So I’m starting something new with this post.  It is called Blogging for Books with the WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group.  It should be a fun way to do something different on my blog every so often.  And today is the first day!  So here we go…

Welcome to my addition to the Blog Tour for the new book Extraordinary: The Life You’re Meant to Live by John Bevere.

I’ll be honest, from the title, I was expecting a book about discovering and doing what you love.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  Using Scripture as his foundation, Bevere builds a significant case for starting to live the “extraordinary” life God calls Christians to and explains why so few Christians are actually living that life.

Bevere describes the extraordinary life as one that is well-pleasing to God.  It is a life empowered by grace, not just saved by it.  We are to do more than we “naturally” can do because we are to be living out of the supernatural power of God (grace).  And we access this extraordinary life of grace through faith.  Faith, as Bevere describes it, is simply believing what God says and then speaking and living according to His Word.  It’s that simple. 

Of course it isn’t easy (and Bevere explains why and how most Christians miss this mark).  But it is that simple.  And Bevere uses verse after verse, passage after passage, from the Old and the New Testaments, to prove and support his claim.  The book used so many Scriptures that it was sometimes almost overwhelming.  But with so much of God’s Word packed between the covers, there was little room to doubt the truth of the book’s thesis. 

There were a couple of criticisms that I had, of course.  First, he jumps between translations too easily, and it was hard to switch from KJV to the Amplified Bible to the New Living Translation and back while reading. Second, I did struggle to really get into the book for the first 100 pages or so.  The writing was too verbal in places, as if he was trying to talk to his readers instead of write to them, and this was distracting for me.  Also while Bevere starts with the basics and builds on them, which is good, he started so basically and built so slowly (and for me, disjointedly) that I kept losing sight of where he was going.  Looking back at the book as a whole, the flow made sense, but at first, I struggled to see how the ideas were fitting together.

However, once he got to his main idea, the book really took off for me.  I found myself getting excited about the ideas and the possibilities for my life if I really lived what the Bible clearly teaches about living extraordinarily.  Without a hesitation, I would recommend this book.  The biblical ideas woven together on its pages can change our lives, our families, our churches and our world.

This book was provided for review by the WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group.