Review of Getting it Right: The Real Problem and God's Perfect Solution by Dr. Mike Fabarez

Some books aren’t as effective as they could be because the needs of the audience are not considered carefully.  Case in point: evangelistic literature, which tends to come in two flavors.  First, there are larger works of at least a few hundred pages that unearth and ferret out all the precious intricacies of the gospel.  While this genre is eminently useful for the Christian reflecting back on his salvation, it is less so for those non-believers who are merely curious about the Christian faith.  They may have heard the gospel from a friend and simply want some additional, straightforward discussion and references to Scripture.

On the other hand, gospel tracts are usually in a race to compress the gospel message into as few words as possible, with as small a font as possible, as inexpensively as possible.  This is beneficial for aerial ‘carpet bombing’ gospel campaigns, evangelism blitzes, and the like.  But it again fails to meet the need of the bona fide inquirer who really desires to go deeper in understanding the biblical gospel.

Enter Getting it Right: The Real Problem and God’s Perfect Solution.  A slim 130 pages, you can probably keep a stack to give to friends, family, and that guy at Starbucks.  The book is also comprehensive enough to give you the gist of a really long, meaty fireside chat about the gospel.  A big plus: pertinent Scriptures are mostly printed in full, rather than concatenated in long chains of parenthetical references that can be confusing and look onerous to the non-believer.  The believer in an evangelistic encounter, on the other hand, can easily find and quote Scripture in making his case for Christ.

Getting it Right is an effective little book.  It doesn’t fall prey to the pitfall of setting out to write in a plain, non-polemical style (suited for the non-believer) but then getting waylaid by extended elaboration of the all the ‘hot’ issues in contemporary evangelicalism.  Nor do we sense a ‘ghost’ audience of believers who already know and cherish the true gospel—the bane of many evangelistic books that mushroom in size and scope.  Of course, because the gospel is infinitely glorious, even seasoned Christians can benefit from a lucid discussion of the gospel.  They’ll find it in Getting it Right.