith. With the mind of Christ. And a learning, thanking, thinking. Thinking back. Thinking forward. Being intentional in doing so. Pondering about what could be. Looking with thankful eyes. Reflecting.

But that’s not new for me. I’ve written before on how I think it’s really important not just to experience things, but to reflect on those experiences. That’s how I think we often learn. In fact that’s why I first started blogging (back in May 2006 – wowzers!).

But I’ve been realising afresh that something is killing that process time.

You see the times when I often process best are at what I call ‘bit-times‘. In-between moments. Waiting moments. Break moments. It’s in those bit-times that we naturally tend to think about what’s just happened, what’s coming up, how it’s all going.

But something’s killing my reflection time and that something is social media.

I’ve been struck recently by how my default response in ‘bit-time’ seems increasingly to be to get my phone out. Whether it’s that I’m waiting for someone, or I’m moving from one event to another, or I’ve just hit the end of the day and crashed out on the sofa, my next move all too often is to reach into my pocket and pull out the said device.

In all likelihood it’ll either be that I’m scrolling through the latest posts on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instragram – probably in that order) or else I’ll be checking my inbox for new mail. But as a result reflection is going out the window. It’s in with new, new, new. And there’s no space left for reflect, reflect, reflect on everything else.

Of course reflection doesn’t need to be done alone. It might be that daily debrief over dinner with a spouse or a housemate. It might just be walking somewhere with someone – taking ten minutes in the lunch hour to go for a thoughtful, thankful wander. But let’s not let social media kill those precious times. Even when we’re with others it can quickly become party policy to get phones out and scroll away. We give permission for each other to do it by doing it ourselves.

One of my friends has this killer John Piper quote as their background on their phone:

“One of the great uses of Twitter and Facebook will be to prove at the Last Day that prayerlessness was not from lack of time.”

My intention here isn’t to talk particularly about prayer (although of course prayer naturally forms part of the God-centredness of a Christian’s processing of life), but it’s a pretty devastating exposure of both how slow we can be to pray and how quick we can be to drift to social media/email.

Any advocate of any productivity method will know that it’s uber-unproductive and counter-intuitive to be checking email more than a few times a day (and at any time when you can’t actually process the email you’re receiving there and then).

Well, likewise, how about only checking social media at a few particular slots in the day? An end-of-the-day fifteen minute Facebook catch-up? Twitter scrolls three times a day, using an app like Tweetdeck that allows you to quickly see if those who you’re really interested in have posted?

So this is me (someone who’s convinced that Instagramming/Tweeting/blogging are potentially good and godly uses of time) saying that because it’s personally important for me to be giving time to reflecting upon my life, I’m therefore gonna seek, with God’s help, to not let social media kill that all-important process time.

Here goes. Wanna join me?