prayer coach

image courtesy of Shelton Interactive

Recently I was approached by Shelton Interactive to do a review for Anything: the prayer that unlocked my God and my Soul by Jennie Allen. This is not a paid review, but my opinions on this book.

This book is a journey with Jennie through her life the last couple years. It starts giving her background of a good Christian girl and comfortable pastor’s wife. Her life gets turned around after coming in contact with a blog by Ugandan missionary, Katie Davis. Katie Davis was also the all-American girl, but she ended up dying to all the normal American dreams to serve Jesus in Africa. As Jennie read Katie’s blog, areas of her heart came alive and reawakened desires to give it all to Jesus.

While this book is mainly Jennie’s journey, her husband Zac was also being lead by God to the same abandonment. Together they prayed a simple prayer, “God we will do anything.” This book is primarily about the consequences of that prayer, through the many things that gave up and the extraordinary things they gained.

God is incredibly in love with us, but the things our hearts desire keep us from fully giving ourselves to Him. We say that God loves us, but we believe that we loves ourselves more than He does. We live our lives as if we know what would make us happy. Jennie’s journey shows her giving up things she thought would make her happy and moving toward things that scared her. But in the end what she found was that the things God was calling her to were things that made her come alive.

A couple weeks ago I reviewed A Blessed Child by Ted Dekker and Bill Bright which was a fictional story about a pure vessel of God working miracles. The novel put a story around Dr. Bright’s teaching on Living Supernaturally in Christ. The two men co-labored a follow up to that novel with A Man Called Blessed which turned its focus on Dr. Bright’s teaching on Recapturing our First Love.

A Man Called Blessed picks up Caleb fifteen years after he left the world’s stage. He had grown up and became familiar with God. His familiarity led him to acknowledgment of devotion but inwardly removed from God. God was about to reawaken out desires with him.

Rebecca was a Jew committed to find the ark of the covenant, the place where the presence of God dwelt. All information pointed to Caleb as the link to finding the ark and bringing it back to Israel. Rebecca does not come to Caleb along, but instead followed by a band of Muslims bent on keeping hidden any hint of a potential ark.

Dekker and Bright succeed again producing another inspiring, page-turning story. This story will re-engage you to live as a child before God. Fall in love again and believe.

Quotes from A Man Called Blessed:

• There is no greater disaster in a spiritual life than to be immersed in a false reality.
• There is no greater disaster than to think that what we see with these eyes is the real life.
• Desire does not come from the mind, but from the heart. The hope that burns under the ashes of our poverty.
• Poverty is about clearing space in your heart so that God can fill it.

Just about 10 years ago all the Campus Crusade staff at the semi-annual staff conference received A Blessed Child by Ted Dekker and Bill Bright. It was my second conference, and I gladly received the book with all of the other giveaway items. Over the years I have read this book three time and each time I have found new fresh ideas to encourage my relationship with God.

Dr. Bright had said that he had some concepts he was trying to get across and felt that putting them into a story would distribute the message to a wider audience. The concepts he wanted to get across in the Blessed Child were the keys to the supernatural life that he wrote about in Living Supernaturally in Christ. Ted Dekker took the concepts and put together a story that is both exciting to read and inspiring to your faith.

This story revolves around a 10 year boy named Caleb. He was raised in an Ethiopian monastery, but the book picks up as he is rescued by an American and Canadian named Jason and Leah right before a deadly attack on his home. Caleb is taken to the United States where his pure faith becomes evident in miraculous answers to his prayers. As the book progresses, Caleb becomes tainted by the ways of the modern world and lessens his connection with God.

While this is going on there are struggles over custody of the boy, outside dangers, and wrestling with deep held beliefs. Each time I have read this book it has been hard to find a place to stop. Dekker masterfully ends each chapter making you want to keep reading to find out what will happen next.

Recently I was encouraged by a friend to reread Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster. This was my second time through the book, but the previous time was several years ago. While I remembered liking the book, most of the gems found within were either forgotten or not gleaned from that first pass.

This book isn’t a detailed review on how to do these different disciplines of the faith, but instead Foster encourages believer to partake of the blessing found in them. Foster finds a nice blend of God’s role and our roles in Christian activities. The disciplines are not our attempts to earn God’s pleasure, but they also do not come naturally. While they can be hard work, they should not lead us into slavery but greater freedom. Foster writes, “the primary requirement [for the disciplines] is a longing after God.” He goes on to say, “by themselves the Spiritual Disciplines can do nothing; they can only get us to the place where something can be done.”

While the Celebration of Discipline is not so much a ‘how-to’, Foster trusts the Holy Spirit to guide the readers in how to apply each discipline to their own lives. Each person is different and will approach the disciplines in their unique personality. With the Spirit as the guide and this book as motivation, your heart will be ready for new and ongoing encounters with God.

This year I read Danny Silk’s Loving Our Kids on Purpose on my wife’s recommendation. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and quickly decided it is my favorite parenting book out there. I liked it so much that I reread it and created a Bible Study to go along with it. Here are some of my takeaways.

Most of us have had no real training on parenting besides the on-the-job training once kids enter our world. Most of the advice people offered us was warnings about how hard it would be: boys are wild and girls will break your heart – just you wait. Even if we decide not to accept that reality, once we try parenting we become quickly surprised how much of it involves spanking, punishment, or just plain frustration.

This book will open you to a whole new perspective. Silk pulls from his personal experience, professional training, and principles from Scripture. He matches our goals in parenting up to what drives the Father’s heart for His children. This book will identify the Father’s heart for His children and tactics that can open your child to live out of them.

I would break this book down to the following subjects:

• Chapter 1a: Parenting Free Children
• Chapter 1b: Relinquishing Your Right to Control
• Chapter 2:   Building Relationship Through Consistent Love
• Chapter 3:   Managing Yourself Well
• Chapter 4:   Promoting Healthy Choices
• Chapter 5:   Enforcing Consequences to Choices

If I were to distill this book into some main points, they would be:

Love allows for freedom and choice.
Choices have consequences.
Our connection is more important than their obedience.

Shepherding a Child’s Heart by Ted Tripp is one the best books I have read on parenting. So many books on parenting are focused on getting your kids to act right. Tripp looks at the root causes of disobedience and allows them to be the focus of parenting.

So often we judge how well we are doing with God by our behavior. Have we stayed clean this week? God is more focused on our heart than our behavior. The law says do not commit murder, but I say… The law say do not commit adultery, but I say… Jesus wants us to know that it is not a matter of just doing the right things, but He wants our hearts. As parents we so easily get sidetracked with our kid’s behavior instead of heart issues.

This book helps provide a balanced focus on our parenting. It identifies some common methods of parenting and how they don’t address the heart issues. Oftentimes these other methods draw our children further from God. This book is a great topic for group discussion. I have attached a Bible study that I used for a parents of preschoolers class below. I strongly encourage this to be a must read for parents.

• Shepherding a Child’s Heart Bible Study (PDF)

image courtesy of Disney’s Tangled

I took my girls to their first movie in the theaters yesterday. We went to see Disney’s Tangled, its Rapunzel story. The girls loved the movie and were well-behaved for our new venture making a perfect first experience.

Tangled was full of the elements you would expect from a Disney movie: fun, action, love story, evil villain, and a touch of magic. The thing that stood out to me on this movie, and the reason of wanted to post it, was how the villain’s method of evil was different. Mother Gothel did not wield physical strength, magical powers, or plain meanness. This villain used weapons of manipulation and emotional abuse disguised as love.

This to me is the most evil of villains. Her intentions and ways are no less powerful than other forms and yet for the victim they are hidden as love. Tangled does a good job showing some of the effects of this when Rapunzel leaves the tower. She goes back and forth from elation to despair as the joy of new found freedom is being attacked by the lies planted by years of manipulation.

Too many of us struggle like Rapunzel carrying around lies told to us by those who we thought loved us. Or, more than likely we carry around lies from people who did love us but carried lies of their own. Those who have loved us  have shamed us in order to get us to do what they wanted us to do. Mother Gothel wanted Rapunzel to stay in the tower because her hair was the source of her youth. She did not want to risk Rapunzel leaving and having to grow old. Therefore in order to get her to stay Mother Gothel made her fear the world and doubt her abilities to survive out there.

The Bishop’s Wife is one of my favorite Christmas movies. It came out in 1947 starring Cary Grant, David Niven, and Loretta Young. My wife and I just watched again last night and enjoyed the dialogue and what it has to show us about spiritual living.

The movie is about an Episcopal bishop that loses his focus on what is truly important. This loss of focus entrenches him into a religious mindset that changes how he relates to former friends, new ministry relationships and most noticeably, his wife. Through a series of events a stranger, Dudley, comes along and show the bishop’s friends what God is like—loving, kind, and giving. This offends the bishop and leads to anger and frustration.

The movie does a great job showing how those free to love God offend those who are trying to earn God’s favor. This is the same way that Jesus offended the Pharisees. The Pharisees tried very hard to do everything right to get God to bless them. This effort turned to competition with others. The way of a God-follower was to be one of discipline and hard work.

In this movie, Dudley offers life to everyone he meets. He buys the bishop’s wife a hat she wanted, he takes a taxi driver skating in the park, he refills the sherry bottle of the professor many times for appears to only be for the joy of it. Dudley had a way of making everyone feel important, while the bishop was stuck in thinking about himself or the ministry he was working on.

Obviously this is a Christmas movie, so it has a happy ending. The bishop has the light of love re-ignited in his heart, and it ends with a great Christmas sermon, which is transcribed below. If you want to keep the Christmas spirit for a few more days, I encourage you to watch this movie: The Bishop’s Wife.