The Old Testament Speaks offers a clear picture of the archaeological, geographical, historical, and linguistic dimensions of God's covenant with his people from the time of Abraham to the coming of the Messiah. The Old Testament Speaks examines the historical and religious life of the Hebrews, integrates the development of non-hebraic cultures with conventional biblical history, and reviews the best modern scholarly research in placing the Scriptures in their Near Eastern setting.Samuel J. Schultz emphasizes the importance of letting the Scriptures tell their own stories. He makes selective use of the best and latest literature in Old Testament studies, and offers a balanced perspective. Schultz sifts the facts and follows them to their inevitable conclusions. However, when the evidence is not definitive, he exercises caution, presenting his own interpretation as only one of several possible views. Schultz also appraises the impact of recent archaeological and historical findings on the understanding of key portions of the Old Testament.The Old Testament Speaks contains all the relevant material -- biblical and nonbiblical -- necessary for classroom use or personal study of the Old Testament. Schultz provides outlines that reflect the historical background and summarize the contents of each biblical book, as well as charts and maps to help visualize the biblical narrative. He has also revised and updated the biblio-graphies at the end of each chapter.

    Our local newspaper ran a front-page story not too long ago about a study revealing that one in five people in our city lives in poverty. This is a book about those two numbers.Jesus Wants to save Christians is a book about faith and fear, wealth and war, poverty, power, safety, terror, Bibles, bombs, and homeland insecurity.It's about empty empires and the truth that everybody's a priest. It's about oppression, occupation, and what happens when Christians support, animate and participate in the very things Jesus came to set people free from.It's about what it means to be a part of the church of Jesus in a world where some people fly planes into buildings while others pick up groceries in Hummers.

     Think of Ruth and Esther, two Old Testament heroines of the faith. Singled out as the only women to have Bible books named after them, Ruth and Esther lived in very different worlds, one a poor peasant and the other a powerful queen. Yet both dared to do the right thing when confronted with the easy way out, and God rewarded them for their courage and commitment. As you study the Books of Ruth and Esther, you will appreciate anew the tough choices of faith these women made, and you will be encouraged to do the same as you rely on the God: who accomplishes His purposes through people who trust Him.

    Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is a resource to help church leaders improve the culture of their church and disciple men and women in their flock to read, understand, and apply Scripture to our lives in the church. Until both men and women grow in their understanding of their relationship to Scripture, there will continue to be tension between the sexes in the church. Church leaders need to be engaged in thoughtful critique of the biblical manhood and womanhood movement and the effects it has on their congregation.Do men and women benefit equally from God's word? Are they equally responsible in sharpening one another in the faith and passing it down to the next generation? While radical feminists claim that the Bible is a hopelessly patriarchal construction by powerful men that oppresses women, evangelical churches simply reinforce this teaching when we constantly separate men and women, customizing women's resources and studies according to a culturally based understanding of roles. Do we need men's Bibles and women's Bibles, or can the one, holy Bible guide us all? Is the Bible, God's word, so male-centered and authored that women need to create their own resources to relate to it? No! And in it, we also learn from women. Women play an active role as witnesses to the faith, passing it on to the new generations.This book explores the feminine voice in Scripture as synergistic with the dominant male voice. Through the women, we often get the story behind the story--take Ruth for example, or the birth of Christ through the perspective of Mary and Elizabeth in Luke. Aimee fortifies churches in a biblical understanding of brotherhood and sisterhood in God's household and the necessity of learning from one another in studying God's word.The troubling teaching under the rubric of "biblical manhood and womanhood" has thrived with the help of popular Biblicist interpretive methods. And Biblicist interpretive methods ironically flourish in our individualistic culture that works against the "traditional values" of family and community that the biblical manhood and womanhood movement is trying to uphold. This book helps to correct Biblicist trends in the church today, affirming that we do not read God's word alone, we read it within our interpretive covenant communities--our churches. Our relationship with God's word affects our relationship with God's people, and vice versa. The church is the school of Christ, commissioned to discipleship. The responsibility of every believer, men and women together, is being active and equal participants in and witnesses to the faith--the tradents of faith.

    When complete, the twelve volumes of the series will cover all the Sundays in the three-year lectionary cycle, along with movable occasions, such as Christmas Day, Epiphany, Holy Week, and All Saints' Day.For each lectionary text, preachers will find four brief essays--one each on the theological, pastoral, exegetical, and homiletical challenges of the text. This gives preachers sixteen different approaches to the proclamation of the Word on any given occasion.The editors and contributors to this series are world-class scholars, pastors, and writers representing a variety of denominations and traditions. And while the twelve volumes of the series will follow the pattern of the Revised Common Lectionary, each volume will contain an index of biblical passages so that nonlectionary preachers, as well as teachers and students, may make use of its content.

    Without bogging down readers with technical terminology, Burridge brings to bear his research comparing the Gospels with classical biographies and offers a clear interpretation of each Gospel author's portrait. A striking feature is his use of the ancient symbols for the Gospels -- human face, lion, ox, and eagle -- to represent each book's unique picture of Jesus. This second edition incorporates the latest scholarship on the historical Jesus, a new section on how the Gospels have been read throughout history, and an expanded discussion of how to teach and preach the Gospels through the lectionary. Burridge also tackles the question of how these ancient writings bear on today's hot-button issues of unity and diversity. Four Gospels, One Jesus? will be appreciated by teachers, pastors, students, and other readers wanting to understand Jesus more fully. " Praise for the first edition: " ""A rare merger of the very best of modern biblical scholarship with a readable and engaging telling of the Gospel portraits of Jesus particularly aimed at a popular audience." -- Anglican Theological Review " ""A fine introduction to the distinctive portrait of Jesus provided by each of the Gospels. . . . Should prove to be a very helpful window into Gospel scholarship for many readers." -- Reformed Theological Review " ""An engaging approach to reading each Gospel as a unique portrait of Jesus." -- Toronto Journal of Theology "

    Today, shifts in technology mean that language is increasingly one of symbols and metaphors, stories and images—not words.So what does this mean for the sermon, that long-standing, word-based tradition of Christianity?In this ground-breaking resource, bestselling author Leonard Sweet offers an alternative to traditional models of preaching, one that is fitting to a new culture and a new mode of thinking. The first book of its kind to move preaching beyond its pulpit-centric fixation and toward more interactive, participatory modes of communication, Sweet presents both a challenge and a path forward for a church struggling to maintain its relevance in a post-modern, media-saturated culture.

    Restoration is a riveting argument for a return to that original biblical expression of faith in Jesus. Discover for yourself the profound beauty of Torah life, the celebration of the biblical Sabbath, and the application of God's holy feast days. Your eyes will be opened to another dimension of the faith that is beginning to reemerge among Christians worldwide. Lancaster answers common theological objections to the Torah, while demonstrating that Christians are already keeping more of God's Law than they realize. This thought provoking, theological boat-rocker is a fun-to-read inspiring journey into the world of the Bible.

    Her husband has branded her as an adulteress and threatens to kill her if she comes near the town. Struggling to survive amidst the fear, grief and bitterness of living in a leper colony, she would give anything just to see her son again. Is God really punishing her with this disease?When rumors of a Healer from Nazareth reach the colony, Aaliyah wonders if this man could really heal her, or if He would despise her like the rest of her people. It is now that Aaliyah must make the most difficult decision of her life: risk her life to appear in public, or die a leper.

    We need to recover the practice of honest spiritual struggle that gives us permission to vocalize our pain and wrestle with our sorrow. Lament avoids trite answers and quick solutions, progressively moving us toward deeper worship and trust.Exploring how the Bible--through the psalms of lament and the book of Lamentations--gives voice to our pain, this book invites us to grieve, struggle, and tap into the rich reservoir of grace and mercy God offers in the darkest moments of our lives.

    We all prefer quick fixes and bandage solutions to the long, hard, slow work that produces real change. So the moment we learn about a new ministry or strategy and see its effect in another church, we run to implement it in our own. Unfortunately, this impulse is usually met by opposition, skepticism, and ultimately, rejection.What if the solution isn't a new model or a complicated strategy, but a shift in perspective? What if you could keep your church's current vision, values, and model, and simply make a few micro-shifts...leading to macro-changes?This book explores five micro-shifts that have the potential to produce macro-changes in your church. As you read, you will discover how to integrate these micro-shifts into the life of your church, starting with the way you disciple. You will finish by developing a plan to structure, communicate, and evaluate these changes to ensure that they take root and pave the way for lasting change and kingdom impact.

     It is widely viewed in the world at large as being outdated, boring, irrelevant and filled with backbiting hypocrites. How different that picture is to how the Bible talks about the new family that Jesus has gathered. It is a precious bride, a sparkling jewel, a lifeboat for forgiven sinners that is precious and holy; nurturing and warm; filled with truth, friendship and all embracing, forgiving love. Sam Allberry understands the collision between these two views, and how, even as Christian believers, we can lose sight of how truly wonderful church is and should be, and what a privilege it is to be part of, and to serve. In this brief accessible but thorough guide to church, Sam outlines what church is and why we need it. And how, when we have got it wrong, we can move closer to what a true church should be.

    Ephesians For You helps readers see how being "in Christ" changes everything—our view of ourselves, our world, our future, our church, homes and workplaces.Richard Coekin brings his trademark clear teaching and challenging application to every page.

    Is he still a husband? Being a husband is not just a state of mind; it's not just a private decision. Being a husband is a public relationship made from a public exchange of vows, an objective covenant. An adulterous husband is a covenant-breaking husband but still a husband. Being a husband is what makes his infidelity so horrendous. In the same way, when people are baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, they are ushered into an objective, visible, covenant relationship. Regardless of the state of their heart, regardless of any hypocrisy, regardless of whether or not they mean it, such people are now visible saints, Christians. A Christian is one who would be identified as such by a Muslim. Membership in the Christian faith is objective-it can be photographed and fingerprinted. In baptism, God names us and imposes gracious obligations upon us. Multitudes of faithless, corrupt Christians show that they do not believe what God said at their baptism. They live like adulterous husbands. But the tragedy is that many conscientious conservative Christians also do not believe what God said at their baptism.

    But very few people could say just how its seemingly disparate jumble of writings — stories, letters, poems, collections of laws, religious visions — got there. Filling this knowledge gap, How the Bible Was Built clearly tells the story of how the Bible came to be. Penned by Charles Merrill Smith in response to his teenage granddaughter’s questions, the manuscript was discovered after Smith’s death and has been reworked by his friend James Bennett for a wider audience. Free of theological or sectarian slant, this little volume provides a concise, factual overview of the Bible’s construction throughout history, outlining how its various books were written and collected and later canonized and translated. Written in an easy conversational style and enhanced by two helpful appendixes (of biblical terms and dates), How the Bible Was Built will give a more informed understanding of the Bible to people of virtually any reading level and any religious persuasion. Did you know?The word “Bible” comes from biblion, a Greek word meaning “papyrus scroll.”It took several thousand years to construct the Bible.The book we call Deuteronomy was discovered hidden away in a dark corner during the reconstruction of the temple under King Josiah.The Apocrypha contains some of the earliest “detective” stories on record.Church councils had many disagreements about which books ought to be authoritative (a book called the Shepherd of Hermas almost made the cut; the book of Revelation almost didn’t).A heretic helped form the canon.Debate over the canon didn’t really end until the Protestant Reformation and the use of the printing press.