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best books I read in 2017

In no particular order...

 Reformation:Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow, by Carl Trueman (Christian Focus, Reprint 2011).  In this reprint, Trueman (professor of church history) gives a number of important applications for today's church from the Reformation.  

 How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, by Alan Jacobs (Currency, 2017).  Hard to describe this little book, but it is profound. How community  affects the way we think. 

 I enjoyed two collections of sermons by Martyn Lloyd-Jones:
Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled, (Crossway reissue, 2009).
The Cross: God's Way of Salvation, (Crossway, 1986) 

 Awakening the Evangelical Mind: An Intellectual History of the Neo-Evangelical Movement, by Owen Strachan (Zondervan, 2015)  Along with Confessions of a Theologian, by Carl F. H. Henry (Word Books, 1986).  Strachan chronicles the rise of the new evangelicals in the 1950s and beyond.  Carl Henry figures prominently in that movement.  I also finished Volume 4 of Henry's magisterial God, Revelation and Authority, and read portions of Vols. 5 & 6.  Carl Henry (who also founded Christianity Today) is probably the least known, but extremely gifted theologian to impact the church in America in the second half of the twentieth century.  His works are immensely valuable to evangelicals today. 



The Everlasting God, by Broughton Knox (Matthias Media, 2012).  
Excellent (and brief) overview of the nature and character of God by Australian clergyman and former president of Moore College.   

 God, Marriage, and Family (Second Edition): Rebuilding the Biblical Foundation,
by Andreas J. Kostenberger (Crossway, 2010).  Thorough, clear, biblical, and much needed explanation of marriage, family, and gender.  

 He Is Not Silent, by Albert Mohler (Moody, 2008).  I picked this up at the Basics Conference last May.  Mohler connects God's use of words in making covenant and our use of words in preaching. 

 Seeing the Unseen, Expanded Edition: A 90-Day Devotional to Set Your Mind on Eternity, by Randy Alcorn (Multnomah; Expanded edition, 2017)  This is a daily devotional that my wife and I enjoy reading together. 

 I read three smaller works by J. Gresham Machen, best known for Christianity and Liberalism.  These were... 
-- The Person of Jesus (radio addresses, 1935)
-- The Christian Faith in the Modern World (1936)
-- What Is Faith (1937)
Machen, former professor of New Testament at Princeton and later founder of Westminster Seminary, had an uncanny ability to take profound theological truths and state them simply, clearly, and forcefully.  
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