Life gets so noisy sometimes that we forget to look beyond our own thoughts.

Others encouraged me to dive into a couple of books…

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God’s Wisdom for Navigating Life, by Timothy Keller

I’m part of a men’s group with my church. It’s an amazing community of people who have become real friends. We intimately share our struggles and encourage each other to let God work in our hearts.

We recently started going through God’s Wisdom and have already been stretched and challenged to follow Jesus more closely.

Keller devotes one page and one date of the year to reflections and prayers around small bits from the book of Proverbs. Tim’s wisdom is so clear. He provides insights that resonate or cause me to question what I previously thought about friendship, parenting, temptation, emotions, money, work, and more.

An excerpt:

God wants you to value workmanship over success. He wants you to take enormous pride in work well done and give far less thought to how much money the work makes. … Where in your life are you doing some task or work that is unrewarded or unrewarding? How can you use the wisdom of these verses to help you?

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The Familiar Stranger, by Tyler Staton

My daughter and son-in-law are part of Bridgetown, a church in Portland, Oregon, that Tyler leads.

This book delves into the most mysterious part of the trinity, the Holy Spirit.

People tend to intellectualize their spiritual life – and God’s Spirit – or go to the other extreme by heavily prioritizing their emotional and experiential relationship with God at the expense of what the Bible tells us.

Tyler illustrates his points with real-life stories of the Holy Spirit’s work in his life and the lives of others.

An excerpt:

“The ways God pours his love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit are as beautiful and varied as the turning of a kaleidoscope. But nowhere does the Spirit meet us more profoundly with the experiential, transformational love of God than in the weakness exposed by suffering.”

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If you don’t know already, Jon Swanson also has several books. They have encouraged me in following Jesus. Check them out.

Paul Merrill writes here every first Friday.