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Profoundly Challenging Mar 23, 2008 (96 of 104 found this helpful)
"It is our deepest need, as human beings, to learn to live intimately with God."
John Eldredge has been writing about walking with God for over ten years, since the publication of The Sacred Romance in 1997. His latest book, Walking with God, is his most deeply personal & may become his most controversial as well.
Walking with God is not structured as a typical book at all: instead, it is a written retelling and explanation of his own walk with God over the course of a year. It has no specific goal or direction; it is simply his life day by day, and how he saw God guiding and teaching him.
Interspersed with these personal experiences are explanations of his own worldview and approach to walking with God. Two core issues he spends a lot of time with are spiritual warfare and conversational intimacy with God.
Eldredge's view of spiritual warfare is that demonic attacks, both in the form of physical ailments and mental and spiritual clouding, are very real and very common, almost an everyday occurrence, and that it takes concentrated, specific prayer to overcome them. Eldredge's view of "conversational intimacy" is that God really can speak to us, to enlighten and guide us, and that we can learn to listen to His voice.
These paradigms are very foreign and even antithetical to most evangelical Christians. Eldredge fully realizes this, but does not try to build an elaborate structured case for his theology. After all, Eldredge is not a theologian at heart, but a storyteller. Consequently, I think he realized that he could be most effective in teaching his way of walking with God by telling stories, and not by trying to write a theological tome.
I actually am both theologian and storyteller. The theologian in me has always bristled at some aspects of Eldredge's theology, and yet the storyteller in me sees much truth and much goodness in it as well. Did I agree with all the theology in this book? No, I did not. Did I take page after page of detailed notes, being struck again and again by his honesty and insight? Yes I did.
Walking with God is a profoundly challenging book, one that I will re-read, meditate and pray over. I believe John wanted to create a book that would make people take a hard look at their definition of what it means to truly walk with God, and then show them a path to a richer and fuller life.
He succeeded.
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Insight Into One Man's Walk With God Apr 29, 2008 (25 of 29 found this helpful)
I've enjoyed several of John Eldredge's previous books, so I was looking forward to jumping into this one.
The good: he gives you a behind-the-scenes look at his conversations with God over a year's time. It's usually interesting to see what people are talking to God about and that's true here. There are multiple moments when his comments will remind you of things you've also gone through.
The bad: I felt he goes overboard in a couple areas. The first is that everything for him is a spiritual battle. I do believe in spiritual warfare, but that doesn't mean every little problem you encounter is demonic. The second is that he seems to be constantly finding that things bring up all these deep problems from his childhood or early adult life. Again, I know that's sometimes true, but is everything ultimately about why I had low self-esteem in junior high or similar issues?
Ultimately, he doesn't fulfill the book's subtitle. It's interesting, but not filled with the insights I was hoping for.
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Wild at Heart for Everyone! Mar 26, 2008 (16 of 18 found this helpful)
John Eldredge may very well have reinvented a new and much needed genre of modern Christian literature. When much of recent Christian writings have left me wondering was the time spent reading it worth what I got from it, Walking With God never gave me such a concern! This is a true `page turner' that may help turn the page in your life!
John takes us on a journey with him throughout a year and sharing his walk with God. The startling and intriguing part was how close his walk relates to mine ... the struggles and issues ...
The beauty of this book is the guidance John is able to give on facing these issues and the solutions he found by walking and listening to the Spirit of God. He shows you the practical prayers and ways he was able to connect with God in a deeper way during his walk and I found it so easy to agree with the prayers and receive joy and peace in my heart. Every day that I opened the book it seemed to speak directly to something I was going through and I think this will be a transcendent truth for most readers.
What Wild at Heart did for men, Walking with God has the potential to do for families and communities.
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Getting to know John May 31, 2008 (9 of 9 found this helpful)
For me, a book is only as good as the expectations that I have on what the book is going to be about. With John's book, I expected it to be a book of his journal entry, which is the reason why I bought the book. It's not a "how to" book or a theological treatise. I'd like to share some of the things that stood out to me with this book...
It was an absolute delight getting to know John. I had somehow felt privileged, like I was looking over his shoulder as he wrote in his journal. I enjoyed getting to know John's heart for God, and how he managed his thoughts and emotions on a daily basis. It fleshed out what his life and friendship with God really is. He was brutally transparent in sharing what everyone experiences but are not discerning enough to realize nor brave enough to share.
John shared quite a bit about having "conversational intimacy" with God. As someone who taught against this concept for 20 years until 2 years ago, it was encouraging to hear someone's internal processing with how he listened to the Holy Spirit. This is a subject that has divided the Christian community with one side teaching that the Holy Spirit doesn't do that, while the other states that the He actually does. I wish that John would have shared that living a life of unforgiveness and being in bondage from the tormentor (Matt. 18:34-35, Eph.4:26-27, 2 Cor. 2:11-12, 1 Sam.18) is one of the biggest if not the biggest hindrances from hearing the Holy Spirit.
He also covered something that everyone does, but hardly talks about, which is making agreements, or what I call making vows. Making agreements is when you say things like, "I will never..." due to whatever unrealized and unprocessed pain they have. I have thought about this in the past, and have even encouraged others against it, but John covers it in much more depth, and shares the danger it poses in one's deeper agreement, which is their service with our Dad in heaven.
He also covered quite a bit about spiritual warfare that he experiences on a regular basis. He emphasizes that most people overlook this very crucial aspect of the Christian life. It was encouraging to me how discerning and aware he is of what's going on in the supernatural. I was personally challenged to have a heightened sense of awareness with what's going on in the spiritual realm, without focusing too much on it so as to be in a state of paranoia.
John's heart and passion for a deeper intimacy with God is inspiring and contagious. Beyond the theological mumbo jumbo that most authors write about, it's nice to hear someone's persistent drive and heart to more intimacy and closeness with our Dad. It's extremely refreshing. It's trademark, "John," consistent with all his other books.
Overall, I was encouraged with the unique format that this book was written, and look forward to personally pursue an even closer relationship with my Dad in heaven.
Michael Trillo
Author of What Does God Really Want?
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Finding truth and healing thru Walking with God May 26, 2008 (9 of 9 found this helpful)
I've just spent the better part of two days reading this book after picking it up on a whim. I have not read any of John Eldredge's other books.
John is a good story teller, and he caught my interest. As I read, my thoughts were parallel to many of the reviewers here: How does John know these one word answers are indeed the voice of God, along with How can I know this? (I suspect the answer lies in "the sheep knowing the voice of the Shephard")and How come everything is a spiritual battle, what about me just being a stupidasshumanbeing causing the problems in my life? And isn't my mood my choice anyway?
But when I read the entry on Unfullfilled Longings, God used it to heal my heart of some angst I have been living with for 9 months. I am so happy to be free and to gain the understanding about how when we exile the wounded, broken pieces of our hearts, (locking the door on our pain and throwing away the key as a method of coping), our whole heart cannot be given to God to fully heal. The idea that the stirrings of the unfullfilled longing are to motivate us to "seek a new life" or to submit it to God's healing, falls in beautifully with what I was needing to learn from my experience.
So yesterday, as s I sat outside reading, weeping cathartic tears and praying about the holes in my wholeheartedness, I was thankful for John's writing that gave words to explain it all to me.
Now, I am thinking that "whim" might just have been the voice of the Lord saying "Choose this one"! John explains it so much better, so get the book if you need freedom and understanding about the unfulfilled longings in your heart. I hope it helps you as much as it is helping me...