Dr. Jones Book Summary

“You don’t Know What you Believe Until it’s time to believe it”

Dr. Eric Jones Jr.

If the Church has ever needed a practical, but powerful Word to develop and cultivate her faith, it is now. The writer of Hebrews gives us a clear definition for faith in Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. The word substance means a foundation, or something put under, and the word evidence means a conviction or belief. Which can also be rendered: Therefore, Faith is the foundation upon which hope rest and the belief in a reality that is not seen. While this definition of faith is encouraging personally, many believers do not know this kind of faith practically.

This is the reality that Dr. Eric Jones Jr. conveys in this insightful, inspirational, and instructional work. Immediately your faith will be challenged as you are compelled to examine and measure the degree of your own faith; to consider if the declaration of your faith is married to the demonstration of your faith. Dr. Jones provokes the reader to analyze whether his or her faith is only strong statements of faith that has not be tried. Then he informs with a since of warning that all statements of faith must be proven and tested. Therefore, Dr. Jones echoes throughout this book, that believers really don’t know what they believe until it is time to believe it, and that many believers’ faith is based on what they have heard rather than what they know, which he declares is just an intellectual faith rather than an experiential faith.

Hence, Dr. Jones shares this profound insight, not merely intellectually but experientially as he processes his personal pain and experienced an unfamiliar hurt that brought his faith under fire. Sometimes God uses our personal disappointments and difficulties as well as our pains and perplexities as instruments to fortify our faith. Dr. Jones courageously and transparently shows us the struggle between his flesh and his faith as he wrestles with three enormous events that nearly compromised his spiritual equilibrium.

First, he grapples with his pastoral assignment to the Saints and parental affection for his youngest son that announces his sexual orientation. Secondly, he tussles with the unexpected transition of his second Kaniel and the undertaking of preaching his eulogy. And thirdly, he battles with a daunting medical diagnosis that has potentially fatal consequences and his faith in God’s healing power.

It is this trilogy of disappointment, death, and disease that inspired Dr. Jones to write this personally painful and powerful book that is guaranteed to test our theology and expose the flaws as well as the fidelity of our faith.

Dr. Robert C. Stanley

Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church

Pompano Beach, Florida