About the Book

Book: Encountering God’s Heart For You

Author: Diane Stortz

Genre: Christian non-fiction, Devotional

Release Date: September 3, 2019

God put the Bible together for you, and he wants you to understand and know him better. But sometimes you can get lost in the details and miss the big picture. The Bible is more than just a collection of wisdom, instructions, and history. It’s one unified story of the incredible love of God!

Encountering God’s Heart for You takes you on a daily journey through the full narrative of Scripture in a year. And in the process, it will draw you nearer to God as you discover his love and compassion. It won’t cover every verse, or even every chapter, in the Bible, but by the time you’re through, you’ll have a strong grasp of what the Bible is all about.

Reading Scripture isn’t just a way to collect information or check something off a to-do list. Let this book bring you into God’s presence to better understand the Bible’s story of love, sacrifice, and redemption as he draws you to himself.

Click HERE to get your copy!

About the Author

Diane Stortz is a multipublished author who writes to make God’s wonders known to the next generation. Diane’s books for women, A Woman’s Guide to Reading the Bible in a Year and Encountering God’s Heart for You, both from Bethany House, encourage women to get to know God through His Word, the Bible. Her children’s releases include the best-selling Say & Pray Bible and I AM: 40 Reasons to Trust God, both from Tommy Nelson. Diane and her husband have two married daughters and five grandchildren—all boys! Visit her at www.DianeStortz.com.

More from Diane

Twenty years ago, I was invited to join a women’s Bible study group planning to read through the Bible in a year to get to know God.

Although I’d been a Christian for many years and had read many parts of the Bible and used the Bible in my work as an editor, I had never actually read the entire Bible.

I joined the group. We read about three chapters a day and met weekly on Monday nights to discuss what we’d read.

I’ve repeated that experience in various forms most years since then, and it has changed my life in so many ways. (Getting to know God does that, right?)

I’m convinced that one of the most loving things we can do for someone else is to invite and encourage her to become a lifelong reader of the Word, and to read it together.

That’s how I view my new devotional, Encountering God’s Heart for You. It’s an invitation to every woman to pick up her Bible, read along with me, and look together for all the ways God teaches us about himself on every page.

My Review

This beautiful, unique devotional book is one of the best I’ve come across. Reading from cover to cover takes readers through the whole story of the Bible, a novel approach that I personally have not encountered before. While not a substitute for the Word of God, this daily devotional is an excellent and fairly comprehensive supplement, suitable both for those who are familiar with the Bible and those who aren’t. Because each page-long entry is numbered from 1 to 365, there is no set start or end date, unlike many devotionals that are divided into month and day. Each day has a title and the books and chapters of the Bible being discussed, as well as a Scripture verse taken from that designation, and each reading concludes with a prayer. The short reading sometimes consists of Biblical context or the Biblical story, and at other times it focuses on a contemporary connection. I love everything about the formatting; while not every single chapter of the Bible is examined, the highlights are, and this book goes very well with my Bible reading plan this year, which consists of concurrently reading both Old and New Testament chapters daily and results in reading the entire Bible by the end of the year.

Diane Stortz’s “Encountering God’s Heart for You” is structured in such a way that it can serve as a supplemental go-to book for addressing and praying about specific needs or exploring certain books or chapters of the Bible. To this end, I do wish that there was a table of contents, but the chronology follows along closely enough (although not completely) to the Bible that readers should be able to locate certain books without much difficulty. There are two main sections: Encountering God’s Heart for You in the Old Testament and Encountering God’s Heart for You in the New Testament. Each of these two sections is further divided into categories. For the Old Testament these include: The Books of Law, The Books of History, The Books of Poetry and Wisdom, and The Books of Prophecy. For the New Testament: The Gospels, The Book of History (Acts), The Letters, and The Book of Prophecy (Revelation). My favorite during this read-through was The Books of Poetry and Wisdom, although I think that would be subject to change depending on what is going on in my life at the time. This is definitely a book that is going onto my favorites list and that I will refer back to frequently.

I received a complimentary copy of this book through Celebrate Lit and was not required to post a favorable review. All opinions are my own.