19th April, 2016
Max Lucado
Glory Days: Living Your Promised Land Life Now
Thomas Nelson, Nashville, Tennessee, 2015
ISBN-13: 978-0849948497
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This book isn’t about empty triumphalism. It’s about Christians stepping, stumbles and struggles included, into the inheritance they’ve been given through the saving work of Jesus Christ. |
What does life in the ‘Promised Land’ look like to you? This question is at the heart of prolific US Christian author and teacher Max Lucado’s book Glory Days, which walks readers through the Book of Joshua in a bid to uncover how Christians can live in the Promised Land today.
Lucado starts by saying that the Promised Land – Canaan – is not used here as a metaphor for heaven, the “life to come”, but in fact represents “the life we can have now”, provided we turn our backs on the wilderness out of which we have come.
“Life is different on the other side of the Jordan,” he writes. “Breakthroughs outnumber breakdowns. God’s promises outweigh personal problems. Victory becomes, dare we imagine, a way of life.”
Filled with Lucado’s folksy charm and humour as he recounts anecdotes to illustrate the points he’s making (you’ve been warned!), the book takes the readers through the book of Joshua – from the call upon Joshua to lead two million former Egyptian slaves into the inheritance God has given them (and the instrumental role the Law of God played in that) through to the critical role the prostitute Rahab played in the fall of Jericho and the parceling out of lands, their inheritance in God, to the victorious Israelities.
While it broadly follows the chronology of the Book of Joshua, Glory Days is not a chapter-by-chapter exegesis of the Biblical text but is centered, rather, on the lessons Lucado draws from it for the lives of Christians today as he walks his way through.
A bonus is the study guide at the back of the book which, prepared by David Drury, is designed for use as an individual or a group with questions focused in helping the reader draw out how the Book of Joshua impacts their lives today (and, oh yes, the book is accompanied by a complete suite of DVDs, study guides and sermons if you want to tackle it as a church).
This book isn’t about empty triumphalism. It’s about Christians stepping, stumbles and struggles – even defeats – included, into the inheritance they’ve been given through the saving work of Jesus Christ.
As Lucado writes, "Geography is theology. In Egypt the Hebrews were enslaved to Pharoah. In the wildnerness they were free from Pharoah but still enslaved to fear. They refused to enter the Promised Land and languished in the desert. Only in Canaan did they discover victory. Egypt, the wilderness, and Canaan. Slaves to Pharoah, slaves to fear, and, finally, people of the promise."
Lucado’s message is that it’s no different for us, now, as it was for them, then. We’ve simply got to choose to take the step by, just as the Hebrews did before us, believing what it is God says about us.
Follow this link to buy this book – Glory Days: Living Your Promised Land Life Now.
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