19. Good News at Rock Bottom

19. Good News at Rock Bottom. Ray Ortlund. 2025. [March] 160 pages. [Source: Review copy] [5 stars]

First sentence (from the preface): My plan here is to ask of you as little as I can and to give you as much as I can. You have a busy life to live. But right now, while we are together, literally on the same page, let's make the most of it. Here is what I promise you: I will try to explain the gospel of Jesus honestly and helpfully for your needs. I will not lie to you. And I will try to believe the gospel honestly and helpfully for my own needs. Here is what I ask of you: Give Jesus a chance. Allow for the possibility that the good news about him is relevant to what you really, really care about--maybe more relevant that you have ever dared to believe.

Good News at Rock Bottom began its life as a series of talks given at Immanuel Church in Nashville, Tennessee in 2023. The book is about being at ROCK BOTTOM. It is about how there is good news--no, great news, fantastic news--at rock bottom. The book illuminates in particular Isaiah 57:15 though I am not limiting the book's use of Scripture just to one tiny--though important--verse.

There are just five chapters:

Way Up High, Way Down Low

Betrayed

Trapped

Lonely

Dying

The book is about sorrows, trials, tribulations--anything and everything which could lead you--the reader--to being at rock bottom and in need of refreshment [and spiritual healing] that can only come from the Lord Jesus Christ. 

It was a fantastic read--always timely and relevant. I do think it falls close to being a must read. If you yourself are not at rock bottom--at the moment--you probably have been or might soon be. OR perhaps someone you love dearly is there now and you could be an encourager. 

Quotes:

• What helps us most, when we need help urgently, is to discover who Jesus is for people like us. His wisdom is better than our escapism. What we want deep down is Jesus himself, with us, even us. 
• By God's grace, you can bear the burden of the actual life you're living. He is lifting you into your true dignity and destiny. And on your way there, you'll be encouraged by your fellow sufferers as they walk with you...If we savor Isaiah 57:15 for the rest of our lives, it will keep us going.
• God has settled on an arrangement that does two beautiful things at once: it does justice to who God is, and it brings mercy to where we are. The one high and lifted up has mercies for us way down low. And he wants us to be sure of it.
• Let's always leave room for God to exceed our highest thoughts of him. 
• Whatever others might think of you, the risen Christ doesn't despise you.
• There is only one thing more costly than giving our hearts away. And that is not giving our hearts away at all. 
• You are never more like Jesus, never more powerful, than when you forgive the real evil that ruined your life. That merciful you is the most alive you, the most beautiful you, the most consequential you that could exist in this generation.
• Our very efforts to make ourselves more presentable only add another layer of sin on top of the sin we committed in the first place. Everything about us is mixed with sin. If evil were color-coded, like yellow police tape at a crime scene, then everything about us at all levels would glow yellow--including our attempts at proving to God that this time we're serious, this time we really mean it. Our grovelling is why verse 14 is here. God lovingly invites us to come now, as we are, and just collapse in his arms, even with all our mess. 
• The only real barrier between us and the embrace of our Father is our hesitancy is to come. 
• "Church" isn't one more item on our weekend to-do list. It is an island of humanness in a sea of loneliness. It is God's provision for us. It is a major way he cares for us in our suffering. 
• Our loneliness is a sorrow God never meant us to bear. 
• Death is the bottom of rock bottom. Death is the underside of the bottom of rock bottom. And that is why the high and holy one will be so present with you at the moment of your death. 
• If our majestic Lord is present with us at our death, and he will be, then he is surely with us in all our sufferings leading up to death. 
• God has dynamic energy. We have exhausted lethargy. The two go really well together, as long as we don't mind staying low before God. 
• Stake your eternity not on your obedience or your attainments or your virtues, but stake all your hope on the atoning work of Jesus alone. He lived for you the virtuous life you've failed to live, and he died for you the atoning death you aren't even able to die.

© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible

18. Knowledge of the Holy

18. Knowledge of the Holy. A.W. Tozer. 1961/1978. HarperCollins. 128 pages. [Source: Book I Bought] [5 stars]

First sentence from chapter one: What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God. Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God. For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God. This is true not only of the individual Christian, but of the company of Christians that composes the Church. Always the most revealing thing about the Church is her idea of God, justas her most significant message is what she says about Him or leaves unsaid, for her silence is often more eloquent than her speech. She can never escape the self-disclosure of her witness concerning God.

I have read A.W. Tozer's Knowledge of the Holy four times now, I believe. I reviewed it in 2012, 2014, 2017,  2021, 2022,  2025. It is one of my all-time favorite books to read and reread. I always am struck by something new. I always find new quotes to share. 

Can a book be both theological and devotional? It's a tricky combination to pull off, I think. But A.W. Tozer's classic Knowledge of the Holy is one of the best examples I've ever read. It is both theological--of substance and depth--and devotional--written with the pure intent to make your heart love and love greatly your Lord and Savior. Why learn more about God? So you can love him more, so you can worship him in spirit and truth. Tozer is urging readers to meditate on God, to meditate on God's glory--his majesty. He's saying DELIGHT IN GOD.  

It is a short book that I'd recommend to just about anyone. It is a book EVERY Christian needs to consider picking up. Even if you're not typically a reader of theology.

Knowledge of the Holy is very reader-friendly. Each chapter is short--just three or four pages, which is why I think it would be a great choice for a devotional. The content has weight to it--it is a book ABOUT God how could it be anything else? Yet. At the same time, it is written in a style that is simple and straight-forward.  

  

Why read A.W. Tozer's The Knowledge of the Holy?

Because…"It is impossible to keep our moral practices sound and our inward attitudes right while our idea of God is erroneous or inadequate. If we would bring back spiritual power to our lives, we must begin to think of God more nearly as He is."

Because…"What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us."

Because…"Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they are themselves idolatrous. The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true."

Because... "If we insist upon trying to imagine Him, we end with an idol, made not with hands but with thoughts; and an idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand."

Because…"We can never know who or what we are till we know at least something of what God is."

Because…"It is not a cheerful thought that millions of us who live in a land of Bibles, who belong to churches and labor to promote the Christian religion, may yet pass our whole life on this earth without once having thought or tried to think seriously about the being of God."

Technically, all those reasons are reasons to read the Good Book, the Word of God, Holy Scriptures. But I think the Holy Spirit can and will use Tozer's words--long after he's dead--to inspire new generations to seek God.

Favorite quotes:

It is impossible to keep our moral practices sound and our inward attitudes right while our idea of God is erroneous or inadequate. If we would bring back spiritual power to our lives, we must begin to think of God more nearly as He is.

Always the most revealing thing about the Church is her idea of God, just as her most significant message is what she says about Him or leaves unsaid, for her silence is often more eloquent than her speech. She can never escape the self-disclosure of her witness concerning God.

That our idea of God correspond as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of immense importance to us. Compared with our actual thoughts about Him, our creedal statements are of little consequence. Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions and may require an intelligent and vigorous search before it is finally unearthed and exposed for what it is. Only after an ordeal of painful self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe about God.

Low views of God destroy the gospel for all who hold them.

The idolatrous heart assumes that God is other than He is - in itself a monstrous sin - and substitutes for the true God one made after its own likeness. Always this God will conform to the image of the one who created it and will be base or pure, cruel or kind, according to the moral state of the mind from which it emerges.

A god begotten in the shadows of a fallen heart will quite naturally be no true likeness of the true God.

The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him. It begins in the mind and may be present where no overt act of worship has taken place.

The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.

If we insist upon trying to imagine Him, we end with an idol, made not with hands but with thoughts; and an idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand.

The study of the attributes of God, far from being dull and heavy, may for the enlightened Christian be a sweet and absorbing spiritual exercise. To the soul that is athirst for God, nothing could be more delightful.

An attribute of God is whatever God has in any way revealed as being true of Himself.

An attribute, as we can know it, is a mental concept, an intellectual response to God's self-revelation. It is an answer to a question, the reply God makes to our interrogation concerning himself.

The doctrine of the divine unity means not only that there is but one God; it means also that God is simple, uncomplex, one with Himself. He need not suspend one to exercise another, for in Him all His attributes are one. All of God does all that God does; He does not divide himself to perform a work, but works in the total unity of His being.

The divine attributes are what we know to be true of God. He does not possess them as qualities; they are how God is as He reveals Himself to His creatures. Love, for instance, is not something God has and which may grow or diminish or cease to be. His love is the way God is, and when He loves He is simply being Himself.

To meditate on the three Persons of the Godhead is to walk in thought through the garden eastward in Eden and to tread on holy ground.

Because we are the handiwork of God, it follows that all our problems and their solutions are theological.

The fact of God is necessary to the fact of man. Think God away and man has no ground of existence.

Sin has many manifestations but its essence is one. A moral being, created to worship before the throne of God, sits on the throne of his own selfhood and from that elevated position declares, "I AM." That is sin in its concentrated essence; yet because it is natural it appears to be good. It is only when in the gospel the soul is brought before the face of the Most Holy One without the protective shield of ignorance that the frightful moral incongruity is brought home to the conscience. In the language of evangelism the man who is thus confronted by the fiery presence of Almighty God is said to be under conviction.

The Christian religion has to do with God and man, but its focal point is God, not man. Man's only claim to importance is that he was created in the divine image; in himself he is nothing.

Unbelief is actually perverted faith, for it puts its trust not in the living God but in dying men.

For every man it must be Christ or eternal tragedy. 

Abounding sin is the terror of the world, but abounding grace is the hope of mankind.

The Christian witness through the centuries has been that "God so loved the world . . ."; it remains for us to see that love in the light of God's infinitude. His love is measureless. It is more: it is boundless. It has no bounds because it is not a thing but a facet of the essential nature of God. His love is something He is, and because He is infinite that love can enfold the whole created world in itself and have room for ten thousand times ten thousand worlds beside.

God cannot change for the better. Since He is perfectly holy, He has never been less holy than He is now and can never be holier than He is and has always been. Neither can God change for the worse. Any deterioration within the unspeakably holy nature of God is impossible. Indeed I believe it impossible even to think of such a thing, for the moment we attempt to do so, the object about which we are thinking is no longer God but something else and someone less than He.

In God no change is possible; in men change is impossible to escape. 

God never changes moods or cools off in His affections or loses enthusiasm. His attitude toward sin is now the same as it was when He drove out the sinful man from the eastward garden, and His attitude toward the sinner the same as when He stretched forth His hands and cried, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

God will not compromise and He need not be coaxed. He cannot be persuaded to alter His Word nor talked into answering selfish prayer. In all our efforts to find God, to please Him, to commune with Him, we should remember that all change must be on our part. "I am the Lord, I change not."

We can hold a correct view of truth only by daring to believe everything God has said about Himself.

We do God more honor by believing what He has said about Himself and having the courage to come boldly to the throne of grace than by hiding in self-conscious humility among the trees of the garden.

Hell is a place of no pleasure because there is no love there. Heaven is full of music because it is the place where the pleasures of holy love abound. Earth is the place where the pleasures of love are mixed with pain, for sin is here, and hate and ill will. In such a world as ours love must sometimes suffer, as Christ suffered in giving Himself for His own.

© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible

17. A Collection of Blessings

17. A Collection of Blessings. Helen Steiner Rice. 2009. 160 pages. [Source: Bought] [nonfiction, poetry, christian poetry, 3 stars]

First sentence: As the New Year starts and the old year ends

There's no better time to make amends

For all the things we sincerely regret

And wish in our hearts we could somehow forget--

This is a paperback collection of poems by Helen Steiner Rice put together by the Helen Steiner Rice foundation. Her poems evoke warm, cozy, comfy feelings. The literary equivalent perhaps of a nice cuppa. (cup of tea). The subject matter varies to a small degree but all well within a narrow framework of spirituality--prayer, sorrow, joy, forgiveness, repentance, peace, love, etc. There is some repetition which I don't look down upon since rhyming can be tricky and when you find a satisfying rhyme, well, it's hard to not repeat it in other poems. To be fair, the first time I came across the lines, I was like THAT IS GOOD. The second or third time I was like, okay, okay, still true, still relevant. And to be fair, this is a collection. I doubt her intent was for anyone to read a couple dozen of her poems within a twenty minute period. 

The poems in the collection are arranged somewhat thematically with special poems for special occasions being first in the book. The book is not unlike a Bible Promise book in its topical approach or its general vibes. 

God speaks to us in many ways,

Altering our lives, our plans, and our days,

And his blessings come in many guises

That He alone in love, devises,

And sorrow, which we dread so much,

Can bring a very healing touch...

For when we fail to heed His voice

We leave the Lord no other choice

Except to use a firm, stern hand

To make us know He's in command...

For on the wings of loss and pain,

The peace we often sought in vain

Will come to us with sweet surprise,

For God is merciful and wise....

And through dark hours of tribulation

God gives us time for meditation,

And nothing can be counted loss

Which teaches us to bear our cross. (23)

Happiness is something we create in our minds--

It's not something you search for

And so seldom find.

It's just waking up and beginning the day

By counting our blessings and kneeling to pray.

It's giving up thoughts that breed discontent

And accepting what comes as a gift heaven-sent.

It's giving up wishing for things we have not

And making the best of whatever we've got.

It's knowing that life is determined for us

And pursuing our tasks

Without fret, fume, or fuss...

For it's by completing what God gives us to do

That we find real contentment and happiness, too. (28)

I LOVED some of the poems. I liked many more of them than loved. A few I didn't quite care for--a few I found could be interpreted/misinterpreted as being theologically questionable. Still, for the most part, I enjoyed this old-fashioned poetry book. 

© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible

Sunday Salon #8

Bible reading 

1611 KJV

• Job 16-42
• Ecclesiastes
• Song of Songs
• Romans 12-16
• 1 Corinthians

NASB 1977

• Psalms 90-118
• Exodus 5-40
• Leviticus 1-12

KJV

• Proverbs 25-31
• Ecclesiastes
• Jeremiah 1-31

ESV

• 1 Kings 13-22
• 2 Kings 

NKJV

• Deuteronomy 1-27

© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible

16. Psalms for My Day

16. Psalms for My Day: A Child's Praise Devotional. Carine Mackenzie and Alec Motyer, Illustrated by Catherine Noel Pope. 2019. 96 pages. [Source: Bought] [4 stars, devotional, children's book]

First sentence: The book of Psalms is the largest book in the Bible.

Psalms for my Day uses a new translation by Alec Motyer. Selected psalms have been illustrated alongside light devotions. Each day's devotion has a prayer to pray. The book also includes a sprinkling of quotes by Alec Motyer. 

Readers should also know that this translation uses Yahweh. 

The psalms include the following:

• Psalm 1
• Psalm 8
• Psalm 13
• Psalm 19
• Psalm 22
• Psalm 23
• Psalm 24
• Psalm 25
• Psalm 27
• Psalm 29
• Psalm 32
• Psalm 34
• Psalm 37
• Psalm 40
• Psalm 46
• Psalm 51
• Psalm 63
• Psalm 67
• Psalm 72
• Psalm 73
• Psalm 78
• Psalm 84
• Psalm 95
• Psalm 100
• Psalm 103
• Psalm 107
• Psalm 117
• Psalm 121
• Psalm 133
• Psalm 139
• Psalm 150

I love, love, love the book of Psalms. While there are many, many, many, many storybook Bibles to share with children--of all ages, there are few that celebrate the Bible's songbook: Psalms. I think this book would be a good one to share before/during/after family devotions. 

© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible

15. Truth Unchanged, Unchanging

15. Truth Unchanged Unchanging. Martyn Lloyd-Jones. 1951/1993. Crossway. 128 pages. [Source: Bought] [4 stars, apologetics, lectures, christian nonfiction, 1947]

First sentence: What is man? Any true consideration of man and his problems in the modern world must answer that question. If the basic idea of what man is is a mistaken one, so of necessity will be the view of his troubles and what can be done for him. 

Truth Unchanged Unchanging began its life as a series of lectures given by Martyn Lloyd-Jones in 1947. It was first published in book form in 1951. Crossway republished it in 1993. The lectures have an apologetic vibe. The lectures address basic questions that "universal man" is asking and seeking answers to. It is very much written with a twentieth-century view, and perhaps slightly older than mid-century philosophy. That is not at all to say--not even a little bit--that the answers are any less relevant or any less true. Just that the specific questions and the arguments against Christian answers will have shifted and changed. Particularly the arguments against. The suppositions/presuppositions will have perhaps changed as well. Again, Lloyd-Jones' arguments FOR Christianity are ever-relevant, ever-true. At the end of almost every chapter, his writing becomes more emphatic, more persuasive. He always ends his arguments strongly. 

Chapter titles include:

• What is Man?
• What is Wrong with Man?
• Sincerity versus Truth
• The Simple Gospel
• Is the Gospel Still Relevant?

Quotes:

Man cannot rehabilitate his true self. He cannot find God. Man can lose his own soul, but he can never find it again. He can kill and destroy it, but he cannot create it anew. And were it not for one thing he would go inevitably to the eternal fire of Hell. But, thank God, there is that one thing. "The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost." (Luke 19:10). Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, came down to earth and lived and died and rose again in order to save. He has borne the punishment that we deserve on account of sin and for spoiling and marring the image of God upon us. But more, He restores our soul to us. He gives us a new nature and fills us with power that will enable us to express this new and true self even as He expressed it Himself. (35)

© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible

Sunday Salon #7

Bible reading 

1611 KJV

• Ezra
• Nehemiah
• Esther
• Job 1-15
• Acts 19-28
• Romans 1-11

NASB 1977

• Psalms 56-89
• Genesis 18-50
• Exodus 1-4

KJV

• 1 Kings 17-22
• 2 Kings 
• Proverbs 1-24

ESV

• 1 Samuel 25-31
• 2 Samuel
• 1 Kings 1-12

NKJV

• Leviticus 23-27
• Numbers
• Psalms 90, 95

© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible