Hi!
Today I will be talking about a book I read last semester, called the Fuel & the Flame. It was written by Steve Shadrach, and it’s about how students can become “reproducing disciples for Jesus Christ”.
I am a Bible study leader with my church, I lead a small Bible study or two each week with girls who are interested. What this role consists of is sharing the gospel on campus, following up with interested girls and doing Bible studies with them, and of course befriending women who are coming into the life of the church! This book is given to all the student BSLs at my church when they become a BSL, which is why I read it.
I wanted to write a review about it because I feel like I haven’t seen a lot about it anywhere. There are tons of tiktoks and posts and whatever else on Pinterest about a bunch of wonderful Christian books, but I’ve never seen anything about this one, and I think that’s kinda sad.
Although the focus of the book is for student leaders, as the applications and testimonies in the book are all for or from college students (mostly past ones the guy who wrote it knew or knew of), it could really be read by anyone who is interested in having an impact in their community for Christ. It’s got a lot of applicable ideas and discussion questions to get you thinking about what you’d like to implement in your life and conversations with others to see people impacted for Christ.
It has ten chapters:
- Lay Your Foundation
- Develop Your Character
- Build Your Convictions
- Prepare for Impact
- Plot Out Your Strategy
- Persist in Dynamic Evangelism
- Invest Yourself in Establishing Young Believers
- Persevere in Equipping the Faithful to Make Disciples
- Mobilize Your Campus as a Sending Base by Exporting Laborers
- Remember to Always Keep the World in Clear Focus
See, even the chapters sound like they want to be applied to your life!
It’s super cool, because it starts out with talking about you. What are your convictions, what is your testimony, what is your foundation. How can you help others if you cannot even help yourself? Once it has established that, it moves on to speak about how to evangelize. Personally, this really helped me. Although I’m lucky to have many people around me teaching me how to share the gospel and do Bible studies with girls, it was helpful to have it broken down into a simple and understandable step-by-step type process. It wraps up by speaking about how it doesn’t end on your college campus or in your college career–we are called to share the gospel for all our lives, and the whole world needs to hear it! It speaks about how to impact the world for Christ, even from your bedroom. This also really helped me, because I think it can get overwhelming sometimes thinking about all the people who need to hear about Christ. But this gives some starter ideas for praying for the whole world, and is full of reminders that we aren’t alone in sharing the gospel with others. We are one of many many brothers and sisters, all working for a common goal.
Anyway, the book is full of good information about sharing your faith with others, and I definitely recommend it. I also went and found it on thriftbooks if anyone is interested, when I looked it up it was only $4.99, which seems pretty decent to me: Fuel & the Flame on thriftbooks
Overall Rating: 5/5
Rating System: 1–no 2–meh 3–okay 4–pretty good 5–just read it already
Thanks for reading! If you read the Fuel & the Flame, pretty please leave a comment about your thoughts on it 🙂