Book Review – The Love and Respect Devotional – 52 Weeks to Experience Love and Respect in Your Marriage By Emerson Eggerichs

A devotional for married couples is hard to get right. You’re talking to two people and you’re looking to make applications for people all through the spectrum of marriage highs and lows. With this book, it feels like most of it is talking to people in only the lows. The first month is pretty much talking to people who only bought the devotional as a “we need help” rather than a couple wanting a biblically based marriage devotional. So this tends to skew more “self-help” than “devotional”. It also skews more of a sales pitch to a system and other books from the author. He does offer a summary of his system in the back of the book so this can be read without it but the implications of the other book are pointed at strongly. When you spend the first section of your book talking about husbands shouldn’t view this as a thing to dread – but then make a good portion of the first part of the devotion what you were warning against, good luck getting men on board.

For a devotional this is too inward focused and not enough (note I’m not saying it’s fully lacking) an upward, God-ward perspective.