This small book (just 87 pages plus discussion questions) examines Jesus’ parables of the lost coin, the lost sheep and the prodigal son from Luke 15. The first two parables get a chapter each and the last one gets four chapters looking at the lost son, the gifts, the elder brother and the celebration.

It’s readable and accessible and that’s about it really. Unfortunately for Moore when it comes to the parables he has some pretty stiff competition and this falls way short of the standard set by Tim Keller in The Prodigal God for example.

The points Moore makes are all OK but they’re a bit bland and forgettable. The illustrations read like the ones you find on sermon illustration websites (which I used in my first year or so of preaching and then stopped. Preachers you can usually do better). It’s thought of the day stuff but with a dose of American sugar and pie.

‘Have you heard the story about the pastor who looked out of his study window and saw that a little kitten was stuck in a tree?’

‘I sure have’, Rev Moore and so it goes.

The points he makes are alright and nothing to complain about – God does after all want us to be like him and be forgiving and gracious and no He doesn’t want us to be like the elder brother and so on. But those points aren’t really worthy of a book are they, if they’re not presented in a way that catches the heart, that exposes the sin, that draws me to Christ? Well, I didn’t think so.

I don’t know who I’d give this book to or what insights they’d gain from reading this instead of just thinking a bit longer about the parables themselves. So there’s nothing much wrong with this book but nothing that makes it stand out either.