Show Notes
In this episode of Peaceable and Kind, host Derek Vreeland reflects on the Advent season and discusses his top five favorite books of 2024, exploring themes of spirituality, holiness, and personal growth. Each book is presented with insights and personal anecdotes, encouraging listeners to engage with these works and reflect on their own faith journeys.
Scriptures mentioned in this episode:
Matthew 7: 21-23
Books mentioned in this podcast:
Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints by Jason Byassee
Holiness Here: Searching for God in the Ordinary Events of Everyday Life by Karen Stiller
The Narrow Path: How the Subversive Way of Jesus Satisfies Our Souls by Rich Villodas
A Short Guide to Spiritual Formation: Finding Life in Truth, Goodness, Beauty, and Community by Alex Sosler
The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ by Ashley Lande
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Transcript
Narrator: Welcome to Peaceable and Kind, the podcast where we explore the transformation. Each week your host, Derek Vreeland, will delve into the stories, scriptures, and practical steps that help us embody these essential Christian virtues.
Derek Vreeland: Welcome back to another episode of Peaceable and Kind. I am your host, Derek Vreeland, bringing you this episode a week. Well, less than a week before Christmas, we are in the Advent season, and Christmas is right around the corner. And I hope that this advent and Christmas season has been a good one for you. And if you haven’t finished up your Christmas shopping, you need to get on that immediately It’s funny with the holidays how busy our lives become because there’s all sorts of activity around Christmas. There are Christmas parties and Christmas gatherings, you have to do your Christmas shopping, there’s the exchanging of gifts. And this is why I love the Advent season. Because Advent is given to us as a gift from the church historically to slow down a bit To ponder, to reflect, to build in anticipation for the celebration of the coming of Jesus. And so I hope in the busyness of these final days before Christmas that you are able to do that. And maybe this episode of Peaceable and Kind will help you pause for a bit. to slow down and to reflect. But thank you for joining me for this episode. If you haven’t already, go ahead and subscribe to Peaceable and Kind wherever you’re listening to this podcast episode. And if you would like to leave a rating or review, that helps us. And if you know someone who might benefit From Christian content like this, I’d appreciate if you’d share this episode or a previous episode. Today we’re going to talk about books. One of my favorite topics is talking about the book. books that I am reading, the books that I have read. On today’s episode, I want to tell you about the top. Five books I read. These are my favorite books that I read in 2024. I have been a book lover, a book reader. Well, since I was a child, I remember being in elementary school and browsing the aisles of our school library. I remember our sweet librarian who would often ask us what we’re interested in, what we would like to read. And I read a bunch as a child. I slowed down my reading a bit in middle school and early high school because my attention turned towards sports. And I was really interested, particularly in basketball. I also started running track. And because athletics began to overtake my life, I was much more interested in being on the basketball court than being in the library. I remember being a freshman in high school or maybe I was in the eighth grade and we had to read something in English class and my teacher asked what I was into and I said, basketball. I’m interested in all things basketball And she recommended a short little biography of Bobby Knight, the basketball coach, which was a great recommendation because I loved that book. Then I had this resurgence of my faith when I was 15 years old. And by the time I was 16 years old, I knew I wanted to be a pastor. And getting involved in church, particularly the kind of church I was involved in, reading was a part of what Christians do. At a minimum, we’re reading our Bibles every day, but I ventured into our local Christian bookstore. And I saw all of these Christian books and well, the rest is history. I started reading then and haven’t stopped I have books everywhere. I am surrounded by books here in my home office. I have a library of books at my church office. I have a stack of books. Next to my chair where I read in the living room. I’m just surrounded by books. I’m always reading or looking for the next read. Often I get into these bad habits of buying new books when I haven’t read the books that I’ve already purchased. There’s a couple of times during the season of Lent, for example, where I have said, okay, for the 40 days of Lent, I’m not going to buy another book until I read the books that I’ve already bought. Sometimes I’m reading a new book in my chair in the living room and then I gaze over to my right and I see this stack of books. I recently purchased but haven’t read, and I feel like those books are judging me. They’re wondering, why haven’t you read us? I love books and my life in is involved with uh reading, in part because I’m a pastor and I’m a teacher and now I’ve become an author. Books are just a part of my life So on today’s episode, I want to share with you the top five books from 2024. Four of them were written this year in 2024. One was not, but I actually read it this year. And as I was compiling the list, I wanted a top five, but that meant that there was a number of books. that did not make the list. And I feel bad about that. But I want to talk to you about these five books. Maybe it will encourage you. to pick up and read one of these. What I’d like to do is describe each of the five books, and they are somewhat in an order. I loved all five books I’m gonna talk about today, but I I’ve ranked them somewhat And perhaps as I’m talking about each of these books, I’m going to read from each of these books. I might encourage you to check one of those out. Particularly if you get an Amazon gift card, a Barnes and Noble gift card for Christmas, and you’re wondering what should I check out? Here are five books certainly that I can recommend to you So let’s begin. And again, I’m going to go from five up to one. The fifth book on this list is Surprised by Jesus Again. Subtitled Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints by Jason Biasi. This is a book that was written in 2019. So this is the book that was not written in 2024. But it’s a book that I read this year. This is a book that was recommended to me by my friend Perry Zond. We worked together at Word of Life Church and she recommended it not only to me, but to our leadership team. And so I facilitated a small group discussion of Bias’ book, Surprised by Jesus Again, for our leadership staff. And I read all the time and I do like reading groups. I enjoy reading books with other people I like the the wrestling and the dialogue. Often as I’m reading a book, I’ll skip over a point or I’ll miss a point. And then when I’m in a book study, someone else will bring out a little gym. From a chapter that I missed. So we read Biasy’s Book Together, and it is a book about how we read the Bible. and how we understand the Bible. In particular, how can we read, as the subtitle says, in communion with the saints? How can we read the Bible Like many of the ancient Christians did. And the primary way that we do that is by reading the Bible in order to find Jesus all throughout the scriptures, not just the gospels that are recording his life, not just the epistles and the rest of the New Testament. that are talking about how Christians live in the light of the coming of Jesus and the outpouring of the Spirit, but even in the Old Testament. Bias E is advocating for a what we call Christological reading of the Bible That is finding Jesus in all of the scripture. And he’s also arguing for a figurative reading of the Bible He has a chapter in here where he talks about the four meanings of Scripture, the four senses of Scripture. This comes to us from Aquinas Aquinas made popular the four meanings or the four senses, but it’s all rooted in early church history, how the earliest Christians read the Bible. And biasy builds on Aquinas’ idea of these four meanings, four senses. That is one, the historical reading, that is reading scripture in its historical context The allegorical, which is the figurative, that is, how do we, particularly in our reading of the Old Testament, read it figuratively in such a way that it leads us to Jesus There’s also the ethical or the moral reading of Scripture. What is any text of Scripture calling us to do as followers of Jesus And then the fourth meaning or the fourth sense of Scripture is what is called the anagogical or the mystical reading of Scripture. Sometimes people will describe this as the devotional reading of Scripture. How does the reading of the Bible draw our hearts closer to God? And of those four meanings or four senses, he talks a lot about the second, the allegorical or the figurative. And as I was reviewing this book in order to get ready for this podcast episode, I found so many asterisks and stars in the margin, little lines and thoughts and ideas that I love so much. My favorite chapter is chapter five, which is entitled Learning Scripture in Nazareth And then this chapter has a subtitle, God is Jewish, Catholic, and Pentecostal. And it’s funny, in my book, I actually crossed out the primary title of chapter five because chapter five is about the god that we worship being Jewish, Catholic, and Pentecostal. I love how provocative that is. I still want to preach a sermon entitled God is Jewish, Catholic, and Pentecostal And what he’s doing in this chapter is first establishing that the Christian God, the God made famous by Jesus The God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is rooted in Hebrew Scripture, is rooted in the story told by the Jewish people. And this is where bias E is grounding our reading of Scripture in history. That first sense, that first meaning of Scripture, the historical or the literal sense. Is a necessary starting point, particularly in reading the Gospels and reading the rest of the New Testament. We do so understanding the Jewish background There are Christians that would be happy just to lop off the Old Testament and scrap it and just live in the New Testament But the scriptures that we have received and the scriptures that have been handed down to us by Christians who have lived before us. are scriptures that include the Hebrew text, that include the Old Testament. And the Old Testament is for us Christians as well. There is no way to fully understand Jesus and the New Testament writers without the Old Testament. So it’s a reminder that God is Jewish. The second, God is Catholic, which I love how provocative that is. If you are a Protestant Christian, that probably bothers you a little bit. But I will tell you about biasy, that he likes to be provocative and he has a kind of dry, sarcastic kind of humor for a biblical theologian and pastor. uh which I found endearing. I I loved it so much. So in describing God as Catholic, he’s not saying that God is contained in one Christian tradition, the Roman Catholic tradition. Rather, he is saying that our understanding of God as communicated through the scriptures is a mediated faith. It is passed on to us. In other words, we don’t get to make up the Christian faith. We don’t really get to invent new doctrines because we’re reading the Bible with fresh eyes. Rather the Christian faith has been passed on to us. So many of the foundational doctrines of the Christian faith were settled hundreds and hundreds of years ago. So again, we are looking at Scripture historically, not only in its Jewish historical context, but also understanding the great Christian tradition. of how scripture has been handled and interpreted. And then finally he talks about God being Pentecostal. That is, God is experiential. That in reading Scripture, we’re doing so to commune with God, to encounter God. God is not an object in the universe to be observed or studied. God is not simply a historical figure in holy scripture to be researched, but God is a living person to be experienced and encountered And this is that fourth sense, that fourth meaning of Scripture that we encounter God through the text. So I encourage you check it out, Jason Biasy, Surprised by Jesus again from 2019. That was book number five. The number four book on my list was released in 2024. In fact, the rest of the books I’m going to talk about today were all released this year. And book number four, I read early on this year, and it was one of my favorites. And number four on my list is Holiness Here. Searching for God in the Ordinary Events of Everyday Life by my friend Karen Stiller If you will remember, I interviewed Karen on a previous episode of Peaceable in Kind. I interviewed Karen back in August. This was episode 10, if you want to go back and hear my interview with Karen. She wrote this beautiful book on holiness entitled Holiness Here. And it was about. thinking through Christian holiness in terms of how we live our day-to-day lives Often holiness is a concept for some Christians that’s about rules and regulations, this long moral code of do’s and do-nots. Often a lot of that has to do with how we worship and things like that. But in Karen’s book, holiness is what we do at the dinner table. It’s what we do when we rise in the morning. It’s what we do as we walk through our neighborhoods. And Karen is a beautiful writer. She is a Canadian author. And while writing this book, her husband, uh, who had been a pastor, passed away. And the chapter entitled Sorrow is perhaps the most emotionally moving and powerful chapter because she talks about her husband’s dying and then passing and and how her friends and family and church community gathered around her. But she describes holiness in a way I think is relatable. Let me read just a few lines from the chapter on humility. Karen writes, we do not grow in a straight line. Holiness can’t be charted out on graph paper, although that would be easier and so much more predictable. The journey into our holiness, so we can live out of our holiness is more loop than line. Holiness is in and out, backward and forward, around and around, then out a bit farther and in a bit deeper. Three steps forward and two steps back, exactly like our mothers described our progress in other things with that sigh. Our outer acts of holiness, which we’ve been instructed to do, and our inner selves which we are advised to pay close attention to will rarely match up, at least at the beginning. The beginning can be long. The deeply inadequate ways in which we practice holiness in our lives and in the world will always, inevitably, involve humility. And that’s just a small snapshot of what Karen is doing in this book. And so I recommend it, particularly if you have read other holiness related books and you have found it a little stiff, a little legalistic You won’t find that uh in Karen’s book. And it’s such a wonderfully written book. I think that you will enjoy it. And I told Karen that It was my favorite book of 2024. I would say for the first half of 2024, it was the best book that I read. The rest of the books on this list are books I read this fall. But for the first half of the year, Holiness Here was number one. But here coming in at the end of the year, I’m putting it number four on my list. Number three on this list of my favorite books of 2024 is The Narrow Path. How the subversive way of Jesus Satisfies Our Soul by my friend Rich Velotis Rich is the pastor of New Life in Queens, New York. Rich has written a number of books, including The Deeply Formed Life. That book was a Christianity Today Book Award winner. That was Rich’s first book. Loved that book, The Deeply Formed Life. His second book was Good and Beautiful and Kind. With a book title like that, I need to bring Rich on the podcast. I need to interview him in 2025. We’ll do that. But this book, his newest book, The Narrow Path. Is his overview of the Sermon on the Mount. And I have loved reading books and commentaries on the Sermon on the Mount. And this one in particular, I led a group of people through because I found it deeply transformative. If you are serious about following Jesus, and maybe you are newer in your Christian walk, or maybe you’ve stepped away from the faith and you’ve come back and you’re trying to figure out, okay, what does it look like? To walk in the footsteps of Jesus? What does it look like to live an authentic Christian life? If you’re asking some of those questions, I recommend the Narrow Path. I have loved all of Rich’s books, but this is my favorite of all three, in particular because I think there’s more Rich Velotus in this book. There’s more anecdotes and stories. His other books were well researched, and there’s lots of quotes from other authors. This one has less quotes and therefore less footnotes and more of Rich’s pastoral exhortations. And it is Jesus focused, it’s Jesus-centered, and it it really, really was a helpful formational and discipleship tool. I enjoyed leading a group through it. And he walks through the Sermon on the Mount, giving you what Jesus said, and then Rich reflects on it. Let me read just a couple of lines here from the chapter entitled Our Decisions Rich has just quoted Jesus in Matthew 7, 21 and 23, talking about those who call Jesus Lord but don’t enter the kingdom of heaven People who have even said, Lord, didn’t we do mighty things in your name? Didn’t we cast out demons, perform miracles, and all these things? And Jesus says, Depart from me, I never knew you. That for me was always a terrifying line of scripture from the words of Jesus: Depart from me, I never knew you. So Rich has just quoted Jesus from Matthew seven and then Rich writes this When I read these words, I’m jolted by his directness. At the heart of this warning, there is grace. Jesus loves us too much to play games with the truth He invites us into a life of knowing God, not just knowing about God, a life of presence, not posturing. A life of being with God, not simply doing things for Him. Jesus is not interested in a spirituality that separates motive from mission He calls us to congruence, to a life unfractured and secure. This is one of the many, many powerful pastoral exhortations. From Rich Filotis in this book. And this fact here, this point that Rich is making is one that deeply resonates with me. Currently, I’m doing a lot of reading in the area of character formation, virtue ethics. I’m trying to get at how we live in harmony between our being and our doing. And Rich is one to focus on themes like that. What we do in obedience to Jesus is important. but it is only as valuable as our internal life, that being with God. So a very, very helpful book, The Narrow Path by Rich Velodis. That’s book number three Book two on my list of favorite books from 2024 is no surprise. It is a short guide to spiritual formation. Finding Life in Truth, Goodness, Beauty, and Community by Alex Sossler. Now this one is no surprise because if you’ve been following Peaceable and Kind recently, I just had an interview with Alex Sossler. This book was sent to me because I was honored to be A judge for the Christianity Today Book Awards in the area of Christian living and spiritual formation I was sent for books and Alex’s A Short Guide to Spiritual Formation was on that list and I loved this book. I won’t say a whole lot about it. You can go back and listen to episode 27 if you’d like to hear the full interview with Alex. But what I told Alex, why I love this book so much, is that for me, it is the perfect textbook to the subject of spiritual formation, that is, how we’re formed into the image of Jesus. For years and years I’ve always considered Dallas Willard’s renovation of the heart to be the classic textbook. And I still love Willard. I still love Renovation of the Heart. I still reference it. I go back to it. But I told Alex that I think his short guide to spiritual formation has now replaced Willard in terms of like the key textbook for understanding spiritual formation. I love that Alex draws upon a variety of Christian sources from different traditions. Alex shared in the interview that he sees himself a bit as a a theological and ecclesiological mutt. I feel the same way. And he he quotes from all of the best, what I consider the best Christian scholars, particularly those from the last hundred years or so. But I love the framework of this book It’s built around the Greek transcendentals, that is the true, the good, and the beautiful. This goes back to Aristotle, Plato. Socrates, and I do love the import of that framework from Greek philosophy. In the interview, Alex said he did so because God is the ultimate truth. God is the ultimate goodness. God is the ultimate beauty in the world. And Next to the three transcendentals, he adds a fourth, which is community or unity, the social aspect. And I thought it was helpful, well researched, biblical, historical, readable. And again, that’s all I want to say about this book because you can go back and listen. to the interview that was episode 27. But Sossler’s a short guide to spiritual formation was number two. Okay, with that, I have come to number one, my absolute favorite book from twenty twenty-four. And it is the thing that would make everything okay forever Subtitle Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ, written by brand new author, Ashley Landy Ashley’s book was also sent to me. It was one of the four nominated books for a book award. From Christianity Today, it didn’t win. Uh Alex’s book won in that category, but when I submitted my final thoughts of the four books that I received, when I sent that to the Christianity Today book editor. I said Alex Sossler and Ashley Landy’s books are very, very different. But to me, they’re the best of the four. They’re one and one A. And when I did my final rankings, I did rank Ashley’s book higher than Sossler’s. I love them both. They’re wonderful books. But I was captivated by Ashley’s book. In this book, she is telling some of her story. A story of growing up, well, just down the road from me in Kansas City. Looking for significance, for truth, for meaning, for a spiritual transcendence to connect with something beyond herself She was looking for this path towards spiritual significance, spiritual transcendence, and the path that she took was psychedelics, was drugs, psychedelic mushrooms, LSD, speed. She was using drugs in order to go beyond herself, in order to connect with the universe something bigger. And she describes in quite descriptive terms what that journey was like, both the good and a lot of the bad As she pursued that, she was looking for meaning, she was looking for truth, but time and time again she was disappointed. And I don’t want to ruin the story, because I really would love for you to read this book, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever. That’s what she was looking for. In looking for significance and transcendence, she just wanted that sense of peace. knowing that everything would be okay forever. And ultimately she finds it in Jesus Christ. And I I don’t want to give away the Story that she tells. It’s so beautiful. Um, how she slowly goes to church with her husband and she’s weeping and she doesn’t want to be there. And this encounter that she has with Jesus is beautiful. This book was so well written. I read it in about five days. It was the kind of book that I was reading at night And when I’d wake up in the morning, it’s the first thing I was thinking about. I couldn’t wait to get back in, to read another chapter, to see where the story was going to go. But maybe what I could do Not necessarily giving too much away, but let me just read to you uh from some of the very final pages in the very last chapter, chapter 11. Maybe you can get a sense for Ashley’s style and her heart. Listen to what she writes towards the end of the book. Psychedelics made me believe I could have it all. Glory without submission, transcendence without descent, knowledge without trauma, freedom without discipline, New Life without death. It was all a lie Quote, No one comes to the Father except through the Son, Jesus claimed, and my efforts at salvation by psychedelics were by another gate, another entryway And one that eventually narrowed to a claustrophobic echo chamber. I was a thief and a robber as Jesus in John ten calls those who attempt to plumb the kingdom apart from him, and I merely paid the price with my sanity and perhaps my soul. This is my favorite book from 2024. I would love for you to get a copy, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever by Ashley Landy. And if you read Ashley’s book or any of the books on this list, I would love for you to reach out and let me know what you think And I can also say that I have a coming episode of Peaceable and Kind where I sit down with Ashley Landy. and talk about her story, about her writing, about this book, about her faith journey. And so that’ll be coming up in just a couple of episodes. I’ve already recorded it. I’m so excited to share that with you. It’ll come out in 2025. Well, that’s it for today. That’s all I have. These are my five favorite books of 2024. We’re gonna put links to each of these books in the show notes if you’re interested in any of them
Guest: Go check it out. Thank you for joining me for this episode. Go in peace and be kind
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.