Love is a Flame compiled by James Stuart Bell offers a host of stories by different people who've weathered various storms in their marriages: struggles with finances, illness, pornography, sexual baggage, challenging small children, wayward grown children, the death of a child, a spouse's or one's own infidelity, and just drifting apart. These stories are so powerful because they are just true stories with very little didactic material, somewhat of a rarety in marriage-help books. The focus is on, w/ God's help, altering oneself rather than one's spouse, a seemingly simple truth that is really tremendous, I think. Only one of the stories disappointed me, as I thought it read like an Ann Landers' column w/ a number of euphemistic expletives like "darn" and "dang" and hardly any references to Christianity. I think this book would be a great wedding or anniversary present. As I read it, I found myself determining to find more ways to show my husband how much I love and appreciate him. Bethany House sent me a free copy of this book to review.


R.T. Kendall's The Lord's Prayer is an easy read as theology books go. He breaks the Lord's prayer into four parts, focus on God, on God's prayer list, on God's prayer list for us, and on the prayer's benediction. He talks about God as Father and heavenly Other. He points out the greatness of God's name and our need for His Holy Spirit's kingdom within. He encourages us to focus on God's revealed will, trusting Him to reveal His secret will. He stresses our need for God's daily provision, help, protection and for our repeated forgiveness of others. Kendall deals with this concept of forgiveness again at the end of the book as he covers Mt. 6:14-15 in which Matthew again states the connection between our forgiveness of others and God's forgiveness of us.
I appreciate Kendall's argument against open theism as he emphasizes God's sovereignty and our responsibility to obey. I also appreciate that Kendall sees God's revealed will in Scripture as our primary focus in finding out what He'd have us to do.
The Lord's prayer is a prayer that gives us a great idea of what God wants us to be concerned w/ in our prayer; however, a focus on it as having some sort of special properties seems misguided. While Kendall doesn't take this position, he seems close to it and certainly readers might come to this conclusion as he stresses the perfectness of this prayer and its being heard by God.
Wanting God's name on your church as he puts it when he discusses God's name being hallowed sounds to me like a talisman or good-luck charm. The special word "rhema"/revelation from God Kendall speaks of also seems mystical and hasn't a great deal of scriptural support for being part of our current lives. I don't believe we've special spirit-annointing or self-actualization today as he puts it.
I don't hink it likely that the prayer for daily bread includes finding our calling or praying before meals.
The idea of our forgiving others and God's then forgiving us as a contract of sorts even for those who are already believers takes this verse rather far. But I agree that God is very concerned w/ our showing love and compassion toward others, modeling Him and thus drawing much closer to Him.
All in all, this book isn't a waste of time and has some good insights, but despite Kendall's recommendation to the contrary, it isn't something I'd read again.