Your Heart, Made New!
Renew My Heart, O God—Daily Devotions for Healing Your Heart is precisely that—a devotional dedicated to bring you hope, encouragement, healing, and the renewal of your heart, the wellspring of your soul. It was written to meet you in the midst of life’s trouble and pain and bring you the message of the light and love of Jesus Christ. May the words resonate within your heart and soul and lift you to a better place, and may you become the person of wellness and wholeness that God intended you to be.
It is my prayer that you will find God within these pages and that you will cultivate a new desire to pray consistently and to read God’s Word. It is reading His Word and being in His presence that will transform your life and renew the wounded heart within you. It’s time to exchange your sorrow and pain for His comfort and peace, your guilt and shame for His assurance and forgiveness, and your turmoil and despair for His hope and joy. Ezekiel 36:26a says, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you;”—it’s time to come and enter in—God’s waiting for you inside.
A daily devotional offers quotes drawn from Christian Scripture.
Horacek’s debut book has a simple goal: “to cultivate within the reader, a desire to consistently pray and read God’s Word and be transformed by it to become the whole person God intended you to be.” Using a typical devotional strategy, the author takes his readers day by day through a year, highlighting a different religious theme each month, illustrating that idea with quotes from Scripture, and then elaborating on those citations with spiritual and life lesson writings of his own. The author mostly eschews the seasonally themed narrative anchors of such an approach in favor of straightforward evangelical preaching of a bracingly old-fashioned kind. No matter what the date, Horacek is concerned with a more eternal narrative of Christian eschatology composed of equal parts optimism and encouragement (“The furnace of life brings about silver and gold of immense value”) and stern fundamentalist warnings: “Serve God acceptably, with reverence, awe, and godly fear. Although He is gracious and merciful, He will also ultimately destroy all His enemies with a consuming and devouring fire in the times of the end.” The version of Christianity presented here is a stark combination of daily affirmations and detailed descriptions of Christian end times, with the author repeatedly stressing the hopeful, participatory side of faith, telling his readers that Jesus “persevered and endured the scourge of the Cross” for them, and that “the Divine Whisper” confirms that they belong to God. “He knows the path of your life,” Horacek writes. “Let Him guide you in the way, moment by moment.” The author’s prose is vivid and fast-paced, and his amplifications on the Scriptural passages he chooses are always decisive and thought-provoking. His Christian target audience should find much to both challenge and comfort them in these pages.
A dramatic Christian devotional full of fire and brimstone—and hope and encouragement.
-- Kirkus Reviews
