Wisdom for Life Devotional: 100 One-Minute Reflections from Psalms and Proverbs by Gail Burton Purath. B&H Publishing, 2023.
The Bible is filled with wisdom for our daily lives, and Gail Burton Purath has produced a devotional book that helpfully guides the reader through many of the Psalms and Proverbs.
“Wisdom for Life Devotional: 100 One-Minute Reflections from Psalms and Proverbs” is a highly readable and uplifting work that strengthens faith, challenges spiritual drift and steadies biblical conviction for the engaged reader.
Purath is the founder of Bible Love Notes ministry, and she has been a women’s Bible study teacher for many years. She holds a master of arts in leadership for evangelism and discipleship from Columbia Biblical Seminary. This devotional is especially targeted for women, and she writes with sensitivity and conviction.
Along the way, Purath helps the reader interpret the Psalms and Proverbs carefully and accurately. She explains the role of figurative and poetic expression. “Believing the Bible is the inerrant Word of God doesn’t mean taking every word literally. … We also recognize figurative language” (p. 11). She notes that the Book of Psalms, as well as Proverbs, uses expressions of symbolism, hyperbole, metaphor, etc. She draws a helpful distinction between the role of proverbs and promises, observing that “God doesn’t guarantee that we’ll always experience the desired results” of following His instructions as we would like, but that those principles are valuable nevertheless (p. 16).
There are 100 short devotionals in this book that are based on either a Psalm or Proverb from the Bible. Purath does not travel systematically through every chapter of these books of the Bible but addresses each devotional in a creative and personal manner. In this way, the reader becomes familiar with both books of Scripture like someone savoring individual meals from a favorite restaurant rather than trying to eat through the entire menu at one time.
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