Book Review: With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God by Skye Jethani

I had the opportunity to review the recent book written by Skye Jethani, With:Reimagining the way you relate to God. To get to the point, I enjoyed this book, overall, I found a few theological mentions troubling. I truly enjoyed his perspective on how one approaches God. I had never truly examined that for myself and this book made me think. The author's premise is that there are five main approaches to God that humans have created - 1) Life over God; 2) Life under God; 3) Life from God; 4) Life over God; and 5) Life with God. Of course, when introduced to these concepts, the reader would like to assume they fit into what the author deems the best, Life with God, but one quickly realizes that is not always the case.

This book really examines and gives a new perspective on how we "do" life with God and how, in our heart of hearts, we see Him. Do we see him as someone who bargains with us? Or as a removed, task-master? Or saying that we need and live for Him with our mouth but not truly believing it in our hearts? Jethani even gets into areas that border on worshipping the Bible instead of God as well as replacing Jesus with a set of principles that seems to be a popular trend right now.

I was moved by Jethani's fresh approach to how we approach God but was troubled by some statements mid-way through. Jethani is quick to point out that the Bible is either completely true in its entirety or it's not. There is no picking and choosing which sections of the Bible compliment your beliefs and life. However, he then contradicts himself by throwing in the idea of an "Old Earth" view point. I have an issue with this because, as he so rightly pointed out, either the Bible is true and accurate entirely or it isn't... so, if God says He made the earth in a certain amount of time or in a certain way, then we, His creation, must accept it as He stated it. Or not, but then Jethani contradicts his thought that we must accept the Bible's accuracy as a whole.

The first part of the book and Jethani's viewpoint on how we approach God is insightful and, at times, convicting, however, he lost me with the second half of the book, both in theory and in redundancy.

I received this e-book for review from BookSneeze.com and was not compensated in any way for a pre-determined review.