Daily Readings from Your Best
Life Now, is a daily devotional adapted from Joel Osteen’s
breakout bestseller Your Best Life Now.
The primary divisions of the book follow that of the source material. Likewise,
the body of each short chapters is adapted closely from the original material. However,
this book is organized differently. It is divided into 90 chapters, each one kept
short in order to fit into a daily reading schedule.
At the top of each chapter is a reference to a passage of scripture. The
chapters in the book are not expositions on the scripture; Osteen is plain in
the introduction that that was not his intention. Osteen’s books, like his televised
sermons, are topical rather than expositional. I thought that the connection
between the scripture reading and the chapters were sometimes tenuous.
I’ll admit I took much longer than 90 days to finish this book (I
probably first opened it shortly after it was published in 2005).
That may have injured my sense of the book as a whole, but I think that the
book was written with the hope that each chapter would be able to stand on its
own as a sermonette of encouragement.
Encouragement is a good word for the book. It’s the theme through every
part from encouragement to dream bigger to encouragement to press on in the
hard times.
That leads also to what I think is the weakness of the book, and
Osteen’s ouvre in general. It seems to draw from the theme and concepts of self-help
as much (or more) as from the Bible. Even in
the introduction, Osteen speaks in one sentence of wanting people to draw near
to God and in the next of helping readers “unlock the doors of a fuller life.”
These are not mutually exclusive pursuits, but that depends a lot on your
concept of a fuller life.
I don’t mean to be too critical of Osteen. Obviously, I read several of
his books and books by his predecessors as preachers of positivity in popular
culture, Robert H.
Schuller and Norman
Vincent Peale. I have felt encourage by reading the books of these men, but
I also leave there books feeling like something much deeper is missing.
Joel Osteen also wrote
If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
No comments:
Post a Comment