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What does Passion – How Christ’s Final Day Changes Your Everyday (Mike McKinley, The Good Book Company, 2013) promise?
In ten chapters Mike McKinley seeks to demonstrate how the events of the day of Christ’s crucifixion (recorded in Luke’s Gospel) have “a purpose for our lives today.” In unfolding this observation McKinley seeks to explain how the events of Jesus’ final hours and crucifixion reveal His unique role as our redeemer, while also opening up a variety of ways in which Christians are enabled and invited to live as God’s people, not in emulation of Christ, but in freedom responding to His work.
What I liked.
McKinley takes us through familiar accounts in Luke’s Gospel, and does so in a way which is timeless but fresh.
Biblical truths such as substitutionary atonement; Christ’s perfect obedience; His kingdom authority; the cross; forgiveness; and eternal destiny, (among others), flow from these straightforward explanations of Luke’s texts.
Encouraging faith in the work of Christ all the way through, each chapter contains distinct encouragements for everyday life, including assurance of God’s love; courage to know we are can be forgiven when we fail; hope to endure through seasons of affliction; trust to yield to His will as we follow Him and more.
With pastoral heart and grace, Passion outlines the freedom which Christ has won for us and then invites us to enter fully enter into that freedom, without making the Christian’s actions a bare emulation of Christ or spiritualising the accounts as springboards for sentimental applications.
Each chapter concludes with questions that helpfully and practically apply the content which has preceded it.
What I’m Not Sure About.
It’s a shame the book had to end. McKinley leaves the account at Luke 24:12 which means the final chapter is pretty densely packed and the impact which the resurrection has on everyday life is not able to be unpacked as expansively as the material in the preceding chapters. Maybe that’s another book. But our everyday life as Christians is just as informed by the resurrection as it is by the events described here. But it’s a very minor quibble. Very minor. I just wish there was more to read.

As a contemporary devotional work on the events surrounding the crucifixion, Passion is fixed in evangelical orthodoxy and contains practical applications which flow from the text and doctrines expounded. It is recommended for personal or group reading, for new or older Christians.

The mobi file review copy of Passion was provided by Cross Focused Reviews as part of a Passion blog review tour on behalf of The Good Book Company.
Provision of the review copy did not require the publication of a positive review.