Review: A refreshing take on positive confession
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 17, 2013
For at least 30 years I have been bombarded with the message that the words of my mouth become how I live, whether positive or negative. Much of it is shallow--preachers on TV or the radio talking about healing and prosperity so much that I finally had to stop listening. It was becoming too hard to remember that the Bible makes plenty of other promises, some of which are more important than those two.I have thought I understood the concept, but have never been able to shake the habit of speaking what I have, and therefore reaping more of it whether I want it or not.Most of even the more helpful books that deal with positive confession from a biblical perspective serve up individual verses, sometimes combined thematically, and personalize them from whatever translation the author uses. Linda Newberry, on the other hand, goes verse by verse through the 60th chapter of Isaiah. Using common study tools like Strong's Concordance, she has explored the full meaning and implication of the words in the original Hebrew. Based on that study, she compiled a personalized confession of the entire chapter.One doesn't get an idea for a book like this, pick a chapter, and start to write. I gather that Newberry has subjected much of the Bible to the same rigorous study, and of course Strong's is just as helpful for the Greek of the New Testament. Only after she observed the changes in her own life from her style of confessing Scripture could she decide to write such a book.I, for one, find her approach very congenial. I have studied and written confessions for three verses already. I'm not sure when, if ever, I'll tackle an entire chapter, but the exercise has the power to be life changing. That depends entirely on my own follow-through, of course. But I'm very excited.The reason I give the book only four stars is that, unfortunately, it is not well written. It is full of misspelled words, wrong choices from a pair of homonyms (queue when she meant cue, for example), and other errors that a good copy editor would have found.More seriously, she weakens too many of her points by choosing vague words instead of precise words. Even the title is vague, and the way she repeats it at key points of every chapter manages to cloud rather than clarify the message. A good book could have been a wonderful book simply with sharper and more focused prose.