Don’t Give the Enemy a Seat At Your Table by Louie Giglio

Nonfiction. 208 Pages. 4 Stars

Synopsis:

Louie Giglio helps you find encouragement, hope, and strength in the midst of any valley as you reject the enemy voices of fear, rage, lust, insecurity, anxiety, despair, temptation, or defeat.

Scripture is clear: the Enemy is a liar who will stop at nothing to tempt you into poor decisions and self-defeating mindsets, making you feel afraid, angry, anxious, or defeated. It is all too easy for Satan to weasel his way into a seat at the table intended for only you and your King. But you can fight back.

Don’t Give the Enemy a Seat at Your Table outlines the ways to overcome those lies so you can find peace and security in any challenging circumstance or situation. With the same bold, exciting approach to Scripture as employed in Goliath Must Fall and his other previous works, pastor Louie Giglio examines Psalm 23 in fresh ways, highlighting verse 5: “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.”

You can find freedom from insecurity, temptation, and defeat—if you allow Jesus, the Shepherd, to lead the battle for your mind and heart. This spiritual warfare book for those who are leery of spiritual warfare books will resonate with Louie’s core Passion tribe as well as with Christians of all ages who want to live a triumphant life in God.

My Review:

Honestly, I have mixed feelings about this book. My bible study group is going through the book and the accompanying book study. This is the first of Louie Giglio’s works I’ve encountered.

Initially, I really didn’t love the book. It’s redundant and repetitive and uses a lot of metaphors for the same point over and over again. But the second half/last third of the book I enjoyed much more. I think Louie spent a lot more time setting the initial idea of a table than he needed to, but once he finally started building out from that, I did enjoy the book more.

And let me be clear, I still really liked how he set up the table metaphor in the first place. I just didn’t love the additional 800 metaphors for each element along the way. Some of them were helpful, actually, and the anecdotes made his points clearly. But at a certain point, the sheer number of them became monotonous. In the latter half of the book, he dropped the metaphor onslaught and started just to make his point and use scripture a lot more.

I went into the book expecting it to be a study of Psalm 23, because that was how it was presented to me, but really, I don’t think that’s an accurate description. Yes, the book starts with the Psalm and dives into parts of it to draw out this metaphor of a table and a personal invitation with the king, but truly, the book centers around just a few verses within the Psalm and then builds out from there. I thought a lot of Giglio’s points were powerful and the heart of the book is a beautiful call to focusing on Christ. There was much in this book I drew out and was encouraged by. And, again, many of the visual representations did actually give me a new way to think about the points he made.

I will say, I didn’t love all of the modern phrasing for some of the examples and metaphors. I get that Giglio is trying to relate to current culture, and some of it worked well–like the drive by coffee date. Excellent point, clearly illustrated. But some of it felt a little flippant (which, to be fair, our culture is often flippant) and I personally as a reader wanted to go deeper, be more serious–and be taken more seriously. Maybe I’m just a little old school, but I didn’t love the tone of the book.

Additionally, I’ll just point out that while the video series has been really well done so far (we’re still going through those cause I finished the book early. I’ll review the study book when we do finish the proper schedule), the video series is very repetitive with the book and the study book. All three resources at once were a bit much for me. They all three pull directly from each other and it just didn’t feel necessary. I might recommend the book and the video series (or maybe the study book and the videos, but that doesn’t quite go to the depth that the book did)–still repetitive, but the visual representation in the first two videos really was stellar. The study book does ask some questions and lead to some discussion, but it draws heavily from the book sometimes in large sections and some of the questions didn’t quite click with me. Though I did enjoy the bit on the armor of God, which wasn’t in either the videos or the book.

I’m not honestly sure if I’d recommend the study or not. Again, I’m a bit conflicted. Maybe I’m just not the primary audience. There are some good parts here, but I didn’t love the compilation of them and felt many of the pieces weren’t necessary or could have been done better.