My wife wrote a ladies’ devotional book, and we just launched it last week, and she is so embarrassed and humbled and grateful about all the messages she has received this past week. It really is overwhelming. But it is also really funny to me when she gets all embarrassed, because she is a big-time celebrity now. With the dozens of cents I am earning from my books, now we are going to double that. I am telling you, I checked our sales, and we have sixteen books sold so far. No, I really do see that as sixteen people who can study God’s Word, sixteen people whose lives can be changed by studying these things. So it is an incredible opportunity, and I wanted to share what is inside the devotional as well as some of my takeaways from the book as I was reviewing it. Hello, church. Welcome back to this week’s video, where we try to bring the Bible home as you continue with the Scriptures, not just on Sundays but throughout the week as well. Today I am probably going to get a little less into the actual content of the book. It will not be that kind of review, but I will show you the theme of each week (there are four weeks in this devotional), and then I will review the book as a whole.
How the Book Came About
If you are new here, my name is Ryan Rench. I am the pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California, and I guess we are uniquely placed to launch some of our own books at our church, just because I dabble in design, I dabble in writing, and I dabble in marketing stuff. But ministry is our heart; Bible study is our heart. When my wife had the idea for a ladies’ Bible study, we would talk through her topics, and then she would write the handouts and give them to the ladies. As I was reading through those handouts, I was going, “Man, we have got to capture these somehow.” This year I went away to junior camp, and like a nerd, I logged every minute of my time and broke my week down from Monday evening to Friday morning. Mostly it was that Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday that I could just hammer out all kinds of things, according to my log. I meant to put up a graphic, but I could not quite get ChatGPT to work up the right kind of graphic for me. It was seven hours of travel back and forth. I slept twenty-six hours. Twenty-six hours went into what I just called publishing, which is all the actual words and writing. Then eight hours of editing and eleven hours of designing; that is when we came up with a couple of different cover designs. This was not the final one; I had a green version I was working with before. There were six hours of eating, seven hours of personal time, five hours of my devotions, and about three hours of administrative stuff I had to get done for the following Sunday. So the total work on these books, not just this one but a couple of others I was working on the same week, was about forty-five hours for that week. And that is my favorite week of the year, the fact that I get to go away and spend that time working on a book like this. It really is a labor of love, this devotional book, Joy.
Inside the Book
So I want to review the book and go through some of the things on the interior. I will share some of it up on the screen; this is my digital file, which I figured would be easier for us to see. The cover is simply Joy. There is a nice cover page inside, and obviously the copyright information. Each week has the main topic and the main passage for the first couple of days, which is what she taught at the ladies’ Bible study at our church. She would first teach the passage listed in the table of contents and then send them home with a handout that followed up on it. One of the happy surprises of this book is that already about three or four ladies have sent my wife pictures of coloring pages they have done, filling in some of these graphics like this. We did not even intend it to be a coloring book, but I love that people are getting creative with it.
Here is the welcome page: “Nice to meet you,” where it started. I already explained that it was a ladies’ Bible study, set up so that days one and two were the lesson she taught and days three through seven were the handouts she gave. At the end of each handout there were about five additional Scripture passages they could take home and study for themselves. That was 2024, at the time of the recording; right now it is 2025. So this Joy devotional was last year’s study, and we waited a year. This year’s was Ezekiel, and that one is coming out in the future. What I did was take the handout she originally had. Let me show you the week that was here. Here were her notes. We took her lesson notes and her handout notes and turned them more into paragraph form. Here was the handout she gave; it was more in paragraph form already, but we edited it to make more sense in a devotional format. And on the last page of every handout she sent home with the ladies, there was a further reading page: Isaiah 51, Psalm 16, 1 John 1, 2 Chronicles 30, Psalm 43. Those are passages that went with that week’s theme, and the first week was John chapter 15. So each week there was a handout like that, with additional Scriptures, further reading at the back. A year ago they could have done this by filling out their own questions and adding their own thoughts, but we took it and, for days three through seven, expanded each of those passages into its own journal day, added some journal prompts, and included some hymns in the book. There is a nice place for your name there, and on day one it jumps straight into the content.
Before that is an introduction to where the study came from. On the very first week of her lessons, she gave this as an overview of why Bible study is important, and I love it. She tells the story of being a Bible college graduate but still not really knowing how to study the Scriptures for herself. She was taking teaching classes, a few Bible classes, some Baptist history classes and things like that, but not necessarily the Bible study classes that we men got to take. So I stepped her through this Bible study format: read the chapter, read the surrounding chapters, flag words throughout the passage, define the words, research it, read a commentary, figure out the idea of the text, and then apply it to yourself. She would do that, and instead of teaching a lesson, she would just teach it to herself and keep a journal. That was her own Bible study method for several years. As she grew busier and busier as a pastor’s wife, with the kids and the phase we were in for so long, she says in her testimony that there were seasons when it felt like the personality of being a joyful person was not cutting it anymore. She thought there had to be something more to this joy thing, something that is not just personality-driven. Joy must come from something else. So she did a deep-dive study on the topic of joy from several different passages, and that is where this book came from: her personal Bible study on what joy meant to her. What I appreciate about that, and I will say this in my wrap-up thoughts at the close, is that it was birthed out of real-life experience, a real desire to follow the Lord.
The Weekly Layout
In this book there is a different hymn for each week, on the topic of joy, just for your own edification. Then week one: John 15, “Joy Comes from Staying Connected.” Before going into every week, I will give an overview of how each week of the book is laid out; I will not necessarily go over every single week. Here is week one, day one. There are a few blanks to fill out as you go through this study of John chapter 15, and there is the hymn. Day two is a continuation of the same passage, splitting the lesson into two days, with some deep-dive questions, some practical applications of each of those Scripture passages, and some prompts at the end, maybe a challenge, maybe a prayer to close the day. Then days three through seven, as we said before, go over the additional Scripture passages from the original handout. We tied the lessons of the first two days into these journal prompts and the additional readings. There is usually a little quote in the “Reflect” section, maybe a quote from the first two days, and then some thematic tie-in, from Isaiah 51 in this case, to John chapter 15. The next page has plenty of space to journal your thoughts. Down each sidebar there is more space to journal additional notes not directly tied to the journal prompts. Then there is a simple closing call to action, whether a prayer, a challenge, an action step, or whatever. Day four is a similar layout, and day five, all the way to day seven, and after day seven it starts week two: Psalm 32, “Sin Steals Our Joy.” Skipping down to week three: Matthew 6, “Do Not Let Worry Steal Your Joy.” And week four is a study of Philippians 2. Then there is a challenge about the Word of God. I just love this box here, and how seriously my wife takes the Word of God. There are good little snippets in here, little philosophical ideas that just jump out, and I appreciate this book so much.
My Takeaways
Generally speaking, I had several takeaways, in no particular order. My first takeaway from this book, and what I think you will enjoy about it if you go through it yourself, is that joy is a byproduct of walking in the Spirit. It is not a personality. Joy is a fruit of the Spirit. That is what we put on the back cover: joy is not a personality; it is a fruit of the Spirit. My wife has a joyful personality, but she had to realize that true joy is not just happiness. When a person walks in the Spirit and not in the flesh, joy comes out of that. It is the tree that bears fruit, the healthy tree planted in healthy soil, receiving plenty of water and sunshine; that is what produces fruit. When we are anchored and rooted in the Holy Spirit, He produces His fruit in us. Another takeaway is that my wife lives in joy. What I appreciate, knowing the author, is that this is not a fake book. It is born out of a depth of experience, and I think that makes it shine so much more. She is constantly and truly connected to the vine, which is what week one is about. That was another takeaway: the first week is such a focus on Jesus. I appreciate it so much. The whole idea is that Jesus brings joy, and you spend a whole week on that idea, staying connected to the vine. The second week is the idea that sin destroys joy, but repentance restores it. Some devotionals are less pointed than this and will not focus on sin quite as much, but I think she hit the nail on the head: sin destroys a person’s joy, but repentance restores it. I appreciate that about it. The third week is all about worry. Worry is a big battle for Christians, I realize, and maybe ladies in particular struggle with it even more. So that third week is a real-life chapter that gets into the nitty-gritty of worry. And the final week is that selfishness steals our joy; that is the study in Philippians, that selfishness steals our joy, but selflessness is what satisfies. That is counterintuitive. It is so good: giving of yourself is actually what feeds your spirit and gives you joy. So that is the overview of each of the four weeks.
It is such a rich Bible study. It is not just fluff, not softness for softness’ sake. I love the content of this book. It is real; that is another of my takeaways. It gets down into the practical things. It is very down-to-earth, written as if my wife is talking directly to you, and I think you will enjoy it for that. One thing you might not enjoy about it is how invasive it is. The questions in here are very intrusive, but in a good way. It asks tough questions of you about worry and about sin, and if you want to be honest, you may get real honest and write some things down that you would be embarrassed for somebody to read if they picked up the book and started thumbing through your answers. Those are the kinds of questions it asks. It asks you to get serious before the Lord. Whether you write those things down in a book or not is between you and the Lord; you could just have a personal time of prayer and confess these things before Him. But it gets invasive, intrusive, into the little corners of your heart. So overall it is a book of joy, but a book that focuses on joy as the byproduct of a healthy spiritual life, and for that I think you are really, really going to enjoy it. If you did purchase it on Amazon, would you leave a review? That will help other people find it. I am so thankful for our church. We have the softcover, the paperback, coming out soon; right now we just have the hardback edition. We have had some technical glitches with the softcover edition for whatever reason, but this beautiful hardcover edition is already available on Amazon, so you can search for it, and we will try to include the link in the video description. God bless you, and we will see you in our next video, when we are going through a study in the book of Romans. God bless you. See you then.
