When Godly People Do Ungodly Things

Short Review: I have realized that I am reading too many White male authors. Nothing wrong with White male authors as a category, but when they become too high of a percentage of my reading, I stop hearing voices and perspectives I should be hearing. So I have been looking back through my unread books to try to balance that reading a bit. I picked up a number of Beth Moore books a few years ago when she made all of her books available for free on kindle. I have not read a whole Beth Moore book previously and this seemed the most interesting by title.

I am certainly glad I read it. There are three basic parts. The first section is about how Satan uses temptation and attack to harm us as Christians. I thought this section was too apocalyptic, not that the point isn't right, but that I am not sure that we are in the end times and I think the description of this as a particularly evil age is not particularly accurate.

The second section is about defending against temptation. This is pretty good. I think there is a lot of helpful suggestions here although there are places I wanted some different emphasis.

The third section is about restoration. I appreciate that Moore is focusing on the personal individual. She is writing about restoring the reader after sin. She does not want to talk about restoring someone else or evaluating someone else's sin or future ministry. I get her point, but I think we have to have that discussion. The New Testament has both, do not judge and you must judge. They are trying to make different points. And I think that while we should not descend into torch bearing mobs with every social media account of sin, the church does have a responsibility to root out sinful leaders and hold them accountable. I do believe in restoration as Moore talks about. But restoration after a significant process (which is what she is talking about). And I believe that restoration to ministry does not necessarily mean restoration to an equally public ministry.

When Godly People Do Ungodly Things is now out of print and not available for new purchase on kindle. I would like to see it re-written and re-released with some new perspective. But I do think that even with some caveats, this was well worth reading.

My full, just over 1500 word post about the book is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/when-godly-people-do-ungodly-things/