One of today's most popular spiritual writers and commentators interweaves the Old and New Testament Scripture with prayers of hope and repentance, offering ancient ways of seeing Christ that will feel new to readers of all denominational backgrounds.

    Dr. Rick Warren is the founding pastor of Saddleback Church, one of America's largest congregations and author of the best-selling book, The Purpose Driven Church.

    Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, c1976.

    Follow them as they travel through seasons of personal and spiritual growth, undergoing struggles that are common to all believers, experiencing faith-stretching circumstances, and seeking to live for Christ in an authentic way. Their spiritual journeys reflect a deep and growing faith that permeates their music while also transcending it. This new path challenges the limitations we’ve put on Christianity in our postmodern culture and seeks the essence of the Gospel. Shine will challenge and stretch your own spiritual expectations as you discover the dynamics of a living faith.

    The book advocates cultivating the skills of observation, interpretation, and application and encourages readers to become active participants in God's Word.

    The Church needs saints to show it how to live out its calling. The witness of the lives of the saints is a powerful testimony to the reality of God’s plan and the possibility for truly following it in one’s life. So often, we do not see this witness. We see hypocrisy and mediocrity among Christians. That is why we must look to the saints — the ones who really followed the words of Christ and let them be carried out fully in their lives. The saints also give us a reason to hope. Saints were not born; they were made through a life of cooperation with God’s grace despite many difficulties, weaknesses, and temptations. This book, written from a Catholic perspective, provides an overview to the lives of the saints celebrated from January to March on the Roman calendar. It is the first in a series, which will cover the whole Church year. It makes for inspirational spiritual reading any time of the year, providing an introduction to the patron saints for many walks of life. Included are the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Joseph, Apostles like St. Peter and St. Paul, early martyrs like St. Perpetua and St. Felicity, early evangelizers like St. Patrick, medieval giants such as St. Thomas Aquinas, American saints such as St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and St. John Neumann, and many others.

    With wit and wisdom, Nicole Johnson leads readers in a journey of awakenings--first, to God as they respond to His tender, passionate love for them; second to readers as they embrace their identities as women, their gifts, and their dreams; and finally to others as readers learn to love and communicate in ways that bring joy and closeness.

    Whether you feel restless or satisfied right now, Jim Cymbala believes that God has more for you. In this new book, he'll help you find out how to access the 'more' God intends---more peace, real joy, and a deeper sense of purpose. As you open yourself up to the 'more' of God, you will also discover your unique work assignment---the one thing God is calling you--and no one else--to accomplish for the sake of his work in the world.

    After that, the filter kicks in.In our day and age, five to ten seconds is usually all the time we’re given to persuade someone that what we have to say is worthy of his or her time. You and I live in a world suffering from a relentless bombardment of information. Television, social media, advertising, acquaintances, friends, and family all vie for time and an attentive ear. If we don’t adapt and learn to filter out what we believe does not apply to us, we quickly become overwhelmed. In this new world of burst communication, our presentation of this Gospel needs to be adapted as well, and while it’s critically important that the content remain unchanged, the style and vehicle in which it is delivered must fit the culture it reaches. Through current cultural references and true stories, Daniel Rice, founder of #Gospel, will help you come to see the gospel for what it really is and how it can radically alter your everyday life. Rice invites you into the conversation as he breaks down Paul’s explanation of the gospel in Romans in a way that is accessible and engaging.  Hash-tagging (#) a term invites others to join an open conversation and adds the author’s thoughts to our modern-day global exchange of ideas. This is the heart of #Gospel.   Welcome to the conversation.

    This reference work is a must for the desk of every teacher, preacher, and Bible reader. This edition includes new typeface making it more readable, updated and improved Hebrew and Greek dictionaries, maps and additional Bible study aids, the words of Christ in red, and clear edge-tab indexing for handier use. Also includes interactive CD-ROM for free.

    Pretending Jesus is less than He is resulted in someone I wasn't compelled to worship. So I began a journey to discover the whole Jesus--including the seemingly rough and wild parts--revealed in the Bible. And I found Him to be bigger and better than I ever dreamed.--Lisa HarperThrough a powerful blend of storytelling and biblical insights, Lisa Harper invites you to engage with the Jesus of the gospels, a person so provocative that no one left an encounter with Him unchanged. Pharisees fumed, paralytics turned cartwheels, and pariahs found love and acceptance.Come meet the Jesus who is both safe and strong--and learn how this radical Redeemer can liberate you to live and love with abandon.Includes questions for group discussion or personal reflection.

    But sometimes Jesus spoke words that followers then and now have found difficult. He instructs disciples to hate members of their own families (Luke 14:26), to act as if they were slaves (Matthew 20:27), and to sell their belongings and give to the poor (Luke 18:22). He restricts his mission (Matthew 10:6); he speaks of damnation (Matthew 8:12); he calls Jews the devil's children (John 8:44).In The Difficult Words of Jesus, Amy-Jill Levine shows how these difficult teachings would have sounded to the people who first heard them, how have they been understood over time, and how we might interpret them in the context of the Gospel of love and reconciliation.Additional components for a six-week study include a DVD featuring Dr. Levine and a comprehensive Leader Guide.

    But these ponderings beg one more critical question: What exactly should the Church be moving toward? In Walking with Jesus: A Way Forward for the Church, Pope Francis's own words lead us to the answer. Francis urges us to make Jesus central in our individual lives and in the collective life of the Church—to walk toward him, and ultimately to walk with him at all times and in all places. Each chapter of this Vatican-authorized book helps us put one foot in front of the other as we move ever closer to God and to our neighbors through the sacraments, prayer, evangelization, the gifts of the Spirit, and service to others. Francis reminds us that while the Church is indeed made up of individual people, we must walk together as a community of believers in a transformative relationship with Jesus if the Church is to be an effective, faithful witness to the Gospel. With a foreword by Archbishop of Chicago Blase J. Cupich, Pope Francis's first major appointment in the United States,Walking with Jesus offers the Church a much-needed way forward, past its inner and outer walls, as it fearlessly follows Christ toward the future.

    Eyes fixed on a mysterious point in the air, they were mesmerized by something which was invisible to everyone else. What the girls said they saw--and heard--sent shock waves that are still reverberating today. The messages the four girls claimed to receive revealed a picture of a Catholic church in crisis and a world that faced an earth-shattering future that would unfold in their lifetime. The girls’ pronouncements about coming trouble in the church and world were met with fierce skepticism from the first. Some charged the girls with being possessed by demons (based on the girls’ strange physical poses and apparent levitation), and others claimed the girls were putting on an act (revealing their true colors when they chose ordinary married lives instead of the convent). There was also a third body of critics: those who believed that a group of girls on the cusp of adolescence in a remote and insular society conjured up a psychodrama which, fueled by the spotlight and mounting frenzy, gained a frightening life of its own. There was one other possibility--that the strange events in Garabandal, Spain actually did occur, and the girls received an apocalyptic warning for both the church and the modern world. The warning to the world included a prediction that a newly militant Russia would rise again. The prophecies of Garabandal also foretell a World-Wide Warning and a Global Miracle, whose purpose is to convince a world reeling from one catastrophe to the next that God exists. But the Warning and Miracle, dramatic as they sound, are not even the most unsettling of the messages. One night, the young girls dissolved into screams. During this so-called “Night of the Screams,” the girls say they were shown a tragic chastisement that would befall the entire world if the Warning and Miracle failed to trigger global change. As disquieting as those messages were, the most shocking message at Garabandal was for the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Why were the messages of Garabandal so effectively suppressed? Did it have to do with the fact that the messages presciently warned of coming scandal and turmoil in the Roman Catholic Church itself? Did a portal open between worlds on a Spanish mountaintop in that summer of 1961? And if so, who opened the door--an angel of God or an angel of darkness? Did a young girl's flight of fancy one summer night spin wildly out of control? Or was it a visitation from God? Now that the “girls” at the center of this drama are 60-year-old women, should their claims be discredited or re-examined? Are the apparitions bogus or fast-approaching their fulfillment? If the events are false, Garabandal is a fascinating and perhaps tragic human interest story with several explanations. If the events and warnings are true--then what do we do? By the end of this book, readers can judge whether the visions of four young seers on a mountaintop in Spain were historical fact, a devilish fraud, or the creative confusion of four girls who would spend the rest of their lives trying to escape a human tragicomedy that they themselves had produced.

    In each case, the words were "infused" into her by her spirit guide Francine, and of course, by God. Granted, these words are a passive mode of prayer, yet the goal is to recharge your spiritual battery so that you'll be able to go out into the world and do God's work. "Over many years of public work, people have often asked me how to pray. My answer is simple, 'Just talk to God, and make your life a living prayer." "These prayers will lift your soul and let you magnify the Lord. They have done so for me and thousands of others. Many miracles have occurred by the power of prayer, and now I want to share these commanding words with you."