Theories of development Book

This book is divided into four parts:

Part 1. Foundations
Part 2. Deeper Life
Part 3. Israel: God's Chosen People
Part 4. The Future

The book is set up like a workbook. Each lesson has a theme and a short introduction to that theme. There is also a memory verse to learn for each lesson that is supposed to be learned before moving on to the questions. Fill in the blank questions have bible verses that the reader looks up to answer. At the end of each lesson were the answers to the questions and a section that explains the answers. There is also a scoring scheme for the lessons. There is a progress assessment and review at the end of each Part of the book.

I liked this study because there was not a lot of author talk to read. The way it is set up really encourages readers to crack open the bible and read scripture. While I did not agree with all of the interpretations of scripture, as some of them seemed to be taken out of context, this was still a good study to get you going. Readers who really want to study will find themselves exploring more than just the verses listed to get a deeper understanding of ideas and issues that come up in the lessons. I liked that this could be done alone, too.

I had trouble with the memory verses because a lot of them seemed to start mid sentence and sometimes be taken out of what I considered to be too large and necessary of a context. It did not always seem like the memory scriptures were the best choices for conveying the intended messages and sentiments, so they were not as meaningful to me in relation to the lessons. That made it even more difficult to learn the memory verses. The memory work, as a result, definitely became my stumbling block to progress, and that is why it took me so long to finish this study.

Even if you do not agree with all of the author's interpretations and framing of the scripture, I still think that this is a good study to pick up and one that can be redone and reviewed more than once.