Extraordinary

John Bevere's new book, Extraordinary (The Life You're Meant to Live), encourages readers to step into the unknown, embrace the divine empowerment, and live an extraordinary life. Thoroughly Scriptural (though some might be unnerved by the way he occasionally speaks of hearing God's voice...with great clarity and in great detail), Extraordinary guides readers toward the truly extraordinary life Christ-followers are meant to live.

For example, in the first chapter, just five pages into the book, he makes the startling observation: "In contrast to the present reputation of Christians, one of the great struggles the early church encountered was convincing people that believers were not superheroes or gods." He's right. All of us fall far short of the kind of life that was apparently the course de rigeur for the apostles, at least.

Having read Bevere's earlier books with great appreciation, I found this book (strangely enough) a little less than extraordinary, to be honest. It didn't grip me or inspire me. And many of the ideas the author presented as thrilling fresh discoveries were far from new (such as, "Grace is getting what we don't deserve, whereas mercy involves not getting what we deserve," and "The fabulous news is that God has given us the resources we need to live a holy life that pleases Him!").

But it could be just me. After all, far better, smarter men and women than me (like Joyce Meyer, T. D. Jakes, Ed Young, and Jack Hayford, among others) endorse Extraordinary. And it may just be that Bevere's story, in chapter 14, of the day he and his fellow ministry staff turned back a raging, destructive wildfire with the prayer of faith is worth the price of the whole book. It's a story he concludes with the question, "How much are we not receiving for our own lives or, more importantly, to assist others in our arena of influence because we are not living by faith?"

That is definitely extraordinary.

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