Rach's Reading Club

"Living the Cross Centered Life: Keeping the Gospel the Main Thing"
by C.J. Mahaney

I did try doing a regular WDC review under 3 different formats of this book but none would work. So you get my rambly thoughts.

Overall, this was a great book. It reviewed a lot of things and reminded me of a lot of things that are important to my faith. In some places, he can be overly dramatic and take more license than I would expect a pastor to take, and in a few I made notes about why I think he's incorrect, but overall, except for those few places, he seems to stay true to the Bible. And those few places I suppose could be semantics. I meant to glean some great quotes from it but the best quotes were the ones he used as chapter headings, that were really from other authors (many great classic Christian authors).

The best part of this book was that it had me praying more and thinking about to love Jesus more in my every day life. I don't know that I'd ever re-read the whole thing, but I'm going to keep my paper copy and maybe once a year, review the parts I underlined. Or if I ever feel ambitious, I could type those up and give the book to someone else. Time will tell.

Would I recommend it? Yes, to someone who is thoroughly grounded in their knowledge of the Bible. I think a new Christian would be better served by something else. Perhaps a book written by Charles Stanley or Billy Graham.

There is a nice part by Billy Graham's Evangelical Association at the back of my copy, as my book was a gift from their organization and I think they put that at the back of all of their gift books. I know that if I ever have company and get the opportunity to share my faith, I can grab any Billy Graham library book and that information will be there and the pictures make it even nicer. It's a great resource for that. But I probably have 50+ of these (gift books from Billy Graham's organization) so I don't need to keep the book just for that.

I had made this the first featured book over at the "TLC Prayer Parlor"  and anyone who read, reviewed and shared three quotes from this book would get a merit badge but no one said they were taking me up on it. I don't know if it's the book itself, or just that it's summer and there's less participation over there in general. It is a very niched book, so I get that it's not for everyone, but I did hope that someone else would read it. Ah well. C'est la vie!

Happy summer!

PS I think I just have one more review to go!