There are times in life when God is speaking to your heart about something very specific. As God is speaking to your heart, many times he will bring something or someone across your path at just the right time to help you fully understand what God is speaking. That is what Pete Wilson’s book “Empty Promises” was for me this past week.
Along similar lines as Tim Keller’s “Counterfeit Gods”, Pete Wilson crafts an amazing, true to life experience as he highlights the different idols and gods that we can entrap ourselves with while all along searching for the ‘real thing’ that only God can provide. Many times these idols are not bad things, they are good things that have become god things.
For me personally, chapter 7, highlighting the idol of religion, was such a clear understanding of why religion can be so trapping. We are all searching for love and acceptance. It is part of who we are as people. However, we have been taught through the world around us and the things that take place in our lives that in order to be accepted we must perform, we must obey and we need to measure up. The lie of religion perpetuates this idea in our relationship with God as having to measure to his standard so that he might accept us. The problem is we are left short each and every time because we can never measure up.
In “Empty Promises” Pete Wilson writes, “Your greatest temptation in life will be to chase after not what is ridiculously evil but what is deceptively good. Martin Luther rightly said that, as sinners, we are prone to pursue a relationship with God through one of two ways. The first is religion, the second is the gospel. The two are antithetical in every way. Religion says that if we obey God, he will love us. The gospel says that it is because God has loved us through Jesus that we can obey.”
Pete points out that we are accepted not because of what we do for God but we are accepted because of what God has done for us, and that is the essence of the gospel. Religion is man’s attempt to be accepted by God because of what we have done. The gospel is God’s acceptance of us because of what Christ has done.
Diving into many other forms of empty promises, Pete does a wonderful job of relating the issue of life and how the gospel of Jesus is the answer for all of them. This book is a must read for any and every believer who has been a follower of Christ for more than 5 minutes!
“I received this book as part of the BookSneeze bloggers program. I was not required to do anything but write an honest review.”
