Experiencing the Depths of Jesus Christ is a book about prayer, written around 1685 by Jeanne Guyon. It has nothing whatsoever to do with physical fitness.
This page was reviewing an entirely different book
We are opening with that because the previous version of this review was not a small distortion. It was completely wrong from the first line to the last.
It described this seventeenth-century French devotional as a guide to physical stewardship. It claimed Guyon writes about energy management, treating the body as a temple, and habit tracking. It reported that one of our reviewers started a fitness routine after reading a motivating passage, and concluded that the book is “not merely a fitness manual.” It filed the review alongside a sugar fast and a book on body stewardship.
None of that exists. Guyon does not discuss exercise, diet, or physical health anywhere. The entire review was manufactured around a category the post had been filed under, and no one checked it against the book.
What the book actually is
Jeanne Guyon wrote it under the original title A Short and Easy Method of Prayer. It is a manual for interior prayer, and it teaches two practices.
The first she calls praying the Scripture. You take a very small portion of text, a phrase rather than a chapter, and stay with it, turning it over slowly until it stops being something you are reading and becomes something you are praying.
The second she calls beholding the Lord. Scripture quiets the mind, and then you stop working and simply wait in God’s presence without trying to generate anything.
That is the whole book. It is short, it is direct, and it is aimed at ordinary Christians rather than scholars, which was precisely the scandal of it at the time.
Who she was, and why that matters
Guyon was a French Catholic laywoman and the central figure of the movement known as Quietism. She was imprisoned from 1695 to 1703 for the contents of this book, and the book itself was publicly burned.
Being clear about the tradition: this is a Catholic mystical work by a woman the Catholic authorities of her day condemned. Quietism as a movement was formally opposed, and the standing objection to it, then and now, is that it can slide into a passivity which treats all effort as interference with grace.
That criticism is worth taking seriously as you read. Scripture does call for waiting on God, and it also calls for striving, obedience, and work. A reading of Guyon that quietly retires the second half has gone further than the New Testament goes.
With that said, Protestants have read her for three centuries and been helped. Watchman Nee commended her, this edition comes from a Protestant publisher, and writers across a wide range of traditions still point to her. Nothing in the book undermines the gospel, the authority of Scripture, or the person of Christ. It is a book about being quiet before God, and most of us are bad at that.
What to expect from the edition
This is Volume Two of SeedSowers’ Library of Spiritual Classics. It is a modernized rendering rather than a scholarly critical edition, which makes it far easier to read than the 1685 text and means you are getting an editor’s smoothing along with Guyon’s substance.
Who should read it
A man whose prayer life has become entirely a matter of talking, requesting, and reporting, and who suspects there is something else available. Guyon’s answer is short enough to read in a couple of sittings and difficult enough to occupy years.
Read it slowly, with Scripture open, and hold the mystical framing loosely where it goes past what the Bible says. Read it that way and it may do more for you than a shelf of newer books.
And if you arrived here looking for a Christian approach to fitness, our apologies. That is a real subject and there are real books on it. This is not one, and this page told you otherwise for far too long.