In my experience, relatively few Christian books will change your life,
though many claim they will do so.
Those named below come with my recommendation,
because they really did make a difference for me.
"Have you ever wondered why we Christians do what we do for church every Sunday morning?
Why do we 'dress up' for church?
Why does the pastor preach a sermon each week?
Why do we have pews, steeples, choirs, and seminaries?
This volume reveals the startling truth:
most of what Christians do in present-day churches is not rooted in the New Testament,
but in pagan culture and rituals developed long after the death of the apostles."
I had realised the church as we know it was entirely a product of Rome before I read this book,
but reading it explains the who, what, why and when of the process.
The faith of the Apostles was turned into the thing we call a church today
by a series of steps which replaced the power and the presence of God
with rituals whose origins are in Roman paganism.
If you are a Protestant, this is just as relevant as it is to a Catholic;
Luther's reforms took the church back to the fourth century,
where the damage had already been done, not to the first,
where the Apostles worshipped as Christ intended.
My wife says when I pray, things happen. She does not say this of anyone else.
There's a reason for this.
I learned more about prayer from this book than from every other source I have ever seen or heard,
other than the Bible itself.
If you want to change the world through prayer, this is how.
An ordinary Welsh miner discovered what it really means to be an intercessor.
Intercession is not doing a lot of prayer or being fervent about it.
Christ made intercession for the transgressors by dying in their place.
Likewise other intercessors must be ready to accept the fate of those they pray for.
When you are really willing to do so,
your power with God in respect of their cause is limitless.
In my experience, once you have become ready to share their fate,
God usually waives the requirement.
But your readiness to do so must be completely unfeigned.
Even writing about this brings me near to tears.
If you want to change the world, this book will tell you how.
Broadbent's work, first published in 1931 and now in the public domain,
tells the reader about the churches which tried to follow the New Testament,
rather than the dictates of a church hierarchy, from the Apostolic Age to the early 20th century.
This is a subject about which the average Christian knows almost nothing,
as the cost of trying to follow the Bible was persecution and death,
after which the history of such movements was written
by those who persecuted or even exterminated them.
I first read this book in the early 1990s when it was not in print and I had to borrow it.
Lacking even the funds to photocopy it, I typed up most of the book and saved it to floppy disks.
Thankfully it is now available through Amazon, but it was worth typing those words out myself,
because doing so burned those words into my soul.
The memory of the lessons learned has guided my life ever since.
I have the third edition. I thoroughly recommend the maps, but not the text.
I was in a Christian bookshop with my wife and nephew, who was aged ten,
and I wanted to give him something to do.
Since he loved maps, I asked him to look for a Bible atlas for me.
He quickly returned with the Oxford Bible Atlas.
I thought I had better humour him, so I took a look there and then.
I was astonished to see what an excellent choice he had made.
So I went home and studied the book ferociously.
I began by thanking Jesus for providing me with such a great study aid.
But after reading all the text, written from a clearly atheist viewpoint,
I said to the Lord, "Thank You for these great maps, but the text is appalling."
"I never told you to read it," He replied.
To this day this is my go-to resource for maps, but read the pictures, not the text!
I no longer have a copy of this.
There are many books about Müller, but I believe this is the one I used to recommend.
Müller's example changed my life.
In the 19th century, at a time when no agencies existed for taking care of orphans
and babies were left to die on the streets,
George Müller relied on God to provide him with the means to run
not just one but eventually two orphanages.
He had two principles; one, that he never asked anyone for anything.
Two, that he was the last to eat; so if anyone went short, he did so.
This is one thing to read; it is another thing to do.
But for thirty years, as far as this has applied in my own life, I have done the same.
I will show you how this works with an example from Müller's life:
One day someone came to see how Müller managed to fund his orphanages.
As it happened, that morning there was no food to be had.
But Müller had the tables set and showed no sign of concern.
Suddenly a man came in from the street and offered the orphanage
the entire contents of his milk cart.
It had broken down outside the building.
It was impossible for him to get the goods to market before they soured.
Everyone sat down and ate.
This is one thing to read about, but imagine living this way as a principle!
Yet if George Müller could do this, why cannot we do so too?
Before he was saved, Müller was a thief.
Despite this, he discovered the key to living by divine provision,
not just for himself, but for great numbers of abandoned children who no-one else cared for.
Corrie ten Boom tells how God enabled her family to save Jews from Hitler
in wartime Holland before they themselves were sent to concentration camps for doing so.
An astonishing story which is enough to make grown men cry.
Written in 1992 and more relevant now than ever before.
Peter Whyte succinctly expresses why churches are the problem with Christianity, not the solution.
Now available for free download. A quick read, but a transformative experience.
The need for a modern English version of the Bible was identified by Howard Long,
an engineer working with General Electric, in 1955.
A lifelong devotee of the King James Version,
Long found the KJV made no connection with his friends.
He saw the need for a translation that captured the truths he loved
in the language his contemporaries spoke.
After a meal with a colleague, Long pulled out the King James Bible and began to read aloud its familiar verses.
When he glanced up to see how the man was receiving God’s message, Long was baffled by his reaction.
"He got red in the face," Long said, "and pretty soon he just exploded with laughter."
Long could hardly believe how grossly his King James Bible had failed to communicate the Word of God.
For him, the growing divide between the language of the Bible and the contemporary language of the people was reaching a breaking point.
If an educated businessman found the Scriptures, the sacred Word of God, so comical,
there was certainly a discrepancy between what the Bible said and what was being understood.
"Everywhere I go, in Canada, the U.S., anywhere, there are people
who would like to read their Bible to their children at night," Long thought.
"And they don’t have something the children can grasp."
When these long-simmering frustrations finally boiled over, Long told his pastor, the Reverend Peter DeJong,
"We’ve translated the Bible into hundreds, a couple thousand tongues,
and when we run out of tongues to translate it into, someday we’re going to translate it into English."
The 1984 version of the N.I.V. was the result.
The 2011 version of the NIV resulted from the pace of change of modern English and academic progress with translation.
However the impression of a casual reader suggests 'political correctness' is behind most of this.
Whether this is true or not, in my view withdrawing the 1984 version was a mistake.
Those who love the Word of God become deeply connected to the words through which they first received them.
This is no reason to make later generations use language they cannot relate to;
they must have the bible in their own language.
But withdrawing the 1984 version after just 27 years was in my view entirely premature.
You cannot buy the 1984 version anywhere to my knowledge, but you can download a free pdf from the above link.
The 1534 edition, printed with modern spelling (but not with modern language).
In the words of the editor: "Astonishment is still voiced that the dignitaries
who prepared the 1611 Authorised Version for King James
spoke so often with one voice – apparently miraculously.
Of course they did: the voice (never acknowledged by them) was Tyndale's."
Even with spelling changes, Tyndale's work is no easier to read than the KJV.
But there are three major things I learned from studying Tyndale's work:
Allegedly 83% of the King James' New Testament is taken from Tyndale.
This makes the KJV not an original work,
but the biggest act of copyright theft in the history of the English language.
The word 'church' appears once, in respect of the cult of Diana / Artemis at Ephesus.
Tyndale translated the Greek 'ecclesia' as 'congregation'.
'Church' is insupportable, but has been used in later translations
purely to preserve the dominant position of churches,
though Christians never attended anything we would call a church today until the fourth century.
Debunking false arguments made about 17th century English. For instance in Corinthians 13:1:
KJV, 1611: Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity,
Tyndale, 1534: Though I spake with the tongues of men and angels, and yet had no love
77 years before the KJV was written, 'charity' was not 'the middle ages word for "love" '.
Instead those who created the "Bishop's Bible"
preferred to use the wrong word for their own agenda,
and the KJV did the same because those who compiled it shared that agenda.
