Welcome to this third book review. I am Uri Brito, Pastor of Providence Church in Pensacola, Fl.
I have just concluded this fine book entitled The Search for God and Guinness by New York Times best-seller Stephen Mansfield. The book is a biography of the beer, but also of the family that changed the world.
The book begins with a fascinating history of beer in the world and how beer has essentially been a driving force for good and also a driving force in discovering a new world.
What Mansfield does in this book is trace the Guinness family from its founding to the modern day. He establishes the trajectory of this family, but he does not paint a perfect picture, but a realistic picture. The reality is that the Guinness family began with a vision; a vision of charity, a vision of hope, and a vision of godliness. By doing this, the Guinness family rescues beer from its bad name. They rescue beer from its abuse and puts it in its proper place as a gift from God to us and to the world.
Mansfield also discusses in one of his chapters the idea that wealth is can do a whole lot of good to societies. The Guinness family is an example of that; using their wealth to suppress some of the darkest moments in Irish history, but not just feeding the poor (as socialists want to do), but also teaching the poor to not be satisfied with poverty. It is one thing to be poor and it is another thing to live as if poverty is the only alternative. The story of Guinness is the story of the good of the free market. How corporations can have a positive effect in society, as long as it is not controlled by the State is the case today in this corporatist administration.
Mansfield ends the book with several applications to our own lives following the Guinness model. I will list two that I found particularly helpful:
First, discern the ways of God for life and business. The Guinness family has historically been divided into brewers, those in the beer business; preachers, those in the God business; and bankers, those in the gold business, as Mansfield puts it. The reality of course, is that they are all in the God business. They all serve the greater purpose of fulfilling their vocations to the glory of God. Mansfield says that what made the Guinness family so influential was their commitment to following the will of God in their lives. The Guinnesses did not think they were blessed financially for their own benefit (though some of them did), but the majority thought that their financial blessedness was for the sake of others. They asked the question: Why am I here and why do I have this wealth?
And secondly, the Guinnesses thought generationally. The application is that each generation has something else to contribute that the previous generation did not. We should expect as father and mothers that our children will take our faith to the next level. They will be more productive and godlier than our own generation, and that this pattern is passed on to a thousand generation to come.
The book is: The Search for God and Guinness. I strongly recommend it. Read it. Drink it. And Learn from it. Cheers. We will see you next week.
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Pastor Joel Hunter on CNN American Morning: Obama's Faithby andrescik1,123 views
You say well...so I like you to keep uploading more and more reviews and I would like to hear more "about the life" books rather than about horror and science-fiction ones. Like Life of Pi.. or some other philosophical books (good that if it's from the eastern wave)
cjnavaneet 1 year ago