Become A Better You Review Final Post

I can’t do it! I can’t do 3 more posts on this book. I have finished the book despite hearing Joel Osteen’s voice in my head on every word. This will be my final post. For a few reasons. One I think I might have to answer to God if I put anymore of my thoughts into this book. At some point stewardship and common sense kick in. Also, the book becomes very repetitive. The repetition begins in Chapter 2 and by chapter 20 or so you have heard it all. Twice.

I do want to address a few parts of the end of the book and then give my overall opinion of this book.

It took 287 pages, but God final gets a chapter. Step 5 “Embrace the Place Where You Are” ends with chapter 25 titled “God is In Control”. I personally found this chapter comical. This book has 31 chapters. On 60 Minutes and Larry King, Mr. Osteen himself has declared it to be a self-help book . It has 30 chapters on how YOU can make YOUR life better. Then he gives us one chapter about how God is in control. What makes this comical is 6 chapters later he directly contradicts himself in the chapter called “From Believing to Expecting”. This chapter is the usual, name it and claim it, believe and recieve, if you don’t pray expecting nothing will happen jargon of the TBN crowd. It has been package to be less offensive to the usual skeptic, but it is just a nuanced version of the same ole tired charismatic theology and I use the term theology lightly. If you believe enough and have enough faith things will happen. That theology places soul responsibility for the outcome of our lives on us, and reduces God to a cosmic genie waiting in his room to fulfill our every desire. In this theology God is not really in control. Man is in control, and this is obvious throughout the book. I think Tim Challies summed it up very well in his review when he wrote. the book follows this format: “The way to ______ is not to ______. Instead, you need to ______. You might say, ‘But Joel, I can’t do ______ and ______.’ I know it’s hard. Rise to the challenge. Don’t let yourself get beat up or knocked down. God has so much more for you.”

Become a Better You is lacking. Tim Challies referred to it as crust with no substance in the middle, but I believe that is being too kind. Of course I am sure anyone who knows us both would say Tim is nicer than I am. I can’t even give it crust. I might and I mean might be able to place it in the dough category.

This book is missing a few key elements.

1. Anything uniquely Christian
2. Anything about Christ
3. The Gospel
4. Actual biblical theology
5. Anything that will really help you become a better you

It does have these elements.

1. It exalts man rather than God
2. It places happiness in the hands of good living rather than a life surrendered to Christ
3. It makes happiness in life the soul responsibility of the individual
4. It continually confuses the concepts of joy and happiness
5. It places our success in our ability to believe in ourselves.
6. It lowers God to the level of a genie who sits in heaven waiting to fulfill our every desire.

I honestly started this process hoping to find something redeeming about Joel and his ministry. He has a tremendous influence in Western society and I was hoping to find Christ among the fluff. He is not there. Joel Osteen is not preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In fact I could find no Gospel at all, unless you count self-help and positive thinking. There is nothing redeeming about this book. It possibly could bring temporary encouragement at some level, but at what cost. There are all sorts of religions people take solace in that in the end will send them their doom. This book is no different. It is not Christianity. Its not even good religion. Over the years I have read all kinds of books that I would consider heresy. So far this is the worst of the lot.

I have nothing good to say about this book, but this JC Ryle quote from “Holiness” is a good way to conclude.

“A religion without doctrine or dogma is a thing which many are fond of talking of in the present day. It sounds very fine at first. It looks very pretty at a distance. But the moment we sit down to examine and consider it, we shall find it a simple impossibility. We might as well talk of a body without bones and sinews. No man will ever be anything or do anything in religion, unless he believes something…No one ever fights earnestly against the world, the flesh and the devil, unless he has engraven on his heart certain great principles which he believes.”