This post contains affiliate links
About a year ago, I began reading Lysa Terkeurst’s book The Best Yes. I wasn’t too familiar with Lysa so I did some research and was disappointed to learn that her church permits her to have authority teaching over men, which I don’t believe to be in line with 1 Timothy 2:12 (please note, however, that women are called to teach women who are younger in the faith as commanded in Titus 2:3). My discouragement grew as I realized that her church also used her book rather than the Bible for teaching during regular church services.
With the release of Lysa’s latest book, Uninvited: Living Loved When You Feel Less Than, Left Out, and Lonely, I was curious to see how she would encourage readers to handle rejection Biblically.
Uninvited begins with Lysa telling the story of how she personally experienced rejection from her father as a child and how it impacted her as she became an adult. Uninvited is largely autobiographical with a bit of Bible sprinkled in.
Uninvited does contain some truths presented in its pages including, “He (Jesus) was betrayed, mocked, abandoned, beaten, crucified, and buried. . . His crucifixion on the cross became the defeat of death. His broken body became the resurrection hope for the world,” (pg. 175).
However, the bulk of this book leaves much to be desired when it comes to understanding how to handle rejection the way Jesus did and would. The tone of the book is saturated with feel-good, self-help advice. Uninvited seems to encourage Christian women to pull themselves up by their bootstraps rather than fix their eyes on Jesus (Hebrews 12:1-4) who Isaiah 53:3 tells us, “. . . was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces. . .”
An additional concern I have with Uninvited is that Lysa claims to receive direct revelation from God – “And that’s when a very clear sentence popped into my head. You aren’t set aside, Lysa. You are set apart. It wasn’t audible. And it wasn’t my own thought. I knew it was a thought assigned by God that I needed to ponder” (pg. 102). Although it is Biblically true that God’s people are set apart, in the sense that He has redeemed them for Himself, Lysa’s verbiage is troubling because it makes it seem as though God spoke to her outside of the Bible. Claiming to receive direct revelation from God is a problem that is all too common in Christian literature today, especially that which is aimed at women. Her statement made me think of multiple passages of Scripture that warn against adding to what God has said in His Word (Deuteronomy 4:2, Deuteronomy 12:32, Proverbs 30:6, Revelation 22:18). Although I don’t believe Lysa did that, I do believe it is very important to be careful with such wording.
Peter was a disciple of Christ and His close friend, the one upon whom He would build His church. Although Peter physically heard God, he still urged believers to consider Scripture more trustworthy than his experience. This same thinking should be applied anytime someone claims to receive any sort of revelation from God apart from Scripture.
These are some of the issues I had with Uninvited and therefore I do not recommend it.
I received Uninvited compliments of BookLook Bloggers in exchange for my honest review.
Leave a Reply