Posts in Reviews

Trueman’s latest release is more accurately a re-working of his previous title The Creedal Imperative.

Having not read the previous work, I was drawn to this title because I grew up in a faith tradition that did not emphasize creedal statements. Yet, I was immediately confronted with a very truthful statement by Trueman: “Christians are not divided between those who have creeds and confessions and those who do not; rather, they are divided between those who have public creeds and confessions that are written down and exist as public documents, subject to public scrutiny, evaluation, and critique, and those who have private creeds and confessions that are often improvised, unwritten, and thus not open to public scrutiny, not susceptible to evaluation, and, crucially and ironically, not therefore subject to testing by Scripture to see whether they are true.”

Wow.

Not only did I finish this title with a deep appreciation for the historic creedal statements of the church, but I felt the necessity for them presently within our congregations today. Trueman does an excellent job laying out the historicity of creedalism alongside the beauty and usefulness of their profession. Again, having grown up in a tradition that view perhaps erred on viewing creeds as trite, I finished this book deeply convinced of how untrue that sentiment is.

That said, I also found this to be a dense read. It was necessary, but it was a labor to read through even just these 200 pages. As such, I felt some of its impact was received at a crawl and my excitement for creeds weighed down by the heaviness of the read. This would be a tough book for me to hand off to a friend with my background who needed to see the beauty and joys of creedalism. Ordinarily, this would be a 4/5 read for me, but I had to give it a 3/5 for this reason.

I’m grateful to NetGalley and Crossway for the advanced readers copy in return for my honest review.

Furtick’s newest release offers six mindsets meant to help you realize and become who you were created by God to be. Each of the mindsets is further accompanied by a new action step toward the “new you.” In this book, Furtick offers these six mantras of positive self-talk to a new way of living:

1. I’m not stuck unless I stop.
2. Christ is in me. I am enough.
3. With God, there is always a way, and by faith I will find it.
4. God is not against me, but He’s in it with me, working through me, and fighting for me.
5. My joy is my job.
6. God has given me everything I need for the season I’m in.

This is definitely not my favorite Furtick book. And, this is going to sound harsh but if you could not tell from the title or the cover of the book, perhaps you noticed it in the six mantras: this book has more to do with me, myself, and I than it does the actual transforming power of the gospel. This book is likely too religious for those seeking a self-help book but should also be too me-centric for those searching for a Christian living book.

Furthermore, the language of the book at times exhausted me. There was frankly too many attempts at creative wordplay like “do the new you” and “(k)new you.” For a book that is purports itself to share the gospel and teach about God, you will find one word used ad nauseam throughout: you.

Without a doubt, Furtick is a gifted communicator. As such, there are some memorable lines and a positive, uplifting message throughout that will certainly pull readers in. Nonetheless, this book offered nothing really new to the genre of self-help and, even worst, is a detriment to the topic of what Christian living should look like.

I’m grateful to NetGalley and FaithWords for the advanced readers copy in return for my honest review.

As I cracked open Jennie Allen’s Untangle Your Emotions, I was hopeful for some guidance in navigating through the chaotic, knotted-up ball that describes our feelings. Overall, her book offers some great, general advice. Feel your feelings before you attempt to simply fix your feelings. We were created to feel, and so our feelings can be gifts from God Himself. Her acknowledgment that we are all feelers was also deeply appreciated. (I always cringe when someone says they’re not emotional. No, we all have emotions even if we’re not all expressive in the same ways.) Her attempt to remind the Church that emotions in and of themselves need not be sin—it is what we do with our emotions that can lead to sin—is a poignant truth we need to acknowledge. It cannot suffice to simply tell someone, “Well, you shouldn’t feel that way,” and leave it at that. At best, it’s unhelpful, and at worst, it’s even more harmful. Particularly helpful was the second section of her book where she framed an approach to notice, name, feel, share, and choose our emotions as a method to untangle them. I found the chapter The Vocabulary of Emotion (naming your emotions) especially helpful, as she named the big four emotions and their secondary counterparts.

Saint Maximus, back in the seventh century, acknowledged, “A person who is simply a man of faith is [not] a disciple.” John Mark Comer frames the same axiom with the question: are you a Christian or are you a disciple? If your immediate response to that question is, “Are those not the same things?,” then Comer’s Practicing the Way is the exact book for you to read.