The best book I read in 2024

I read some great books in 2024. Among them, The Wood Between the Worlds by Brian Zahnd, Fully Alive by Elizabeth Oldfield, Where the Light Fell by Philip Yancey, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, Poor by Katriona O’Sullivan, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry and Open by Andre Agassi.

I also contributed a chapter to a book of stories, Jesus & Justice, compiled by the Red Letter Christians UK.

Cogitation or application?

But we have to be careful with books, especially theological books, because reading about God can be a seductive distraction from living for God.  Western culture easily centralises cogitation and marginalises application.

But the true test of faith is whether we live it out. A tree is known by its fruit and wisdom is proved right her actions, not her clever books or long sermons.

The most important thing

So with this in mind, there is another book which stands out as the best I have read this year. Not because of its beautiful prose or breathtaking insights, but because it has helped me with the most important priority in my life.

Practicing the Way by John Mark Comer is a book about spiritual formation: how we become more like Jesus. Reading it slowly over the last 6 months has helped shape and guide me and has enriched my life.  These are my 3 reasons why I rate this book:

1. It’s challenging

Practicing the Way is packed with a fresh and energising challenge:

“For Jesus, salvation is less about getting you into heaven and more about getting heaven into you.”

He proposes that we should think of discipleship as far more like an apprenticeship in following Jesus, a more integrated and earthy form of faith than just belief:

“Sadly very few people – including many Christians – take Jesus seriously as a spiritual teacher…to a large number of Western Christians, he is a delivery mechanism for a particular theory of atonement, as if the only reason he came was to die, not to live.”

And this is no easy-going liberalism – he is clear about the demands involved in following Jesus:

“It will require you to reorder your entire life around following Jesus as your undisputed  top priority, over your job, over your money, your reputation – over everything. Yet all these things will find their rightful place once integrated into a life of apprenticeship.”

2. It’s straightforward

Practising the Way is deep but not complex. There is a straight-forwardness which I found really helpful. The book is shaped around three key ‘goals’:

Be with Jesus. Ensuring we do the basic task of spending time with Jesus in prayer, reflection, solitude and scripture. We must resist the toxicity of busyness, including religious activity, and the numbing bingeing on food, booze and entertainment.

Become like him. “The single most important question is: Are we becoming more loving? Not, Are we becoming more biblically educated? Or practicing more spiritual disciplines? Or more involved in church?…Love is the acid test of spiritual formation.”

Do as he did. Comer suggests three priorities: Make room for the gospel, preach the gospel and demonstrate the gospel. In each, he gives practical pointers and challenges the common ways we duck the uncomfortable elements: “I think I’ll just mow my neighbour’s lawn and hope they figure out Jesus rose from the dead.”

3. It’s practical

The best thing about this book is that it is about transforming our practices.

It ends with a suggestion of developing your own ‘Rule of Life’ based on being intentional about nine practices: Sabbath, Solitude, Prayer, Fasting, Scripture, Community, Generosity, Service and Witness.

Comer suggests a Rule can do for our life what a trellis does for a vine: helps it grow and be fruitful.  Our lives require resistance to those things which harm us and we need ‘the constraint of commitment’ to that which bring health and life:

“I hate to break it to you but you are being controlled, by your addiction to your phone, the appetites of your body for pleasure…Choose your own constraints, or they will be chosen for you, not by the Spirit of God stirring your own heart toward love, but by a programmer in Silicon Valley working to steal your time and shape your behaviour.”

The key thing

As I start the new year, my main priority is to actually follow the Way of Jesus – at home, at work, in my community, in public and private.  And the best thing I can say about Practicing the Way is that it is a book which is helping me work out this core priority. As Comer puts it, this is not something we can ignore:

“Spiritual formation is not optional…We become either agents of God’s healing and liberating grace, or carriers of the sickness into the world…to believe otherwise is an illusion.”

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• Buy Practising the Way by John Mark Comer
• Practising the Way website with a course and resources based on the book