Rich scriptural commentary with real-life relevance that offers hope, direction, and encouragement.
A debut book analyzes two well-known biblical stories to address the issue of survival during life’s most difficult trials.
In the first part of this volume, Ramey takes readers on a verse-by-verse exploration of Matthew 14:22-36, the account of Jesus’ disciples facing a violent storm. They witness Jesus walking on water, calming the sea, and eventually reaching the other side. The second part moves into the Old Testament with the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt and their journey to the Promised Land. Ramey has written this work using the foundation of his own excruciating tempests in life, most notably his sister’s battle with cancer. His insights about these scriptural passages are focused on enduring hardships. Some of his premises include: God lets individuals experience tribulation so they can discover his faithful character and learn to trust him; “miracles happen on both sides of the storm”; and God is always “working, moving, orchestrating things, and preparing you for what is yet to come.” The author also advises readers: “God is healing, deliverance from depression, restoration in relationships, heart mending. God is good, and He is reaching out to you. Cling to Him.” The quality of Ramey’s writing is superb—rich with meaning, easily comprehensible, and highly engaging. He is able to extract profound meaning from every verse, employing the details available. He also takes the creative liberty to annotate the ancient setting from his own perspective, which truly brings the Scriptures to life; there is an organized and balanced harmony between scriptural commentary and present-day application that is ambiguous enough to pertain to a wide variety of situations but structured enough so as not to lose readers. The book is also interspersed with novel and memorable one-liners like “God, I don’t know what tomorrow holds, but I know who holds tomorrow” and “God loves an underdog story and a good comeback. We can never place a period where God has placed a comma.”
Rich scriptural commentary with real-life relevance that offers hope, direction, and encouragement.Pub Date: March 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-7974-5
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The ever-popular and highly readable C.S. Lewis has "done it again." This time with a book beginning with the premise "God is Love" and analyzing the four loves man knows well, but often understands little, Affection, Friendship, Eros and Charity, exploring along the way the threads of Need-Love and Gift-Love that run through all. It is written with a deep perception of human beings and a background of excellent scholarship. Lewis proposes that all loves are a search for, perhaps a conflict with, and sometimes a denial of, love of God. "Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?" To relate the human activities called loves to the Love which is God, Lewis cites three graces as parts of Charity: Divine Gift-Love, a supernatural Need-love of Himself and a supernatural Need-love of one another, to which God gives a third, "He can awake in man, towards Himself a supernatural Appreciative love. This of all gifts is the most to be desired. Here, not in our natural loves, nor even in ethics, lies the true center of all human and angelic life. With this all things are possible." From a reading of this book laymen and clergy alike will reap great rewards: a deeper knowledge of an insight into human loves, and, indeed, humans, offered with beauty and humor and a soaring description of man's search for God through Love.
Pub Date: July 27, 1960
ISBN: 0156329301
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
The name of C.S. Lewis will no doubt attract many readers to this volume, for he has won a splendid reputation by his brilliant writing. These sermons, however, are so abstruse, so involved and so dull that few of those who pick up the volume will finish it. There is none of the satire of the Screw Tape Letters, none of the practicality of some of his later radio addresses, none of the directness of some of his earlier theological books.
Pub Date: June 15, 1949
ISBN: 0060653205
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1949
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