Jesus calls us to be salt and light. It can be easy to forget that and get lost in the weeds in the midst of serving the Lord in whatever place He has called us.

Many of us look for or receive a new devotional book to start off a new year. At this point in my life, I have quite a collection. Some of them I revisit over and over again. Others are good, but they don’t challenge me to apply the Word or keep the main things in focus as well.

Devo For The Rest of Us by Vince Antonucci took me on a forty-day journey that drew me in, challenged me, encouraged me, and reminded me of the key elements of my Christian life and experience.

Vince states, “You are loved by a limitless God! Yet many of us don’t live our everyday lives in that reality. The ‘rest of us’ subconsciously believe half-truths about God and ourselves, sabotaging our lives in subtle and no-so-subtle ways.”

To help “the rest of us” have our hearts, minds, and spirits aligned with the Lord Vince led me through forty days of devotions that did not disappoint me. Since I am not a newcomer to devotionals that is significant.

Devo For The Rest of Us invites the reader to take an eight-week trek, five days a week to allow the Lord to bring your relationship with Him into better focus. He does so not through preachy religious language, but foundational themes of the Christian life. Then Vince uses illustrations that can help apply those themes or resurrect them in our daily life.

The eight-week themes include:

• Hungry
• Story
• New
• Abide
• Community
• Obstacles
• Questions
• Missions

Through these themes, Vince imparts knowledge of the truth and seeks to encourage us to adopt habits that help us to live more effective lives as a son or daughter of the Lord.

When I finished the book, I felt refreshed and renewed, my heart lighter and full of joy! Vince wrote in a style that was inviting and real with personal stories and examples that enriched each day’s reading and correlated with the theme of the week.

Vince Antonucci is pastor of an innovative church, Verve, that seeks to reach people who work and live around the Las Vegas Strip. The television series, God for the Rest of Us chronicles his work there.

This book was provided and published by Tyndale House Publishing, in exchange for my review.