Book Review: A Year With Jesus, by R.P. Nettelhorst

You may have noticed, I love books. With the parenting books I rave about, and my daily Bible reading, and reading up on homeschooling, I am usually in the middle of no fewer than three at any given time. 

This year I will also be periodically reviewing books as part of BookSneeze®. First up: A Year With Jesus: Daily Readings and Reflections on Jesus' Own Words by R.P. Nettelhorst. 

This one-year devotional examines the words Jesus spoke throughout the Gospels (plus a bit of text from Acts and Revelation). The introduction, compared to other "devotional" books I have read, is short (one page) and to the point: We get to know people by spending time with them and listening to them. Spend time with and listen to Jesus every day.

Nettelhorst organizes his writing into ten sections, including not only predictable polarities (e.g., love and hate, good and evil, life and death) but also the dichotomies of arrogance and humility, deserved and undeserved, fidelity and treachery. It's helpful that he includes the complete scripture reference on each page along with his thoughts. My only criticism, if you could call it that, would be that he does not pull text from one translation . . . rather, he uses several different Bibles. However, I always have my preferred rendition accessible, so I have been simply reading from that directly.

I intended to simply choose maybe half a dozen days at random to read for the purposes of this review. I ended up spending nearly an hour poring over the book, skimming around the contents to titles that jumped out at me and now I cannot wait to delve into daily readings for 2012.

Each day is only one page, including the Bible verse and his commentary. Easy. Totally do-able for even the biggest of procrastinators. Do you have five minutes a day to focus on the words of Jesus? Pick up this book!

Thanks for reading and have a blessed day.

Note: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze® book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.