Lucado on Grace

Max Lucado's recent work entitle Grace was rather disappointing to me.  Lucado has a gift of turning a good phrase and offering simplistic explanations, but those strengths can also become a weakness.  The subtitle of his book is "more than we deserve, greater than we can imagine."  If God's grace is greater than we can imagine, then a book studying it should have more complexity.

To further explain, look at the structure of the book -- it has 11 short chapters and a conclusion that cover approximately 150 pages.  While that may sound like average chapter length, it is not.  Between each chapter, there are 5 "wasted" pages:  a full blank page that ends the previous chapter, a full page with the title of the next chapter, a blank page behind it, a page of quotes and/or Bible verses, and then a blank page behind it.  If you do the math, that approximates to 45-50 wasted pages.  So, in total, Lucado spent about 100 pages to describe what he calls God's greatest gift.  The lack of attention to such a powerful subject leaves me wondering if this book was rushed to publication.

The strongest part of the book is the readers' guide at the end that allows you to dig much deeper.  Why the book did not have more depth but left it to the concluding guide does not make sense to me.  There may have been a greater purpose; and if it was done purposefully, the structure should have been explained somewhere in a preface or the acknowledgments.

Despite my shortcomings, Grace is a quick read that offers some nice quotes.  It does not, however, provide deep exigesis of Biblical passages on grace; so we have a book that offers man's thoughts on grace rather than seeing how this topic permeates all of the New Testament.  In my opinion, this was not Lucado's best effort.

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