God’s greatest blessing
Frank Allred
Grace Publications
208 pages, £8.99
ISBN: 978-0-94646-288-9
Star rating : 2
The doctrine of the Christian’s adoption as a child of God has well been described as our highest blessing.
Frank Allred suggests that adoption embraces all of the other blessings of the gospel and likens it to the invisible steel framework that holds together a tower. The analogy is a good one.
After early chapters discussing the nature of God’s family, the problem of the slavery of sin, and the question as to who are the children of God, the author sets out to show how redemption, justification, regeneration and sanctification are all linked to adoption.
In later chapters he then goes on to spell out some of the implications of being in God’s family, for example, the need to be conquering sin in our lives and maintaining discipline both in the church and home.
In this connection, the author’s Anglicanism shows through, and it was slightly surprising to see Grace Publications publishing a book advancing a ‘mixed membership’ view of the local church.
Throughout the book, the author illustrates his points extensively by means of personal anecdotes, some of which are more helpful than others. This reviewer found the excessively chatty style increasingly irksome; it detracted from, rather than enhanced, one’s appreciation of the glorious subject being discussed.
The penultimate chapter of the book, ‘The glorious freedom of God’s children’, speaks of the eternal prospects of the children of God. It is a helpful section and would have been a good note on which to end.
Instead, a final chapter, ‘What now?’, which is intended to stir the reader ‘to make progress in our Christian pilgrimage in preparation for the great day’ is mostly taken up with an explanation of how the author came to be disillusioned with the ‘higher life’ teaching of the Keswick movement. It is all sound teaching, but a rather strange and anti-climactic note on which to end.
David Cooke
Banbury
