Monday, October 5, 2009

Experiencing The Resurrection by Henry and Melvin Blackaby

I can't really recommend this book to everyone. For one thing, it's boring. For the first part, it reads like an academic manual. Towards the middle it becomes a bit preachy. In the end it vacillates between trying to be instructional and trying to be inspirational. When it tries to be inspirational it winds up sounding preachy, but it does a decent job of being instructional.

It begins by giving some theological facts to build the framework, that's why the first part is instructional and reads like a textbook. It talks about what sin is, that sin leads to death, and what God intends to do about that. Next it talks about how Jesus died as a consequence of our sin and in our place and how his death and resurrection made a way for us to God. The major thing to understand here is that when the book talks about experiencing the resurrection, it's not talking about some kind of mystical experience that's reserved for only the most spiritual Christians. It's talking about the newness of life that comes from being saved. Jesus died, by becoming Christians, we die with Him and are born again into a new life--the Christian life. This is the resurrection that the book talks about, the new Christian life. So, really this book is about the theology and experience of Christian living. The last section of the book talks about the fundamentals of Christian living.

The books sounds preachy when it tries to goad its reader into living the Christian life. It sounds like an old preacher, trying to preach the concept into its audience. That probably works for some people, but for me, it's a turn-off. The book is also riddled with quaint little examples from the authors' personal lives. The examples just make the book sound more preachy, because they're not clever and they're often very basic--I would have understood it without the example.

The book could have been a lot shorter and still just as effective. I learned some from reading it, but a lot of the time I felt like I was reading a poorly written textbook.

2 comments:

  1. I read another book by Blackaby that was very similar to your description of this one. I had all the same complaints - it was like an anti-advertisement for knowing God: academic without being clever; instructional but not enlightening or intellectually stimulating; dull, dry, didactic - and worst of all, wholly benign. I couldn't even find anything to disagree with- it was just lacking the edge reality lends to things.

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  2. i read "Experiencing God" by Henry Blackaby about seven years ago; i don't really remember if i liked it or not, or how well it was written. there's one thing i learned from it that i remember to this day:

    he writes about moses' burning bush experience and he reflects that no two people experience God the same way. he comments that moses never thought, "this is my burning bush experience, abraham had his, jacob had his, and this is mine;" but that every person in the Bible experienced God in totally different ways. that was a particularly life-changing lesson that i don't think i will ever forget.

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