Experiencing God

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Kevin DeYoung

Hyper-spiritual approaches to finding God's will just don't work. It's time to try something new: give up. Pastor and author Kevin DeYoung counsels Christians to settle down, make choices, and do the hard work of seeing those choices through. Too often, he writes, God's people jump from church to church, workplace to workplace, relational circle to relational circle, worrying that they haven't found God's perfect will for their lives. But God doesn't need to tell us what to do at each fork in the road. He's already revealed His plan for our lives: to love Him with our whole hearts, to obey His Word, and after that, to do what we like. No need for hocus-pocus. No reason to be directionally challenged. Just do something. - Publisher.

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Kimm Crandall

God's Empowering Love for Us in the Midst of Our Mess Life is messy. And Christians are not exempt. Unfortunately, this is not the message we tend to hear. We're told to be moral, look good, and set a positive example. After all, as some people may tell us, we're the only Jesus some people see-so we better make him look good. That's a heavy burden. And so we work feverishly to hide our messes from each other and from God for fear of judgment ... 'll the while wondering how we can ever be loved. But Christianity is not about being less of a mess. It's about admitting that we need to be saved from trying to clean ourselves up. In Beloved Mess, author and blogger Kimm Crandall frees Christians to live with the assurance that God loves us right here, right now. He's not waiting for us to clean up our act before we're worthy to come to him. He wants us to stop trying to fix the mess so that we can allow him to wash it away for us. Endorsements "Kimm unpacks the wonder of God's mercy with honesty and courage and shows how it reaches all the way down to every dimension of our hearts and lives."--Justin S. Holcomb, author, On the Grace of God "Read this short but life-changing book, go back to it again and again, and see yourself falling more in love with the One who loved us and gave himself for us."-Jessica Thompson, author of Everyday Grace

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Dennis F. Kinlaw

How would our understanding be affected if we instead took Jesus as our starting point for doing theology? In Let's Start with Jesus, biblical scholar Dennis Kinlaw explores this question. In seeking to describe the nature of the relationship God desires with us, he explores three metaphors--royal/legal, familial, and nuptial--which serve as motifs for his reflection. Taking familiar theological categories, Kinlaw views them through the primary lens of the person and work of Jesus, and finds that Jesus reveals rich pictures of the nature of God, the nature of personhood, the problem of sin, the way of salvation, and finally, the means of sanctification via perfect love.

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James Choung

James Choung narrates this imaginative dialogue between three young friends attempting to come to terms with Christianity's loss of cultural capital, tectonic shifts in spiritual temperament from one generation to the next and the persisting feeling of God summoning them to an embodied faith despite everything.