Book Review: “Enemies of the Heart”

Andy Stanley’s Enemies of the Heart is a re-release of his former book, It Came from Within. Stanley’s words in this book are highly practical, as the book deals with areas that every person seems to struggle with at times.

Stanley tries to deal with four areas–guilt, anger, greed, and jealousy–that not only harm our relationships with others, but that break us down from the inside. His book seeks to show not only that these things are real, but that they are truly problematic, and that these four areas will destroy us if we leave them untouched.

In my opinion, the best part of the book is the middle section, where the author shares what these four “enemies” do to us, and how they each have a connection with how we either “owe” something to someone else, or how they “owe” us something. (I’m being vague, because I don’t want to give away that part of the book.) These middle four chapters are a must-read.

Overall, the book is highly practical, but seems to lack the Biblical references that I expected going in. Having heard Stanley preach via podcast many times, this wasn’t too surprising, but I thought maybe his books would be a little different. Still, for a practical book, this volume is hard to beat.

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NOTE: I received a free copy of this book from Multnomah’s “Blogging for Books” program in exchange for a review. The review is fully  my opinion.