Was Santa Claus good to you this year? He was sure good to me! Thanks to the kindness of my family, several items on my Amazon.com wishlist are now in my possession. With the girls back in Arkansas, and a few days of peace, quiet, and college bowl games on my agenda, I am going to start plowing through the new books I received on Christmas.
The books I received for Christmas are: The Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible (NRSV) edited by Richard Foster, Paul in Fresh Perspective by N.T. Wright, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding how God Changes Lives by Dallas Willard, The Cure for the Common Life by Max Lucado, and The Disciple Making Church by Bill Hull.
On the baseball reading side, License to Deal by Jerry Crasnick and The State of Baseball Management: Decision-Making in the Best and Worst Teams from 1993-2003 by Scott Barzilla.
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Last night, with the final game of Monday Night Football on ABC in the background, I began wading through N.T. Wright's fresh perspective on Paul. Here's a morsel for you to nibble on from Wright's excellent book.
When Paul speaks in Galatians and Romans of pistis Christou, he normally intends to denote the faithfulness of the Messiah to the purposes of God rather than the faith by which Jew and Gentile alike believe the gospel and so are marked out as God's renewed people...In Romans 3.2-3 Paul declares that Israel had been entrusted with God's oracles; in other words, that Israel had been God's chosen messenger to the nations. But Israel, Paul says, had been unfaithful, had not discharged the commission. This is cognate with what he says in Romans 10.2-3: Israel had failed to understand God's covenant purposes, and had sought to promote a covenant status for itself alone. What then is God to do? Is he to abandon the covenant and to decide...on a drastically different 'plan B'? By no means: let God be true (3.4), though all human beings be false. God must stick to the plan. But that means sooner or later he will require a representative Israelite who will be faithful, who will be obedient to God's purpose not only for Israel but through Israel for the world. The world then waits, and Israel then waits for God to unveil his purpose, to reveal how it is that he will after all be true to his covenant. But when the moment of unveiling arrives (3.21-22), what we see is God's covenant faithfulness operating...through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah (47).
