Book Write-Up: Divided, by Bill Delvaux

 Bill Delvaux.  Divided: When the Head and the Heart Don’t Agree.  Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2015.  See here to buy the book.

Christians intellectually believe certain ideas, but their heads and their hearts do not always agree.  They may have heard in church for years that they are accepted and loved by God, but deep down they do not feel accepted, and they question their own worth.  They may intellectually accept the idea that God will take care of them, yet they contend with fear and anxiety.  Their Bible study can include a lot of analysis yet fail to reach down into their hearts and genuinely transform their attitudes.  In some cases, they may be dealing with unresolved trauma from their past (i.e., abuse, failures, horrible experiences, etc.).

In Divided: When the Head and the Heart Don’t Agree, Bill Delvaux addresses this issue, as he shares his own stories and experiences.  Delvaux admits that he is a work in progress.  He says that he still contends with fear.  He even tells a story about how he and his wife were sharing with each other about where they believe they have spiritually grown. Bill said that he has become less self-centered, and his wife disagreed with him on that, prompting him to become angry, and to wonder later why exactly he became angry.  (I would be angry, too, if I thought I reached a milestone after much effort, only to be told that I had not reached it.  But, then again, I would probably not be sharing with people where I thought I had spiritually grown.  I’d rather not open that can of worms!)

Delvaux shares ways that Christians can find healing and align their head with their heart.  Delvaux stresses the importance of Christian community, particularly community in which people vulnerably can share their own stories and thus find validation and not feel as alone, as well as the importance of undivided focus on God.  On community, Delvaux should have offered ideas on how people, particularly people with social challenges, can find a community where it is safe to be vulnerable or to share; he did refer to therapists, however, and to reading people’s stories.  On having an undivided focus on God, Delvaux asks excellent questions, such as whether this means that he cannot have other interests.  As far as I could tell, however, he did not revisit these questions, though he did indicate that he still had hobbies and interests (while noting the danger of idolizing them).

The book is a bit meandering.  Delvaux in one place talks about movies, and I was not entirely sure what point he was trying to make.  Yet, the book is good because it has an intellectual quality, which is not surprising to me, since Delvaux has attended Duke University and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.  I particularly appreciated Delvaux’s discussion of the Adam and Eve story, as he argues that Adam and Eve try to gain knowledge for self-aggrandizement and power rather than accepting that they are known by God.  Delvaux’s point that God chose Abraham to show nations a walk with God also stood out to me, as did his story about how Thomas Aquinas had a profound experience with Christ that made him see all of his great works as straw.

I received a complimentary review copy of this book through the BookLook Bloggers (http://booklookbloggers.com/) program.  The program does not require for my review to be positive, and my review reflects my honest reaction to the book.

Jesus the Jew, and Being Born Again

Yesterday at church, my pastor preached about John 3, in which Jesus tells the Jewish religious leader Nicodemus that he must be born again.

My pastor made the point that Jesus was not an evangelical Christian doing altar calls, but was a Jew, and so my pastor sought to place Jesus’ teaching about being born again within a Jewish context.  My pastor concluded that being born again was essentially the same as repentance.  Why didn’t Nicodemus understand this, when Judaism, too, had a teaching of repentance?  My pastor attributed Nicodemus’ misunderstandings to his misplaced expectations: Jesus and Nicodemus, at that time, were on a different page and were talking past each other.

I was intrigued by my pastor’s goal here.  It somewhat fits into my goal in the sermon that I will be delivering next week: to interpret the New Covenant in light of the story of Israel in the Hebrew Bible.  Whether or not I agree with my pastor at this point, I do not know.  I think that the concept of being born again in John 3 relates to more than repentance and includes a belief in Jesus, God’s only-begotten son, whom God sent into the world.  There are themes in John 3 that overlap with the Hebrew Bible, however, particularly the Book of Ezekiel: Jesus talks about being born of water and of spirit, and Ezekiel 36:25 says that God will sprinkle clean water on the Israelites and cleanse them of their filthiness and idolatry, Ezekiel 36:27 says that God will put God’s spirit within the Israelites that will motivate them to obey God’s laws, and Ezekiel 37 depicts God resurrecting Israel with spirit, or breath, which could be a kind of rebirth.  Do we see the concept of being born from above in the Hebrew Bible, since being born from above is one way to translate the phrase that is often translated as “born again”?  Not explicitly, as far as I know, and yet Israel was considered to be a son of God (Ezekiel 4:22), and perhaps Israel was believed to regain that sonship, in a sense, when God forgave her.  See here for rabbinic references to being born anew (when Gentiles convert to Judaism, when people get married, etc.), although many of the references are much later than the New Testament.

At the same time, Jesus’ focus in John 3 is not just on Israel: it is on the world.  God so loved the world.  Jesus came to save, not condemn, the world.

A reason that the pastor’s point intrigued me is that I was wondering if there is another way to interpret John 3, than to say that those who do not believe in Jesus are condemned already and will go to hell.  Don’t get me wrong: my pastor believes that Jesus is the only way to salvation.  But I was wondering if some of his points could be developed in the direction of another interpretation of John 3.  Repentance.  Jews can repent without believing in Jesus, right?

Still, I have to come back to Jesus’ statement in John 3 that those who do not believe are condemned already.  Does that apply to non-Christians today?  It can, perhaps, depending on how much light they have and how much they know.  In the first century, Jesus did miracles as a sign that God had sent him, and Jesus said in John 15:24: ” If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin” (KJV), implying that the first century Jews’ witnessing of Jesus’ signs and wonders made them accountable before God to believe in Jesus.  Can we say that those who have not seen those kinds of signs and wonders are accountable?  Well, there are still miracles among Christians nowadays, and I guess that it is between people and God how they choose to respond to them: explain them away, repent and believe, point to miracles in non-Christian religions, etc.  They and God know whether they are trying to avoid having to be responsible to God.

Ramblings on Obamacare and Church

Every month, someone from a charity comes to speak to my church, and the church supports that charity for the month.  This morning, someone from a health care charity spoke to us.  Essentially, the charity helps people who need prescription medicine.

I walked in a little late, so I did not hear the beginning of the speaker’s speech, but he did appear to be rather critical of the Affordable Care Act.  He said that, as a result of the Affordable Care Act, a number of large corporations have reduced people from full-time to part-time jobs so they could avoid providing them with health insurance.  The speaker also said that the health care exchanges have high deductibles, and this puts a strain on a lot of people.  I do not think that this guy was a fire-breathing right-winger; after all, he quoted Desmond Tutu and lauded him as one who spoke for the voiceless.  The speaker was just sharing how certain results of the Affordable Care Act have impacted his charity: more people are now coming to it for help, some of them from the suburbs.

As this speaker was sharing, I was thinking about something that I recently read by Robert Reich, a progressive professor and commentator who was President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor.  Reich was lauding Obamacare as a success, and one of the things that Reich noted was that the copays and deductibles are slowing down the rate of health care spending.  I thought to myself, “And this is a good thing?  Doesn’t that put a financial burden on people and families?”

Some may say that Obamacare is not to blame—-that one should blame the large corporations or the insurance companies.  I am not entirely convinced by that argument, though.  For one, Obamacare, as far as I know, established the health care exchanges that have the high deductibles.  Second, part of constructing a successful program, in my opinion, is realistically determining how people will respond to it, in light of their own interests.  There are many cases in which we have to work with how people are, warts and all, rather than with our idealization of how they should be.  President Obama himself recognized this when he decided against pursuing a single-payer system and instead proposed requiring everyone to have health insurance: it would be better to appeal to the health insurance companies and the profits they would get and thereby to get them on board with Obamacare, than to push for something that would destroy them, and thus to provoke opposition to reform.  Obama decided to work with people’s selfishness rather than against it in his pursuit of reform.  In light of this, one cannot simply say that Obamacare deserves no blame at all for what corporations and health insurance companies are doing: the corporations and health insurance companies are responding selfishly to Obamacare’s policies.  How people are likely to respond to a policy should be taken into consideration when the policy is being developed and implemented.

Do I now regret voting for Obama?  I don’t know, honestly.  Of course, there have been conservatives and Republicans who have long said that everyone should have skin in the game when it comes to getting medical care, and who have criticized health insurance as a third-party payer that drives up the cost of health care.  You would think that they would be happy about the high copays and deductibles.  But I can play partisan games all day, and whom exactly does it help?  People are still bearing the burden of the American health care system.  I can say that Obamacare has failed—-though I would say that it has helped some people, such as the people who now have Medicaid and can get dental care.  But can I say that the Republicans have offered anything better?  Republicans proclaim tort reform as a major solution, but observers have said that it has not reduced health care costs in Texas (see here); the conservative Heritage Foundation, however, says that it has given more Texans access to health care (see here).  Competition across state lines can be good, as long as it does not become a race to the bottom.

Some may tell me that I should abandon trust in the political system because it is corrupt and instead wait for Jesus to come back to fix things.  But people need help now.  That is why I applaud this charity for trying to redress people’s situations.  Moreover, who is in office does matter.  You either have people who care, on some level, or people who do not.  For me personally, not showing up to vote is not an option.

II Chronicles 24

I have three thoughts about II Chronicles 24.  Two of the items are more questions than answers.

1.  King Joash of Judah attempts to repair the Temple of Judah, and he needs donations to do that.  Initially, he sends out priests and Levites throughout Judah to collect, but the Levites stall.  Joash’s approach then is to set up a collection chest, presumably in Jerusalem, and leaders of Judah would come and drop donations into the chest.  The latter approach is successful.

Both policies, though, are connected by the Chronicler with a law in the Law of Moses (II Chronicles 24:6, 9).  Many scholars say that this law is the one in Exodus 30:12-16 and 38:25-26.  This law said that the Israelites in the wilderness, when they were numbered, were to donate a half shekel, so that a plague would not befall them (probably in punishment for the census, which God did not like).  Each Israelite, rich and poor, paid the same amount, and the money would be used for the construction of the Tabernacle.

I wrote a post a while back about the Temple tax and Shmuel Safrai’s statement that what in Exodus 30 and 38 may have been a one-time occurrence became a regular obligation in II Chronicles 24, Nehemiah 10:33ff, Second Temple sources, and the Mishnah.   Indeed, Joash does appear to be going a bit beyond the written letter of the law in his application and interpretation of it.  The law originally may have been for one time, and part of its design was to prevent a plague.  Joash says that the law still applies in his time, however, and there is nothing about the threat of a plague in II Chronicles 24.  Perhaps Joash was following the spirit of the law, though, or saw his own situation as analogous to the historical context of the law.  When the law was given, it was so that the Tabernacle could be built, and the Tabernacle was a place where God dwelt and was worshiped.  Joash wanted to repair the Temple, the successor to the Tabernacle.

A question that I had is how leaders coming to Jerusalem and dropping off contributions into a chest constituted a tax.  It’s a donation, right, not a tax?  Yet, this method of obtaining resources is said to accord with the collection that Moses laid on Israel in the wilderness.  Perhaps the leaders collected the tax in their locality and brought it to Jerusalem.  I think also of Numbers 7, in which princes of Israel come to the Tabernacle and give gifts after the Tabernacle’s consecration.

2.  Joash starts off righteous but turns bad.  Zechariah the son of Jehoiada the priest rebukes Joash for transgressing God’s commandments, and the king commands that Zechariah be stoned.  This occurs in the Temple court.

Jesus in Matthew 23:35 is criticizing the Pharisees and says: “That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar” (KJV).

Was Jesus referring to the stoning of Zechariah the son of Jehoiada in II Chronicles 24?  Believers in biblical inerrancy will not have this because Jesus calls Zechariah the son of Barachias, not the son of Jehoiada (the Zechariah in II Chronicles 24), and they do not think that Jesus would make a factual error.

Gleason Archer, an inerrantist, offers a pretty good reason that Jesus meant Zechariah the son of Berechiah, the prophet who wrote the Book of Zechariah, rather than Zechariah the son of Jehoiada.  Archer says that Jesus in Matthew 23:35 appears to be referring to a merism that goes from the first Old Testament martyr (Abel) to the last one.  As Archer notes, Zechariah the son of Jehoiada was not the last Old Testament martyr, for he died during the time of Joash, the pre-exilic period, and much more martyrs were to come.  Zechariah the son of Berachiah, by contrast, was a post-exilic martyr and was quite late.

I am not entirely convinced by Archer’s argument, however.  For one, there would come more martyrs after Zechariah the son of Berechiah, particularly around the time of the Maccabees.  Second, Jesus may have been respecting the order of books in the Jewish canon, in which Genesis is the first book and II Chronicles is the last.  Abel is in the first book, and Zechariah the son of Jehoiada is in the last.  Finally, not only is there no evidence that Zechariah the son of Berachiah was martyred, but I also find it unlikely.  Zechariah the son of Jehoiada spoke truth to power and had a message that could get him killed.  Zechariah the son of Berachiah, by contrast, supported the establishment, specifically the attempts by Governor Zerubabbel and Joshua the priest to rebuild Israel.  Why would Zechariah the son of Berechiah be martyred?  Was it because he was challenging post-exilic Jews for not completely giving paganism up?  Still, he was part of the establishment.

3.  II Chronicles 24:16 says that the priest Jehoiada was buried among the kings because he did good for Israel, God, and the Temple.  King Joash, by contrast, was not buried among the kings in their tombs, at least according to the Chronicler in v 25; II Kings 12:21, however, affirms that Joash was buried with his ancestors in the city of David.

It seems to me that some of the bad kings in II Chronicles get bad burials.  In II Chronicles 21, Jehoram, a wicked king, is buried in the city of David but not in the sepulchres of the kings, and the customary burning for dead kings at their funerals is not made for him.  In II Chronicles 22:9, wicked king Ahaziah is buried, but that is on account of the righteousness of his father, Jehoshaphat.  In II Chronicles 26, Uzziah, a righteous king who becomes proud and makes a horrible mistake, is not exactly buried with the other kings.

A question that went through my mind is who exactly was making these burial decisions.  Here are people with enough power to decide where a king would be buried.  They appear to have been devout Yahwists, though, and their brand of devout Yahwism was not always honored within Judah.  Could they have been priests?  Or the people of the land, landholders (according to some scholars) who were devout Yahwists and who helped install the righteous king Josiah years later (II Kings 20:24)?  Keil-Delitzsch say regarding Joash’s dishonorable burial that people were discontent with his reign.  Perhaps, according to the Chronicler, the multitudes did not care for the divine punishments that their nation received when they had a bad king (bad according to the judgments of a certain brand of devout Yahwism), so they did not support giving the king an honorable burial.

God's Not Dead: Josh's Risk, and Professor Radisson's Conversion

I’m continuing to blog about the 2014 Christian movie God’s Not Dead.  A key sub-plot of the movie is Christian student Josh Wheaton’s conflict with his atheist philosophy professor, Jeffrey Radisson.

Here are some thoughts:

1.  The Christian band, The Newsboys, is in the movie.  This is pretty ironic, considering that one of the band’s original members not long ago came out as an atheist (he was not in the movie, though).  In any case, at the end of the movie, the lead singer of the Newsboys says that Josh put a smile on God’s face because Josh defended God’s honor.

This scene stood out to me because I was wondering what I would have done if I had been Josh.  Back when I was a cocky college freshman, I probably would have marched right into the arena and challenged Professor Radisson; my arguments for Christianity and God’s existence would have been pretty poor, but that would not phase me.  I would keep on coming up with things to say.

The me right now, however—-jaded, burnt out, wearied by life, conscious about my future, and more unsure about my rhetorical and intellectual abilities, yet able to see more sides of an issue, and even to understand where atheists are coming from—-would simply decide not to take Professor Radisson’s class.  I am enough of a Christian that I would feel uncomfortable writing down on a piece of paper that God is dead and signing my name to it (as Professor Radisson asked his students to do).  But I would be conscious of my grade and my future, so there would be pressure on me to conform.  Therefore, I would bypass the problem altogether by not taking Professor Radisson’s class.  I can read atheists’ books and articles whenever I am interested in what they have to say.  I do not have to be bullied or pressured by an atheist professor.  (As a side note, I had atheist professors, but they never pressured me to be an atheist or to outwardly conform to atheism, as Professor Radisson did to his class.)

I have to respect Josh for defending God’s honor, though.  And I would say that Josh’s motives were purer than mine were back when I was a freshman, defending God’s existence against atheists in online forums.  I was more interested in being right, showing people that I am right and they are wrong, and validating myself by winning debates (which often happened only in my own mind).  In retrospect, I honored God more by serving in the nursing home at that time than I did in those online debates.  Josh, however, reluctantly went into the arena out of conviction and did so to give the students some exposure to Jesus Christ, and he did so at cost to himself: he would have to make up a lot of schoolwork that he was sacrificing by working on his presentations for Professor Radisson’s class, there was a strong possibility that Professor Radisson would fail him, and he lost a relationship.  That sort of courageous risk for God would put a smile on God’s face!  I still would dodge the class, myself, and try to put a smile on God’s face in other ways.

2.  My favorite scene in the movie is when Pastor Dave (played by David A.R. White) leads Professor Radisson to accept Jesus.  Professor Radisson has been hit by a car and is dying on the street.  Pastor Dave comes to him and asks him if he believes in God.  Professor Radisson replies that he is an atheist.  Pastor Dave says that the God Professor Radisson does not believe in is giving Professor Radisson one last chance to change his final answer.  Professor Radisson says that he is afraid and is not ready to die, and Pastor Dave responds that Jesus, too, was afraid: Jesus asked God to take the cup from his lips, but God said no.  “He says ‘no’ a lot, doesn’t he?”, Professor Radisson retorts, for Professor Radisson has long been angry at God for not saving his mother from death back when he was a child.  Pastor Dave responds that God gives us the answers we would want if we know what God knows.  Professor Radisson then to Pastor Dave quotes Isaiah 55:9, which affirms that God’s ways are higher than our ways, and God’s thoughts than our thoughts.  Pastor Dave smiles, apparently impressed that Professor Radisson knows his Bible (Professor Radisson quoted one of Job’s speeches to Josh earlier in the movie), and proceeds to lead Professor Radisson in the sinner’s prayer.  Pastor Dave then says that, in a few minutes, Professor Radisson will know more about God than he or anyone else on earth.  Professor Radisson then passes into eternity.

On the one hand, I think that this scene inadvertently presents a rather trivial picture of salvation.  God has given Professor Radisson a chance to change his final answer?  What is this?  A game show?  On the other hand, I loved Pastor Dave’s appeal to how Jesus was afraid (which some Christians would actually dispute) and how God said “no” to Jesus.

God's Not Dead 1: The Debate

I finally saw the 2014 Christian movie God’s Not Dead (see the trailer here).  I doubt that I can share all of my thoughts about the movie in one single post, so I may write more than one post about it.  Or I may not!

Here are some thoughts:

1. A key plot-line in the movie concerns Christian student Josh Wheaton’s interactions with his atheist philosophy professor, Dr. Jeffrey Radisson.  Professor Radisson shows his students the names of philosophers were were atheists, and he proposes that all of the students bypass discussion of the existence of God and sign a piece of paper saying that God is dead, so they can all move on to more important (in his eyes) philosophical topics.  Josh Wheaton says that he cannot do this because he is a Christian, so Professor Radisson shares with Josh the alternative: Josh must defend the existence of God in class.

What surprised me in the movie is this: Josh gives his first presentation on the cosmological argument, the argument that God is necessary to explain how everything began.  Professor Radisson responds that, according to Stephen Hawking, gravity makes God unnecessary for the existence of the universe, for the universe could have come into existence on its own.  Josh does not know how to respond to that, so it appears that Professor Radisson has won that round.

The thing is, it is after this particular presentation that Professor Radisson fiercely confronts Josh and says, “Do you think you’re smarter than me, Wheaton?”, and promises to derail Josh’s chances of becoming a lawyer if Josh continues with his charade.  I was expecting this scene because I saw it in the trailer.  I was not expecting it, however, to be after the presentation in which Josh lost the argument.  I was expecting it to be after the second presentation, in which Josh presented Oxford mathematician John Lennox’s critique of Hawking, then referred to Hawking’s statement that philosophy is dead, which was followed by the students’ laughter.  But no.  Professor Radisson got all fierce and defensive after actually winning the debate, after (in his words) pricking the balloon of Josh’s entire argument.

That made no sense to me.  Maybe the goal here is to present Professor Radisson as a defensive atheist, one who is insecure about the topic of God’s existence because he hates God.  That is, after all, the point of this entire sub-plot.  Perhaps that is why Professor Radisson wanted to bypass discussion of the topic of God’s existence altogether.  His stated goal, though, was that it is only after we give up religion that we can make progress.

2.  Overall, except for that scene in which Professor Radisson quoted Hawking, I found Professor Radisson to be pretty disappointing as a representative for the atheist side, at least in terms of presenting arguments for atheism.  I would expect for a philosophy professor to be able to come back with more.  Josh was saying in his third presentation that God is necessary for moral absolutes—-for saying, for example, that academic cheating is wrong.  I didn’t entirely buy that, for one can think of secular or non-theistic reasons that cheating is wrong: professors want students to learn the material, society is benefited when people actually know things rather than taking short-cuts, and those noble goals are obviated when students cheat.  But Professor Radisson did not mount a critique of Josh’s argument.

Also, I was surprised that Radisson did not criticize Josh for using Lee Strobel as a source.  Lee Strobel is a Christian apologist and was a journalist for the Chicago Tribune.  Sure, Lee Strobel knows stuff, but one should appeal to Lee Strobel’s sources (after reading them, on some level, to see if Lee Strobel represents them accurately) rather than Lee Strobel himself.  Josh in his first presentation was sympathetic to this sort of issue: Josh referred to a non-believer as an authority to rule out believer bias.  In the beginning of the second presentation, Josh referred to Oxford mathematician John Lennox—-though I found Josh’s discussion of that debate to be a bit shallow, since I wondered how specifically Hawking believed that gravity made God’s existence as a creator unnecessary for the existence of the universe, and what Lennox’s critique of that specific point was.  Still, at least Josh was referring to John Lennox!  Then Josh turned right around and cited Lee Strobel as an authority for a scientific point.  And Professor Radisson did not criticize that, or at least ask, “Who is Lee Strobel, and what are his credentials?”

3.  Professor Radisson’s list of atheist philosophers caught my eye.  I was initially surprised that he included John Stuart Mill on the list, since I thought that Mill believed in a creator, but it turns out that Mill was rather critical of Christianity and supernaturalism, even though he was not a dogmatic atheist (see here and here).  I was also surprised that Radisson included Richard Dawkins on the list of philosophers, for my understanding is that Dawkins is a biologist, not a philosopher, or one with philosophical training.  Yeah, Dawkins makes philosophical points, but his field is biology.

Book Write-Up: The Pleasure of His Company

Dutch Sheets.  The Pleasure of His Company: A Journey to Intimate Friendship with God.  Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 2014.  See here for Bethany House’s page about the book.

The Pleasure of His Company is about the pleasure that can come from spending time with God.  Dutch Sheets tells stories about his own life, examines Scripture, and offers suggestions about how believers can spend time with God.

There were many things that I liked about this book.  Sheets is vulnerable and sometimes humorous in telling his own story, and he depicts God as a God of love, even though he later says that spending time with God will take time and effort (which he says will be worthwhile).  Sheets also shares that God made him an introvert, and he talks about how God uses that for his glory; that resonated with me, as one who enjoys solitude.

My favorite parts of the book were some of Sheets’ applications of the Old Testament.  He talked about Obed-Edom, who temporarily housed the Ark of the Covenant, and who was so addicted to God that, according to the Chronicler, he moved to Jerusalem to be near the Ark after it was transported there.  (There is actually debate about whether those are the same Obed-Edom, but I appreciate Sheets’ point, nevertheless.)  Malachi 3:16 says that those who feared God spoke often with one another, and God heard it, and I have heard preachers use this verse to guilt people into joining Christian small groups.  Sheets, however, offered a refreshing interpretation that I had not considered before: that, after years of putting up with Israel’s faithlessness, God was happy to hear people saying positive things about him!

My only criticism of the book concerns how Sheets does his Hebrew and Greek word studies.  He sometimes seems to jump to conclusions on the basis of a word’s etymology, or how a word appears to be used in a particular passage.  Etymology is not necessarily helpful in telling us what a word means or how it is used, and, just because a word is used to refer to something in one context, that does not mean that it carries those implications in another context.  What is important in looking at words is the context in which they are used.  Scholar D.A. Carson discusses such issues in his excellent book, Exegetical Fallacies.

Still, even though I did not always agree with Sheets’ methods of arriving at his homiletical conclusions, I did agree with his homiletical conclusions: that one can be strengthened by spending time in God’s presence, giving God one’s undivided attention, and learning about what is on God’s heart.

The publisher sent me a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.