Book: The Finishing Touch.Author: Charles R. Swindoll
Info: Copyright 1994: Dallas: Word Publishing.
Where acquired: Library book sale.
Rating (on a scale of 1-4 stars): ✮✭
What it's about: Based on Philippians 1:6 - "He who began a good work in you will finish it by the day of Jesus Christ," Swindoll offers 365 days of benchmarks of finishing strong in faith.
Favorite Quotes:
"The only one who likes change is a wet baby." - Mark Twain, quoted on page 11.
"Your adversary would love for you to assume the worst, to heave a sigh and resign yourself to the depressed feelings that accompany defeat, failure, maximum resentment, and minimum faith. But take heart. When God is involved, anything can happen." p. 217
"What power little babies possess! What frequently happens in a home occurs all too rarely in a church. Somehow the natural and beautiful drive to reproduce gets lost in the youthful busyness of church life. And if she is not careful, the church begins to grow old, brittle, and inbred, losing interest in giving birth." p. 286
"C.S. Lewis once likened his role as a Christian writer to an adjective humbly striving to point others to the Noun of truth. For people to believe that Noun, we Christian writers must improve our adjectives." - Phillip Yancey, quoted on page 356
"No longer can we offer tired, trite statements that are stiff and tasteless as last year's gum beneath the pew. The thinking person deserves an intelligent, sensible answer, not an oversimplified bromide mouthed by insensitive robots within the walls." - p. 403
"Every achievement worth remembering is stained with the blood of diligence and scarred by the wounds of disappointment. To quit, to run, to escape, to hide--none of these options solve anything. They only postpone the acceptance of, and reckoning with, reality. Churchill put it well: 'Wars are not won by evacuations.'" - p 474
Referring to the Sermon on the Mount: "Our Lord reserved his strongest and longest sermon not for struggling sinners or discouraged disciples, but for hypocrites...for glory hogs." - p. 519
"No man is less efficient or more incompetent than the person on the brink of a breakdown." p. 567
"A relaxed easy-going Christian is far more attractive and effective than the rigid, uptight brother who squeaks when he walks and whines when he talks." - p. 595
What I Liked:
- Swindoll quotes from many other great Christian writers and thinkers. He's not simply writing what's rolling around in his own head.
- I like that while most devotionals start with January 1, this one starts with Week 1: Monday. I may not want to start a devotional on January 1st. In fact, I started this on December 28th. However...
- While the devotional starts with Week 1, many of the entries were seasonal in nature. For the entries to make sense, the reader would have to start the first day of the new year. I didn't really care for that.
- There were typographical errors in the book that a good editor should have caught.
- I'm a big fan of Swindoll's writings, however, this book was quite curmudgeonly in nature. His attitude is summed up best in his entry for Monday of week 13 on page 154. In this entry he uses the proverbial Rip Van Winkle (No, not Vanilla Ice; that's Robert Van Winkle.) to criticize everything from modern technology to expressive worship. It's quite depressing. I have to remind myself that this book was written and published in the early 90's, when denominational Christianity was more law than grace, more tradition than worship, more focused on being "right" in a particular flavor of Christianity instead of just being Christians, and more suspicious of anything modern, rather than using modern advances for God's glory. Thank God that for the most part, we are not back there anymore. After several stretches of that, I decided to read several entries a day to get the book over with.
Takeaway:
Swindoll's books are usually filled with encouragement, humor, and in-depth Bible Commentary. This one was quite disappointing in that in didn't include much of those positive traits. I don't know that I would read this one again, but I will keep it in my collection for a while, just in case. If, after a while, it does not appeal to me again, I'll make room in my collection for something else.
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