Incredibly, prayerfully, Elisabeth took her toddler daughter, snakebite kit, Bible, and journal . . . and lived in the jungle with the Stone-Age people who killed her husband. Compelled by her friendship and forgiveness, many came to faith in Jesus.   This courageous, no-nonsense Christian went on to write dozens of books, host a long-running radio show, and speak at conferences all over the world. She was a pillar of coherent, committed faith; a beloved and sometimes controversial icon. In this authorized biography, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot, bestselling author Ellen Vaughn uses Elisabeth’s private, unpublished journals, and candid interviews with her family and friends, to paint the adventures and misadventures God used to shape one of the most influential women in modern church history. It’s the story of a hilarious, sensual, brilliant, witty, self-deprecating, sensitive, radical, and surprisingly relatable person utterly submitted to doing God’s will, no matter how high the cost. For Elisabeth, the central question was not, “How does this make me feel?” but, simply, “is this true?” If so, then the next question was, “what do I need to do about it to obey God?”  “My life is on Thy Altar, Lord—for Thee to consume. Set the fire, Father! Bind me with cords of love to the Altar. Hold me there. Let me remember the Cross.” –Elisabeth Elliot, age 21

    Suspicious of others and insecure about ourselves, we retreat into the safety of our small, self-made worlds. Now more than ever, it's easy to avoid people with whom we disagree or whose life experiences don't mirror our own. Safe among like-minded peers and digital "friends," we really don't have to engage with those who can challenge and enhance our limited perspectives. Tragically, even the church can become a place that minimizes diversity and reinforces isolation.Jesus models a much richer vision of friendship. Scott Sauls, pastor and teacher, invites you to see the breadth of Christ's love in this book, "BeFriend." Join Scott on this journey through twenty-one meditations to inspire actively pursuing God's love through expanding your circle of friends.Scott has met too many people whose first impulse is to fence off their lives with relational barriers that only end up starving their own souls.Yes, it's true: Real friendship is costly. Love does make us vulnerable. But without risk, our lives will remain impoverished.Join Scott in "BeFriend" as he summons you toward diverse friendship that can enrich your life and, in the process, reveal a better version of yourself.

    “Okay, Lord, you can have him. But if he must die, I want it to be for something big. I want someone’s life to be changed forever.” This is what Laura Sobiech prayed when she found out her seventeen-year-old son had only one year to live. With this desperate prayer, she released her son to God’s will.At that point, Zach Sobiech was just another teenager battling cancer. When his mother told him to think about writing goodbye letters to family and friends, he decided instead to write songs. One of them, “Clouds,” captured hearts and changed lives, making him an international sensation.This story is a testament to what can happen when you live as if each day might be your last. It’s a story about the human spirit. It shows how God used a dying boy from a small town in Minnesota to touch the hearts of millions—including top executives in the entertainment industry, major music artists, news anchors, talk show hosts, actors, priests and pastors, and schoolchildren across the globe. And above all, it’s an example of the amazing things that happen when someone shares the most precious thing he has—himself.  “I’m not a musician; I’m just a filmmaker, and my prayer is that you get an opportunity—both through the reading of this beautiful book and the watching of our film based on it—to experience what I will fail to put into words: the magic and inspiration of Zachary David Sobiech.”—Justin Baldoni, filmmaker and director of Clouds

    Have his ear. Belong to his body.Three seemingly unremarkable principles shape and strengthen the Christian life: listening to God's voice, speaking to him in prayer, and joining together with his people as the church. Though often viewed as normal and routine, the everyday "habits of grace" we cultivate give us access to these God-designed channels through which his love and power flow--including the greatest joy of all: knowing and enjoying Jesus.A study guide for individual and group study is also available.

    A young preacher from the Pennsylvania hills comes to New York City and influences troubled teenagers with his inspirational message.

    Her story has been told in the movie The Hiding Place, and in this wonderful book she shares with us many more amazing encounters with people in camps and jails, with students and actresses, and with the sophisticated and the illiterate. We meet on these pages not Corrie, but Corrie's Christ.

    The boy was beckoning me to join him on a voyage through the harrowing straits of memory. He was gambling that if we survived the passage, we might discover an ocean where the past would become the wind at our back rather than a driving gale to the nose of our boat. This book is the record of that voyage."When he was sixteen years old, Ian Morgan Cron was told about his father's clandestine work with the CIA. This astonishing revelation, coupled with his father's dark struggles with chronic alcoholism and depression, upended the world of a boy struggling to become a man. Decades later, as he faces his own personal demons, Ian realizes the only way to find peace is to voyage back through a painful childhood marked by extremes--privilege and poverty, violence and tenderness, truth and deceit--that he's spent years trying to escape.In this surprisingly funny and forgiving memoir, Ian reminds us that no matter how different the pieces may be, in the end we are all cut from the same cloth, stitched by faith into an exquisite quilt of grace.

    Race and ethnicity, caste and color, gender and sexuality, class and education, religion and political party have all become demographic labels that reduce our differences to simplistic categories in which “we” are vehemently against “them.” But Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis’s own experience—of being the first female and first Black minister in her church’s history, of being in an interracial marriage, and of making peace with childhood abuse—illustrates that our human capacity for empathy and forgiveness is the key to reversing these ugly trends.Inspired by the tenets of ubuntu—the Zulu philosophy that we are each impacted by the circumstances that impact those around us, and that the world won’t get better until we all get better—Fierce Love lays out the nine daily practices for breaking through tribalism and engineering the change we seek. From downsizing our emotional baggage to speaking truth to power to fueling our activism with joy, it demonstrates the power of small, morally courageous steps to heal our own lives, our posse, and our larger communities. Sharing stories that trace her personal reckoning with racism as well as the arc of her journey to an inclusive and service-driven faith, Dr. Lewis shows that kindness, compassion, and inclusive thinking are muscles that can be exercised and strengthened. With the goal of mending our inextricable human connection, Fierce Love is a manifesto for all generations: a bighearted, healing antidote to our rancorous culture.

    The idea of our own “righteous anger” is a myth. It is the number one problem in our societies today and, as Dallas Willard says, Christians have not been taught out of it. But what if Christians were the most unoffendable people on the planet?In Unoffendable you will find concrete, practical ways to live life with less stress, including: Adjusting your expectations to fit human natureReplacing perpetual anger with refreshing humility and gratitudeEmbracing forgiveness and beginning to love others in unexpected waysIn a humorous and conversational style, Unoffendable seeks to lift religious burdens from our backs and allow us to experience the joy of gratitude, perhaps for the first time, every single day of our lives—flourishing the way God intended.

    In this paradigm-shattering classic, newly revised and expanded, John Piper reveals that the debate between duty and delight doesn't truly exist: Delight is our duty. Readers will embark on a dramatically different and joyful experience of their faithThe pursuit of pleasure is not optional. It is essential. Scripture reveals that the great business of life is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever. In this paradigm-shattering work, John Piper reveals that the debate between duty and delight doesn’t truly exist: Delight is our duty. Join him as he unveils stunning, life-impacting truths you saw in the Bible but never dared to believe.

    The Pastor’s Kid Dad may be following God’s call, but the Pastor’s kids (PKs) are just following mom and dad. Often to devastating results. Barnabas Piper – son of Pastor and bestselling author John Piper – has experienced the challenges of being a PK first-hand. With empathy, humor, and personal stories, he addresses the pervasive assumptions, identity issues and accelerated scrutiny PKs face.  But more than just stating the problems – he shares the one thing a PK needs above all else (as do their pastor/father and church) is to live in true freedom and wholeness.

    Yet often our most deeply felt longings—for meaning, for love, for significance—end up leading us away from, instead of toward, our Creator and the person he made us to be.  Finding Your Way Back to God shows you how to understand and listen to your longings in a whole new way. It’s about waking up to who you really are, and daring to believe that God wants to be found even more than you want to find him. It’s about making the biggest wager of your life as you ask God to make himself known to you. And it’s about watching what happens next.

    Blending personal storytelling with biblical teaching, they offer readers an inspiring, realistic vision of love, dating, marriage, and sex.Young people today enter adulthood with expectations of blissful dating followed by a romantic, fulfilling marriage only to discover they’ve been duped. They learned about love and sexuality from social media, their friends, Disney fairy tales, pornography, or even their own rocky past, and they have no idea what healthy, lifelong love is supposed to be like. The results are often disastrous, with this generation becoming one of the most relationally sick, sexually addicted, and divorce ridden in history.Looking to God’s design while drawing lessons from their own successes and failures, the Bethkes explode the fictions and falsehoods of our current moment. One by one, they peel back the lies, such as the belief that every person has only one soul mate, that marriage will complete you, or that pornography and hook-ups are harmless.

    Layered with biblical truth and seasoned with encouragement, The Resolution for Women will inspire the woman you see in the mirror to trust God's perfect plan for her life, resolving to become "purposely feminine, surprisingly satisfied, and faithfully His."

    All the Colors We Will See is evocative, compelling, surprising, and brave. Gopo has a special talent for weaving her story into the narratives of Scripture and for guiding the reader through some of the difficult realities of race, immigration, and identity in America with wisdom and grace. It’s rare to encounter a book that manages to be this honest and this generous with its readers at the same time. Every page, every sentence, is a gift!” —Rachel Held Evans, author, Searching for Sunday and Inspired Patrice Gopo grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, the child of Jamaican immigrants who had little experience being black in America. From her white Sunday school classes as a child, to her early days of marriage in South Africa, to a new home in the American South with a husband from another land, Patrice’s life is a testament to the challenges and beauty of the world we each live in, a world in which cultures overlap every day.In All the Colors We Will See, Patrice seamlessly moves across borders of space and time to create vivid portraits of how the reality of being different affects her quest to belong. In this poetic and often courageous collection of essays, Patrice examines the complexities of identity in our turbulent yet hopeful time of intersecting heritages. As she digs beneath the layers of immigration questions and race relations, Patrice also turns her voice to themes such as marriage and divorce, the societal beauty standards we hold, and the intricacies of living out our faith.With an eloquence born of pain and longing, Patrice’s reflections guide us as we consider our own journeys toward belonging, challenging us to wonder if the very differences dividing us might bring us together after all.Praise for All the Colors We Will See“What I find so very moving about this book is that its calm voice and winsome demeanor allow it to speak hard truths. Ms. Gopo is a writer both thoughtful and bold, deliberate and graceful, compassionate and rock solid. This is a wise and ruminative book on color, marriage, the church, and what it takes to continue in Christ’s love despite the fallen and falling world around us.” — Bret Lott, author, Letters and Life and Jewel“As a white woman who grew up in South Africa, I’m so grateful to Patrice, a black woman who grew up in Alaska, for opening the pages of her life. My story is changed and challenged and enriched because of hers. And I am in her debt.” — Lisa-Jo Baker, bestselling author of Never Unfriended and Surprised by Motherhood“In the chasm between race and culture lies Patrice Gopo’s heartfelt collection of essays. All the Colors We Will See is an interrogation of blackness and belonging from a woman who is as much Alaskan as she is Jamaican, Asian as she is Southern, engineer as she is writer, faithful as she is doubting. As she searches “for something that is lost before we can even remember,” Gopo arrives at the intersection of God, race, and country to realize that the only robes that fit are her own.”— Desiree Cooper, Next Generation Indie Book Award winner and author, Know the Mother