The Wow of His Word: God’S Amazing Handbook for Happiness

By Edwina Doyle

The Wow of His Word answers tough questions about Christianity and the Bible while explaining why the Bible is the handbook for happiness. While sharing her own spiritual journey, the author shares fascinating stories of martyrs, missionaries, reformed atheists, revivals, and miraculous healings that will spark faith in unbelievers and rekindle that of believers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: May 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781490873466

Edwina Doyle

After a near-death experience in Central America, the author returned with a passion to know God and that the Bible is true, which resulted in years of reading and research. A retired teacher and former speechwriter for the Kentucky Department of Education, Edwina Doyle is the author of numerous books. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky, and can be contacted for speaking engagements and book signings at [e-mail].

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Copyright © 2015 Edwina Doyle.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Scripture quotations taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org)

Profits from the sale of this book will be used to gift copies to those who need to know the truth about the Holy Bible and Christianity.

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.westbowpress.com

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4908-7348-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-7347-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-7346-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015904409

WestBow Press rev. date: 6/22/2015

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Contents

Chapter 1: Hummingbirds of Happiness

Chapter 2: What’s Real about the Spiritual Deal?

Chapter 3: Religion’s Bad Rap

Chapter 4: The Bible: Blockbuster or Baloney?

Chapter 5: Life after Death? Really?

Chapter 6: Is Martyrdom Madness?

Chapter 7: What’s Love Got to Do with It?

Chapter 8: God’s Touch Transforms Much

Chapter 9: The Faith and Forgiveness Factors

Chapter 10: Is Prayer a Spare?

Chapter 11: Revival for Survival

Chapter 12: Ready for the Eternity Fraternity?

Appendix I: God’s Promises and Prodding

Appendix II: Books of the Bible Abbreviated

Appendix III: Resources to Spark Your Spirit

Dedicated to Pastor Steve Pearson

and my family at Church of the Savior.

Special thanks to Dr. Steve Dwinnells and

Dr. Diana Pope for their loving encouragement.

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"…but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts,

always being ready to make a defense to everyone

who asks you to give an account for the hope

that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence…"

1 Peter 3:15

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Chapter 1

Hummingbirds of Happiness

"They do not know nor do they understand;

they walk about in darkness; all the foundations

of the earth are shaken" (Ps. 82:5).

T hey flutter beyond our reach, their brilliant hues enticing, their delicate wings mesmerizing. Hummingbirds, just like happiness, tantalize and tease our senses and then leave us disappointed but wanting more. I have stalked the rush of the fleeting flush of happiness all over the world. Sampling extensive smorgasbords of religions and relationships, I sought happiness in the perfect relationship with the perfect mate while avoiding the perfect relationship with God—or with myself.

If asked what we want in life, most of us would respond that we want to be happy, and yet few of us really understand what that means. Because happiness based on external factors is fleeting, we can only be happy for a brief time. Our happy is a balloon that attracts us with its bright color and lightness, but it’s filled with air and can burst in a second.

Because I had never received encouragement or praise from my parents, I was convinced that I needed a man to validate my worthiness to be loved, an impossible task because I was too wounded from a lifetime of rejection and verbal abuse to believe that I deserved to be loved. It is a small wonder that I failed miserably at romantic relationships more times than I care to admit.

Years ago at the Jesse Stuart Writer’s Conference in Murray, Kentucky, I attended a class taught by author Harriette Arnow. In her famous book The Dollmaker, Arnow’s main character, Gurney, says, I’ve been readen th’ Bible an’ a hunten God fer a long while—off an’ on—but it ain’t so easy as picken up a nickel off th’ floor. Most of my life, I, like Gurney, was always hunten for God, but I was always too hardheaded and arrogant to surrender my woefully pathetic will to the God who literally hung the moon.

Throughout my life I have read thousands of books, and I have written a few. A few years ago, while promoting my book Midlife Monkeylala in Honduras about my midlife escape to live and teach on Roatan Island, I almost died of anaphylactic shock. When I miraculously survived, due to the prayers of two devout young women, I was deeply humbled and seriously ready to throw up a white flag of surrender, to shout, Okay, Jesus, come into my heart and take over! I’m finally ready to admit that I can’t do this myself. You were the only human being in history who ever got it right, so I want to follow Your example—what You said, what You did, and how You did it!

Immediately, my life radically changed—for the better. I finally got it, that there’s not a spot where God is not, and that He is the Father who loves me and has been waiting for me to love Him back. I now know that what kept me from finding God wasn’t that He’s hard to find. I was the one who was stubbornly hiding from God; after all, a relationship with Jesus would mean transformation and emergence from my comfortable cocoon of ignorance and unaccountability. I finally had hope and a restored relationship with God so that the darkness of this world could never defeat me.

I came to understand that if we don’t have a standard of absolute authority outside of ourselves, then we make ourselves our own standard of authority. When our road contains no center stripe of absolute truth, it becomes littered with casualties of confusion. Limited wisdom and abundant emotional responses kept me on a rickety rollercoaster subject to the whims of society and my selfish desires.

When I finally embraced the truth, I was set free from the harmful repercussions of my sinful disobedience. I returned home from Honduras hungry to know God and His Word, and after a few months of reading and studying God’s Holy Bible, I came to appreciate the most awesome book ever written by the world’s greatest author. In fact, I discovered that the Bible is the only book that, after opening it, the author immediately shows up! With every new insight, I thought, Wow! I wish I had known that earlier in my life! and Wow! If I’d known what was in this book and how to apply it, I could have saved myself a lifetime of bad choices and unnecessary grief.

I openly admit that I have been a big-time sinner, even when I sometimes thought I was a big-time do-gooder, so you can be assured that this book was not written by a notable pastor, theologian, or even a highly evolved Christian. If it had been, it would probably contain religious jargon and deep doctrinal thought, and the people who could benefit the most from this book probably wouldn’t want to read it.

I am just an ordinary person, a retired teacher and writer, who has had the privilege of reading an extraordinary book that has changed—and continues to change—my life. I have always loved telling others about the latest good book I’ve read, so just think of The Wow of His Word as the most important book report you will ever read.

The Wow of His Word is for unbelievers, wherever they may be—whether in prison or in a halfway house, hospital, housing project, corporate office, upscale suburb, or mansion. It’s for educators, politicians, professionals, and blue-collar workers who are muddling through life without a mission and without inner peace, and who have not yet found their way home to God’s loving heart. It’s for everyone who has hit rock bottom, which, by the way, happens to be a solid foundation for rebuilding. It’s also for everyone who is on top of the world, which is a precarious place to be, because with no way up, there are only lots of ways down.

This book is also a reminder for those Christians who are more concerned with being comfortable than following Christ’s mandates to love others as ourselves; to forgive those who have hurt us; to sacrifice to help others; and to share our faith with unbelievers and those who have never heard the Gospel. Even the most spiritually advanced Christians sometimes need to be reminded that to be a Christian is to follow Christ’s teachings and His model of selflessness. Evangelist D.L. Moody once said, Out of 100 men, one will read the Bible; the other 99 will read the Christian. Although I desire to be a Christian who is read as one, I need daily divine nudges to keep my ego and nearsighted agenda out of the way of God’s higher desire.

I want to share what I’ve learned about the most loved yet most feared book ever written—what I wish someone had told me in a way that I could have understood. I’m like a kid on Christmas morning who just opened the greatest present she ever received and can’t wait to tell everybody about it.

While most books are for our information, the Bible is for our soulful and behavioral transformation. If God’s Word can change this sorry sinner, then it can transform anybody. After all, the Bible has been infused with God’s Holy Spirit, and God has promised that if we open our hearts to His Word, He will help us understand it.

Mature Christians are devoted to their faith because they have experienced God’s power and how God’s Word allows them to love and forgive in ways not available to the unbeliever. Mature Christians don’t feel compelled to bang people over the head with a Bible but rather to love people with its spirit.

The Bible is irrefutably the greatest book ever written for excellent reasons. No book has changed so many lives, cultures, and nations. In fact, Christianity is the root of Western civilization and set the noble standards that have made America great. More ideas, wisdom, literature, philosophy, and art have been inspired by the Bible than any other book. After Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1439, the Bible was made available to the general public and over the years has been published in more than two thousand languages. Billions of people have agreed that the Bible lives up to its BIBLE acronym: Basic Information Before Leaving Earth.

Since the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Old Testament, existed in His day, Jesus taught from it and appealed to the Bible’s authority by saying it is written eighty times as documented in the New Testament. More than three thousand times, the Bible says, Thus says the Lord. Jesus, the greatest person who ever lived, claimed that Scripture cannot be broken until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished (Matt. 5:18). Jesus specifically acknowledged the importance of studying the Hebrew Bible.

Christianity, without a doubt, has been the greatest gift to humankind. Certainly, much of the goodness that we find in the world can be attributed to Christians. In pre-Christian Rome, children were sacrificed to idols, left outside to die of exposure to the elements or wild animals, and sold as slaves. Women were often treated with less consideration than livestock. When Jesus showed such tender concern for children, women, slaves, and the poor and diseased, He set a higher code of regard for these oppressed people.

Most of the world’s charities were sparked by the love of Jesus Christ. The YMCA in 1844 and the YWCA in 1855 ministered to the physical and spiritual needs of the urban poor. In 1887, when a Christian named General William Booth noticed homeless men sleeping on London Bridge, he founded the Salvation Army. Florence Nightingale founded the Red Cross out of a Christian desire to help those suffering in the Crimean War. The list of Christians who have blessed the world in significant ways could wrap around the globe countless times.

Because of modern mobility and financial independence, families and individuals are more isolated than ever before; loneliness and depression are unfortunate badges of American society. Mother Teresa, who witnessed leprosy and other horrible diseases, often said that loneliness was one of the world’s greatest diseases. Only in the 21st century could we have 5,000 people on our Facebook pages and still be achingly lonely—maybe not even knowing the people who live next door.

The mass media dupe youth into worshipping idols of fame, wealth, and instant gratification (an idol is anything that replaces God in our heart). Sadly, even those who attain what they think they want eventually discover—just like King Solomon in the Old Testament—the emptiness of it all—that all is vanity (Eccl. 1:2). The novelty, excitement, and adrenalin rushes create addictions for more of the drug of diversion.

Many attempt to find happiness in an electronic jungle by flipping through hundreds of cable stations to feed sports fanaticism, or just to be saturated by a potpourri of pleasure. Twittering and tweeting, blogging, and bleating fill us with monkey chatter that drowns out any possible inner dialogue. People are plugged into I-phones, I-pads, I-pods, I-watches, e-readers, and the Internet, desperate to hear and to be heard but seldom ever saying or hearing anything meaningful. Even parents often prefer spending time with casual cyber friends than with their children. Many people morph God into a genie that is rubbed when they want something and mistakenly think that when moral values change, that God changes along with them. It appears Boston College professor William Kilpatrick may be right when he called our children moral illiterates in his book Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong.

As the world’s moral compass continues to cloud, our youth turn to movies, sports, video games, pornography, gambling, music, drugs, and alcohol to distract them from their unhappiness and emptiness. Billions of dollars are spent annually to promote increasingly violent and profane methods of numbing us to the world’s ugly underbelly. According to Forbes magazine, the highest paid actor is Robert Downey, Jr., who earns $75 million a year to star in Marvel’s Iron Man and Avengers films. Tom Cruise and Tiger Woods are in the same tax bracket; but gangsta rapper Dr. Dre earns a whopping $110 million for interjecting a few incoherent thoughts infused with nauseatingly nasty words. And yet, most ministers make less money than teachers, who are themselves deplorably underpaid. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who finds this just plain wrong on many levels.

Many people also look for happiness in a lucrative vocation, thinking that a prestigious title, membership in a country club, and a bountiful bank account will entice that elusive hummingbird of happiness to lite on their shoulders. Even if we attain an affluent lifestyle, it is doubtful that we will ever find genuine happiness—unless we have satisfied our innate longing to have a relationship with our spiritual Father—unless we find the spiritual source that fills the hole in our soul. Fortunately, Christians have the peace of mind that everything that is truly important