The Rest of the Gospel: When the Partial Gospel Has Worn You Out is for the Christian who has been trying hard for years and is tired. Its argument is that the exhaustion is not a discipline problem. It is a gospel problem, and specifically a half-learned gospel.
Two authors, and one of them is gone
The book is by Dan Stone and David Gregory. This page previously credited Stone alone, which is wrong. Gregory is a co-author, not an assistant.
Stone was a Southern Baptist Theological Seminary graduate who pastored for sixteen years, worked in administration at Georgetown College and Samford University, and then spent more than two decades traveling and teaching the message this book contains. He died in 2005. David Gregory, who holds degrees from Dallas Theological Seminary and the University of North Texas, is the author of Dinner with a Perfect Stranger among others.
That matters for what you are buying. The edition linked here is the Harvest House printing, published years after Stone’s death. The book is a faithful presentation of a message Stone spent his life on, shaped and written up with Gregory. It is not a new work, and there will be no follow-up from its primary voice.
The actual argument
Stone’s question was the one a lot of men eventually arrive at: Jesus promised abundant life, so why does mine feel like grinding effort? His answer is that most Christians are taught the first half of the gospel thoroughly and the second half barely at all.
The first half is Christ for you. Forgiveness, the cross, sins paid for. The second half is Christ in you. Not Christ helping you live the Christian life, but Christ living it through you. Stone’s contention is that a believer who has only the first half will spend his life trying to produce, out of his own resources, a life that was never meant to come from there. Hence the exhaustion.
The practical shift he is after is less about doing more and more about stopping. That is genuinely freeing for some readers and genuinely frustrating for others, because it does not hand you a program.
Read it with your eyes open
Books in this stream, sometimes called exchanged life or union life teaching, can be enormously helpful to a worn-out believer. They can also be pushed too far, into a passivity that treats any effort as fleshly striving and quietly drops the New Testament’s plain commands to work, obey, put to death, and press on.
Stone is more careful than the worst examples of the genre. Still, hold the book next to Scripture rather than the other way around. Rest in Christ and obedience to Christ are not competitors, and any reading that makes them competitors has gone somewhere Paul does not go.
What we cut
The old version quoted a sentence attributed to Stone that we could not verify, and pointed vaguely at customer reviews calling the book “deeply impacting.” Both are gone. It also asserted the book is structured for group discussion. We could not confirm any built-in discussion questions, so that claim is out too.
Who it is for
The tired believer. Specifically the one who has done the conferences, the accountability groups, and the reading plans, and still feels like he is carrying something that will not lift. This book speaks to him directly and it is worth his time.
A newer Christian is better served elsewhere first. The argument here assumes you already know the first half of the gospel well enough to notice something is missing, and reaching for it too early can produce confusion rather than rest.
The Rest of the Gospel on Amazon