"NIV Busy Dad's Bible"

TITLE: NIV Busy Dad's Bible: Daily Inspiration Even If You Only Have One Minute
AUTHOR: NIV Translators and the Zondervan publishing team.
PUBLISHER: Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011, (1216 pages).

A Bible passage per day. A 'thought-starter' per week. This publication tries to inculcate a conscientious desire to study, to pray, and to read the Bible. As the main publisher of the widely used New International Version of the Holy Bible, Zondervan has continued to provide many variants of study helps to accompany the Bible. Targeting age groups, interest groups, and now, family groups, this Bible contains 52 "thought-starters" to help busy men who are also dads to get through their day, and at the same time, to keep a biblical idea in mind for the day/week. The devotional thoughts cover about 13 different topics relevant for the typical dad. The topics include theological ones, learning who God is, to the nature of man and sin. It includes social matters such as relationship, what it means to be a father, marriage, and others. It also highlights the building up of character, a quality that is critical to leadership in the family and in society. Other topics include stewardship, trust, guilt and forgiveness, and many more. Carved into 10-minutes and 5-minutes plans, the topics are arranged in such a way as to encourage busy dads to pick up a thought and go.

My Thoughts

I am normally a little skeptical about Bibles designed around the conveniences of people, instead of people intentionally reading and studying the Bible as a discipline. It makes me wonder, if God is so important, why are we only trying to allocate a few minutes per day for God?  It turns the Word of God into some kind of a tool to fit into the schedule of a busy person, instead of the person trying to mold himself according to the Word of God. The premise of such a help book is thus flawed. Having said that, I understand why the publishers have produced such a help-Bible. It is basically to encourage Bible literacy. It aims to help dads and busy people to at least make time for Bible reading, thinking, praying to God. A little reading or praying is better than no praying or reading. Moreover, the NIV Bible is largely left intact, without any colourful boxes or distracting images that may take attention away from the words. The title of the book is rather unfortunate. It is still an NIV Bible. Perhaps, the words "Busy Dad's" can be relegated to the sidelines so that readers will know it is still a Bible after all. An "NIV Bible (with help-notes for busy dads)" sound like a more appropriate title.

The NIV used is still based on the 1984 version instead of the recent 2011 version. This is still the most popular and most accepted versions among all the NIV variants.

My rating below is on the study helps in this book.

Rating: 4 stars of 5.

conrade

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This book is provided to me free by Zondervan and NetGalley without any obligation for a positive review. All opinions offered above are mine unless otherwise stated or implied.