Don’t be confused, the cover blurb
does not say ‘based on’, it says ‘inspired by’ the feature film War Room. As I write this the movie hasn’t been release
yet, so I haven’t seen it, but the book is about prayer, and the War Room is
apparently about prayer, so there you go.
As a pastor I’m always looking for
ways to encourage people to pray, and from time to time I also need to be reminded
myself of just how important prayer really is. With The Battle Plan for Prayer: From Basic Training to Targeted Strategies,
(B&H Publishing, 2015) Stephen and Alex Kendrick have written a book which
fills both of those needs.
The 35
chapters of this book cover a wide spectrum of prayer topics: what prayer is –
and isn’t. the why, what and how of prayer, even how to develop a prayer life,
and even a section called ‘Targets’ that lists people to pray for, and some
ideas on how to pray for them.
The suggestion
is to use this book as a type of devotional, reading one chapter a day, and spending
several weeks to go through it. Each chapter is short, and should only take a
few minutes to read. There is also a prayer at the end of each chapter,
focusing on the topic for the day. The several appendices cover a variety of
topics, and there are even discussion questions to help you go a little deeper or
at least prompt the reader to think through the passage carefully.
This is
an easy read, and provides a lot of useful information on prayer, but at times I
felt the authors should have gone a little deeper into the topic of the day. If
the intended audience is the group of people who will become interested in
prayer after seeing or hearing about the movie, then this may be all that is
needed, but if the readers of this book are already praying and interested in
further developing their prayer life, there are other books which will do more
than give them ideas.
I
received a copy of this book from Icon Media Group in exchange for a review.
4/5
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