The title and cover photo of pastor Ed Dobson’s The Year of Living Like Jesus: My Journey of Discovering What Jesus Would Really Do immediately bring to mind its inspiration—A.J. Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically. In fact, Jacobs wrote the foreword to Dobson’s book.
Dobson acknowledges the source of his inspiration in the introduction for this yearlong journal. Whereas Jacobs, a nonreligious Jew, set out to chronicle what it would be like to live out what the Bible says literally, Dobson set out to live more intentionally the way Jesus, who was also a Jew, did.
The inevitable comparison with Jacobs’ work ends there, however. Jacobs’ writing was meant to be a humorous study in cultural oddities, but Dobson’s is a sincere attempt to reflect an intentional effort to live more like Jesus.
The book is helpful for those who want to learn more about the culture in which Jesus lived. And Dobson’s personal reflections on living with a terminal, slowly progressing form of Lou Gehrig’s disease are especially poignant. His message is worth hearing.
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