A HEART SET FREE - Christina Fox (REVIEWED)

A HEART SET FREE: A Journey to Hope Through The Psalms of Laments by Christina Fox -- A REVIEW

A Heart Set Free of Christina Fox is a good read. She writes in a way that her readers could easily understand. It was biblical and principally, it is Christ-centered insofar as she interprets our individual lamentation and sorrows as reflective of the ineffably mournful experiences of the Man of Sorrows-- Jesus Christ. This book gives us a good deal of comfort because it affords us the privilege to revisit the Gospel almost page after page. I did not know that our negative emotions can still become a medium for us to see our great need in Christ.


Aside from that, I have also learned several things:

(1) Negative/disturbing emotions are inevitable. It happens both to Christians and non-Christians 
(2) That the existence of such can be accounted for as we read back its inception in the garden of Eden where the Fall of Man took place. 
(3) Because of the Fall, we experience heartaches, sorrows, griefs etc. . . With this in view, we could better underscore the fact of how much we have fallen from God, and in turn, appreciate all the more the redemption secured for us by Christ. 
(4) Given that negative emotions are inevitable, and sooner or later, they may probably intrude in our lives. But in response to this, we have to be honest with ourselves. We have to deal with them 
(5) Lamentation is the honest way to express the tension we experience in ourselves. The Psalmists are sincere lament-ers, so should we. 
(6) Finally, lamentation is also a blessing because like the Law its presence may lead us to see our dire need for the Spirit, and it forwards our gaze to the coming day where God himself would wipe away our tears and there be sorrows no more in the age to come.

The only theological setback of the book which is after all forgivable is that the author thinks that God is an emotional being. She reads our human emotions into the divine economy. I guess she has not spent more time studying the difficult subject of Divine Impassibility. It was really forgivable, nonetheless. Our theological knowledge undergoes phases of growth, after all, .

I would highly recommend the book to those who would want to understand how to redeem our emotions that may be used in a way that glorifies God.

~ Jezreel Madsa

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