I was driving to the office last week when an idea struck me: It’s remarkable how many best-selling books there are that promote self-help, spiritual therapy, and new age ideas meant to bring about inner peace. There are a ton of these books. They fly off the digital shelves on Amazon.com. Articles on the subject help sell endless magazines in the checkout line at the grocery store. Infomercials litter TV screens in the wee hours of the morning.
Yes, I know the old axiom “sex sells,” and it’s still true, but it’s also true that “therapy sells.” People are lost, confused, isolated, frustrated, and more uncertain than ever before about who they are and who they want to be. For those reasons, people are scooping up whatever they can find, and most of the time the stuff they find is garbage. Most of it is published by secular publishers who are only interested in publishing secular self-help books. If there’s a book with a religious or even Christian connotation, it’s almost always watered down and “uncontroversial.” Why? Because the world, so in need of self-help, doesn’t actually want God’s help; God’s help requires tough choices, taking up self-crosses and following Him (Matthew 16:24). People want the idea of God’s help without actually getting God’s help, because people want the goal (inner peace) without taking up their crosses to achieve it.
Which brings me to the great irony…
Despite how popular secular self-help books are, the one book that can actually help people more than any other—the Bible—remains the best-selling book of all time, and yet, despite how frequently-bought the Bible is, it’s rarely the book people turn to when searching for the inner peace they desperately seek.
More often than not, Bibles sit on shelves, collecting dust, while new books on self-help are bought and bought and bought and bought, never satisfying, never being able to provide the relief they promise.
In fact, the whole “self help/spiritual therapy/inner peace” section of every bookstore should be retitled: “Books you buy when you desperately want what the Bible offers but you don’t want to be bothered actually reading the Bible.”
~ Matthew