How to A.C.T.: A Guide to Salvation through Jesus Christ

This is a devotional guide, and judged as one, it does the job devotional guides are meant to do: it gives the reader a memorable, teachable frame and then executes it with discipline. Brandt builds the whole book around a mnemonic — Accept, Confess, Testify — traced back to a real, disarming origin story (the Jamie Foxx Oscar speech, his mother marching him through Mass at St. Therese) that gives the acronym an earned, personal hook rather than a marketing gimmick. Every chapter ends with a tight, plain-language summary paragraph — 'we learn that choosing to live apart from God results in separation from His presence, spiritual death, emptiness, bondage to sin...' — which is exactly the scaffolding a reader working through a study guide wants: repetition as retention, not padding.

The strongest material is autobiographical rather than expository. The Fort Irwin confrontation — where a pastor's sermon on the equal weight of sin lands on Brandt because he's been enabling a friend's affair in his own home — is a genuinely uncomfortable, specific conversion scene, not a sanitized one. The account of learning he'd become a father, disposing of his liquor that same night, and cradling his newborn son Justin months later ('Daddy's home!') does real work grounding the Abraham-and-Isaac theology that follows. Even the invented boardroom scene with Satan and his demons debating the 'lie of time' shows an author willing to reach for an illustrative device rather than lean purely on citation.

The prose itself over-reaches often — 'palpable apprehension washed over me,' 'luminous purpose' — but within its genre, that ornateness reads as sincerity rather than affectation, and the structural clarity is where this book earns its Booky.