Your Best Life Now
Monday, April 4th, 2005 | General
A couple months ago I blogged about one of Joel Osteen’s sermons. I received a mixed response with several people extremely upset that I would dare hold the popular preacher up to the light of scripture in which he reported to be preaching. Perhaps the most ironic claims faulted me for highlighting the Biblical gospel of grace over against Osteen’s lauding of meritorious human effort. I believe humans stand hopeless apart from grace. For this a commenter called me “ungracious.”
Osteen’s book, “Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential,” hit the #1 slot on the New York times Best Seller list. Daryl Wingerd has read the book and offers an in depth critical review. He writes,
here is my view in a nutshell: If you want to read a book in which discontentment is encouraged, a book that shows God to be powerless apart from your power-filled thoughts and words, a book in which sin is minimized and renamed in every conceivable way, and a supposedly Christian book that gives only trivial mention to Jesus Christ, Your Best Life Now is the book for you. But if you believe, with the Apostle Paul, that “godliness with contentment is great gain” (1 Tim. 6:6 NKJV), if you desire a deeper and more biblical understanding of God and His ways, if you desire to see Jesus Christ exalted in your life as you follow His pattern of humility and self-denial, if you believe a Christian’s greatest hunger should be for righteousness (Mat. 5:6) and not for money, health, or easy living, then you would do well to look elsewhere.
Let me recommend Daryl Wingerd’s review.
1 Comment to Your Best Life Now
Reading this about JOel Osteen’s book, which certainly has its downs (as all other books), and seeing the mess that goes on at SBC conventions, I am reminded why so many, like myself, have left the SBC. Indeed, the SBCs will go down in history for all that they were…against…but so little will be known for what they were FOR…
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