Habits for Our Holiness

When I read non-fiction, more often than not, I will only read one chapter a day so that I can ingest and digest the information given. For a book like Habits for Our Holiness, that was a necessary strategy. Learning how others have come before me and walked the walk of faith always aids my own walk. My first tour through the Christian disciplines is Donald Whitney's Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life. Both of these books offer quite the same information, but both of the books are worth reading more than once.

When I was a student getting my degree in education, one of the things we learned is how we learned--we could be visual learners (I am), auditory learners, or kinetic learners, or any combination of all of the above. In fact, we all have some degree of all three learning styles in us. I could take notes in a class and bring the notes back up in my mind when I was taking a test and read until I got to the answer I needed. Making things stick in our minds is easier when we take our own notes and read them in our own handwriting, or we read them aloud in our own voices, or we act it out with our own bodies. This in and of itself is why it's good to read the same kinds of information with more than one author.

So here's what I brought away from the chapter on Bible Study: We have to question each passage of scripture--it's like asking the teacher to explain something we don't understand.

1. How does this passage reveal God's character?
2. How does this passage reveal God's redemptive plan?
3. How did the passage apply to the original hearers?
4. How does this truth affect my relationship with Christ?
5. In what ways do I rebel against the truth in the passage?
6. What is the impact of the passage on the church?

Philip Nation has brought the disciplines together in an extremely readable way, understandable by any student of the Christian life. This is a five star book worth reading, meditating on, and digesting, simply to understand God and His word better.

My thanks to Moody Publishers for allowing me to read and review this book.