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Today's Christian, September/October 1997
The Best Devotional Books of All Time
(Part 1 of 2)
Christian Reader contributors name their top ten
It was a daunting task that we put before 15 of
Christian Reader's contributing authors:
to identify the best devotional books of all time. But the panel of judges made their selections, we compiled the votes, and we offer you a description of, and an excerpt from, the top ten. Consider this highly recommended reading. Proven nourishment for the soul.
#1 My Utmost for His Highest
by Oswald Chambers
The top devotional book selected by the CHRISTIAN
READER panel was originally written as a series of talks to young adults. Oswald Chambers, who died in 1917 at the age of 43, delivered these as lectures at the Bible Training College in Clapham, England, from 1911 to 1915, and as devotional talks while serving in Egypt with Australian and New Zealander forces guarding the Suez Canal during World War I.
First published in book form in 1928, Chambers's meditations became the best-selling devotional book of the twentieth century. Recently a new edition was released (Discovery House), which clarifies and updates the language of the original.
… my earnest expectation and hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed"
(Phil. 1:20). We will all feel very much ashamed if we do not yield to Jesus the areas of our lives He has asked us to yield to Him. It's as if Paul were saying, "My determined purpose is to be my utmost for His highest—my best for His glory."
"Year after year My Utmost for His Highest
continues to feed my soul with fresh insight."
—Patsy Clairmont
To reach that level of determination is a matter of the will, not of debate or of reasoning. It is absolute and irrevocable surrender of the will at that point.
"Oswald Chambers is one of the few who, in the words of Robert
McCheyne, has 'mastered the spiritual secret and hung to the
nails of the cross.' He looks at life from God's stantpoint."
—Sherwood E. Wirt
An undue amount of thought and consideration for ourselves is what keeps us from making that decision, although we cover it up with the pretense that it is others we are considering. When we think seriously about what it will cost others if we obey the call of Jesus, we tell God He doesn't know what our obedience will mean. Keep to the point—He does know. Shut out every other thought and keep yourself before God in this one thing only—my utmost for His highest.
#2 Pilgrim's Progress
by John Bunyan
Our judges offered personal testimony of the power this classic allegory of Christian's journey to the Celestial City, written from prison by John Bunyan, a tinker (repairman) arrested for preaching without a license in seventeenth-century England.
"From childhood on, this book has given me mental pictures that have helped me apply the fundamentals of my faith," wrote CHRISTIAN READER columnist Ruth Senter.
Church historian Bruce Shelley wrote, "Pilgrim's Progress is the dramatic and thought-provoking story of the soul's journey from life estranged from God to life tested at every turn but sustained by the grace of God. It so accurately describes the Christian experience, believers have read it and relived it for centuries."
In the following excerpt, Christian confronts temptations as he nears the end of his journey.
Below the mountains they met a quick lad whose name was Ignorance. He had traveled along a crooked lane that came from the country of Conceit, and said he was going to the Celestial City.
"How do you expect to get in?" Christian asked.
"Just as other good people do," replied Ignorance. "I live a good life, I pay whatever I owe, I pray, and I give money to the poor."
"But you didn't come in at the narrow gate," said Christian, "so I'm afraid you won't be admitted to the city."
Ignorance replied, "You follow your religion, and I'll follow mine." So Ignorance stayed back as the pilgrims walked ahead . …
The next man they met on the road was named Atheist. "Where are you going,"
he asked them.
"To Mount Zion," Christian answered.
Atheist let out a great laugh. "How stupid you are to take on such a tiresome journey, and get nothing for all your trouble."
Christian replied, "Do you think we won't be let in when we get there?"
"Let in! Why, there is no Mount Zion. I once believed there was. But I've seen no more of it than I did the day I set out. If there ever was a Celestial City, I would have found it. Now I know it doesn't exist."
"What!" Hopeful answered. "No City of Zion? Didn't we see it from the Delectable Mountains? Besides, we walk by faith."
Christian and Hopeful next entered a place where they became drowsy. They kept talking to keep one another awake. Hopeful looked back and saw Ignorance still following at a distance. So the pilgrims stopped to let him catch up.
Christian asked him, "How is it now between God and your soul?"
Ignorance answered that he felt good about himself, that he had good thoughts about God and heaven, and that he had a good heart. But Christian explained that the only good thoughts are those that agree with God's Word, which says that our hearts are evil.
"Pilgrim's Progress is a masterpiece, especially when one realizes
the limited education of the author. It is, outside of the Bible,
the best piece of work that 'reads the reader.' To see your
heart revealed in a book and to stand bowed before the Cross
is the most compelling experience one can accept from a book."
—Ravi Zacharias
"I can never believe my heart is bad," Ignorance declared.
"Then you can never have a good thought about yourself," Christian answered.
"Wake up, Ignorance, and see how sinful you are, then run to Jesus Christ to save you!"
"That's your belief, not mine," said Ignorance. Again he dropped back from the pilgrims and stayed behind.
Finally they entered the land of Beulah, where the air is sweet and pleasant, the birds never stop singing, and the sun always shines.
#3 The Screwtape Letters
by C.S. Lewis
A devotional book written from the perspective of a devil? Not standard fare, but in this case, the devil's-eye-view of the war for the soul is by C.S. Lewis, the imaginative author of children's classic The Chronicles of Narnia and several books defending Christian beliefs. In this collection of letters from a senior devil (Screwtape) to his apprentice (Wormwood), Lewis uses "reverse theology" to explore temptation, salvation, and the spiritual influences in each person's life. As you read this excerpt, remember that
"The Enemy" is God, and "Our Father" is Screwtape's superior, Lucifer.
My dear Wormwood,
So you "have great hopes that the patient's religious phase is dying away,"
have you? I always thought the Training College had gone to pieces since they put old Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure. Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?
Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy's determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
This means that while their spirits can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.
If you had watched your patient carefully, you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth, periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.
To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite. … in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.
The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense.
But the obedience the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing . … He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His.
We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.
And that is where the troughs come in. … Merely to override a human will
(as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo . …
"C.S. Lewis always writes well, knowing that truth speaks
for itself. In The Screwtape Letters, he transforms theology
from abstract to meaningful, practical, and concrete."
—Sigmund Brouwer
He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. … Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives.
He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be.
… Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape
#4 Confessions
by Augustine
Augustine was a great sinner who became a great saint. His autobiography, Confessions, written from A.D. 397 to 401, describes the sin and restlessness of his early years in Carthage (North Africa) and the amazing way God captured his attention and allegiance. Augustine became one of the most influential theologians of the early church, clarifying the concept of "original sin"—that sin's power cannot be overcome by human effort, but only by God's work.
I went to Carthage, where I found myself in the midst of a hissing cauldron of lust. I had not yet fallen in love, but I was in love with the idea of it. I began to look around for some object for my love, since I badly wanted to love something. I had no liking for the safe path without pitfalls, for although my real need was for you, my God, who are the food of the soul, I was not aware of this hunger. I felt no need for the food that does not perish, not because I had had my fill of it, but because the more I was starved of it the less palatable it seemed. Because of this my soul fell sick. To love and to have my love returned was my heart's desire, and it would be all the sweeter if I could also enjoy the body of the one who loved me.
"In Confessions, Augustine penned not only a milestone
and masterpiece of Western literature, he profoundly
chronicled his discovery of a God who had been seeking him all
along. I have long appreciated its depth of insight, and have
been moved often by Augustine's passion for God."
—Tim Jones
So I muddied the stream of friendship with the filth of lewdness and clouded its clear waters with hell's black river of lust. My God, my God of mercy, how good you were to me, for you mixed much bitterness in that cup of pleasure!
In the midst of my joy I was caught up in the coils of trouble, for I was lashed with the cruel, fiery rods of jealousy and suspicion, fear, anger, and quarrels.
#5 The Pursuit of God
by A.W. Tozer
One unusual minister knew the secret of quietness in the soul. And yet he lived and taught this close walk with God amid the noise and busyness of a church in Chicago. For thirty-one years, A.W. Tozer pastored Southside Alliance Church and preached regularly on radio station WMBI. His most widely-read book, The Pursuit of God, was published in 1948.
If we truly want to follow God, we must seek to be other-worldly. This I say knowing well that word has been used with scorn by the sons of this world and applied to the Christian as a badge of reproach. So be it. Every man must choose his world. If we who follow Christ, with all the facts before us and knowing what we are about, deliberately choose the Kingdom of God as our sphere of interest, I see no reason why anyone should object. If we lose by it, the loss is our own; if we gain, we rob no one by so doing. The
"other world," which is the object of this world's disdain, is our carefully chosen goal and the object of our holiest longing.
"Nowhere is Tozer more brilliant and powerful in laying bare
all pretense in the soul of the reader than in The Pursuit of God."
—Robertson McQuilken
But we must avoid the common fault of pushing the "other world" into the future. It is not future, but present. It parallels our familiar physical world, and the doors between the two worlds are open.
Part one of two parts; click here to read part 2
Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today International/Today's Christian magazine (formerly Christian Reader).
Click here for reprint information.
September/October 1997, Vol. 35, No. 5, Page 36
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