Many of you already know about this page. There have been a few books added and if you’re confused about which are PDFs, I thought I’d help.

Resources by D.A. Carson

If you scroll down quite a ways and find Books, it’s hard to tell which are PDFs because they’re not labeled. You need to put your cursor over them and look at your status bar or wherever the URL is shown in your browser, if at all, to see if it says …pdf at the end.

If you go to Andy Naselli’s page, you’ll see seven books he lists. Those are the ones in PDF format. So just find whichever one you want. Like he mentions, you can also use a download plugin for Firefox or Chrome or whatever to download all files in a certain format, but then you’ll download all the articles too unless it let’s you download from a selection. (I don’t use one.)

There are also many excellent articles, all in PDF format and some parts of books, like the one on the Sermon on the Mount. I’m reading that one for sure.

If you have an ereader, you can then use Calibre to convert them to ePub or Kindle or whatever format. I use my ancient $39 Nokia device I got on eBay which has a convenient 4″ screen and a great eBook reader.

If you need short stuff to read in a waiting room, this has about anything you’d want because of his prolificness.

The general site also has many book excerpts, although it doesn’t say they’re excerpts. Certainly enough to know if you want to buy them or not. If you click on the book title as opposed to just the PDF button, it will tell you what the PDF contains. It’s not always chapter 1.

I’m very thankful for this resource and I hope this helps anyone who may have been confused. If there’s anything I missed or got wrong, let me know. I figured this stuff out myself.

D.A. Carson writes a chapter in his book How Long, O Lord?: Reflections on Suffering and Evil about firm structures to establish in helping Christians before suffering comes. I think this is the most important.

Above all, we must help people know God better. Too many answers we give are merely intellectual, merely theoretical, merely propositional. We must so teach and counsel and pray with people that we deepen their experiential knowledge of God. We must so get them into meditative and rigourous reading of the Word of God that they draw vast comfort from its pages. At the deepest level, men and women must learn, with Job, that God is very great, and it is an inexpressible privilege to know Him, to be satisfied with Him, even when – especially when! – we do not have all the answers. Then men and women will learn to rest in His love, and will return again and again to the Cross, where their vision of that love will be constantly renewed.

–D. A. Carson, How Long, O Lord?: Reflections on Suffering and Evil, pg. 224

Also see:
When You’re Too Tired To Pray

Not all devotionals, just some. And this is in the introduction to his devotional.

Devotional guides tend to offer short, personal readings from the Bible, sometimes only a verse or two, followed by several paragraphs of edifying exposition. Doubtless they provide personal help for believers with private needs, fears, and hopes. But they do not provide the framework of what the Bible says—the “plotline” or “story line”—the big picture that makes sense of all the little bits of the Bible. Wrongly used, such devotional guides may ultimately engender the profoundly wrong-headed view that God exists to sort out my problems; they may foster profoundly mistaken interpretations of some Scriptures, simply because the handful of passages they treat are no longer placed within the framework of the big picture, which is gradually fading from view. Only systematic and repeated reading of the whole Bible can meet these challenges.

This is the type of devotional reading I used to do, although I never did the self-help types. But for periods of time I’m embarrassed to say, this was the only Scripture I would take in each day in addition to reviewing memorized Scripture.

His devotionals go along with the M’Cheyne Bible reading plan. So the emphasis is on reading the Bible with a comment from him instead of the other way around. You can find a blog devoted to this devotional and also download PDFs of both devotionals for free (and use Calibre to convert them into eBooks if you’d like).

Carson’s For the Love of God Blog

Bitsy at Jack Of All Trades is giving away Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and His Confrontation with the World: An Exposition of Matthew 5-10 by D.A. Carson.

Drawing rules:

• Shipping to USA addresses only. (My sincere apologies to my overseas friends, but postage is what it is!)
• Post here and on your blog for two entries. (either/or will get you one.)

The Sermon on the Mount is one of my favorite parts of the Bible and this book has been on my list already.

Deuteronomy 6:5
And you must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength.

Matthew 22:37-38
Jesus replied, ” ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment.

How seriously do we take this? I know there are a lot of people who say that we love God by doing things for others etc. which is obviously important. But why does it seem to be easier for some people to “do things” than it is to get to know God better? How can we really love God without knowing Him? How can we know Him without knowing the Bible? We are in a seriously Bible illiterate Christian culture. Just the the other day I was thinking about how I sometimes get Esther and Ruth mixed up. That’s pretty embarrassing.

Here is yet another quote by D.A. Carson from A Call to Spiritual Reformation, Priorities from Paul and His Prayers:

When it comes to knowing God, we are a culture of the spiritually stunted. So much of our religion is packaged to address our felt needs–and these are almost uniformly anchored in our pursuit of our own happiness and fulfillment. God simply becomes the Great Being who, potentially at least, meets our needs and fulfills our aspirations. We think rather little of what he is like, what he expects of us, what he seeks in us. We are not captured by his holiness and his love; his thoughts and words capture too little of our imagination, too little of our discourse, too few of our priorities.

This isn’t to lay a guilt trip on myself or others. Those familiar with this blog know I’m not into that. This is to spur us on to know Him better so that we can do what we were created to do which is truly fulfilling and pleasing to God so that we can live in the reality of His Kingdom instead of the veneer of this world.

(This post was prepared before I was sick. Proverbs 30:25)

When Jesus asked that the cup (of wrath) be taken from Him, God answered no (Mark 14:35-36). When Paul asked for the thorn to be taken from his side, God answered no (2 Cor. 12:7-9).

But there are more in the life of Paul that I wasn’t aware of or had forgotten.

Romans 15:31 NIV
Pray that I may be rescued from the unbelievers in Judea and that my service in Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints there,

Acts 28:17 NIV
Three days later he called together the leaders of the Jews. When they had assembled, Paul said to them: “My brothers, although I have done nothing against our people or against the customs of our ancestors, I was arrested in Jerusalem and handed over to the Romans.

Paul also desired to go to Spain. As far as we know, he never got there.

Did they not have enough faith? Were they not “tithing”? Was there sin in their life? Were they not using the right formula? These are more often than not ridiculous questions to ask.

According to D.A. Carson in A Call to Spiritual Reformation, Priorities from Paul and His Prayers:

Suppose, for argument’s sake, that every time we asked God for anything and ended our prayers with some appropriate formula, such as ‘in Jesus’ name,’ we immediately received what we asked for. …

[T]his is not true religion. This is magic, not worship; it is another power trip, not hearty submission to the lordship of Christ. It is superstition, not a personal relation with the Father God who is wise, good, and patient.

I know I’ve been quoting from him a lot lately. And I have a few more coming.

This goes along with a previous quote by D.A. Carson.

We quickly learn that God is more interested in our holiness than in our comfort. he more greatly delights in the integrity and purity of his church than in the material well-being of its members. He shows himself more clearly to men and women who enjoy him and obey him than to men and women whose horizons revolve around good jobs, nice houses, and reasonable health. He is far more committed to building a corporate ‘temple’ in which his Spirit dwells than he is in preserving our reputations. He is more vitally disposed to display his grace than to flatter our intelligence. He is more concerned for justice than for our ease. He is more deeply committed to stretching our faith than our popularity. He prefers that his people live in disciplined gratitude and holy joy rather than in pushy self-reliance and glitzy happiness. He wants us to pursue daily death, not self-fulfillment, for the latter leads to death, while the former leads to life.

–D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation, Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

There has been a lot of buzz in the biblioblogosphere about the book Commentary on the New Testament use of the Old Testament, D. A. Carson & G. K. Beale.

Some blog examples:

• In Light of the Gospel – Best Christian Books of 2007
• Biblical Foundations – Best of 2007
• The Road To Emmaus – Top Ten Books of 2007
• The Riddleblog – Five of the Best Books of 2007 (#2)
• The Henry Institute – Ten Good Books from a Good Old Year (#3)

etc.

Here is an interview in Christianity Today with the editors of the book:
Two Testaments, One Story
Top evangelical scholars team up for landmark commentary on New Testament use of Old Testament.